Matt Brown writes the college football well college athletics, but football heavy newsletter extra points that we use on the show quite a bit.
Not happy money man.
How you doing, Hey, I'm doing great. It's sunny, it's eighty degrees here in Chicago. There's no way I could possibly be upset. Even if it means that I'm going to be writing a lot this week about legal stuff.
I know you will, and we'll get into it.
I've got to give you my hot Chicago take, though it's my favorite summer city in America, and then on either side of summer, I'm like, I got to get out, I gotta do something else.
I mean, I've lived here for post for a decade now, I don't think that's a hot take. Most people who live here think the same thing. From May until September. I think it's the best place in the entire country, and it's good enough that I still want to live here. But in January, and I've lived most of my life in the Midwest, I still want to walk in front of a truck by the ench. And it's not just because it's like six degrees, because it's less of that now.
Just you don't see the sun. Right, even even every time I land in Utah step outside the plane, it's like, oh yeah, it turns out my body does need vitamin D to like not want to die. I understand why people are happier here. That's that's, that's part of it.
Now for sure. When the weather warms up, you're like, you know, I'm not depressed, I'm just cold. So now I feel better. Now I feel better now, all right, Matt, I'm just stealed thirty thousand foot viewpoint here. Like, where are we at.
With House b NCAA, Like, what's the timeline and what's the latest?
What should we know as of today on this Monday, Well as of.
Today, there's been a little bit of a wrinkle, right, Like, over the last honestly six plus months, almost everybody in at the highest levels of college athletics and in the power conferences and conference offices have been operating on the assumption that this settlement is going to get approved essentially as is in early April, and all the revenue sharing and IL deals that have gone out to athletes in the last recruiting class and a lot of like vendor hires,
you know, have been pretty explicitly because all of this is contingent upon the settlement being approved Evan. Last week, Judge Wilkins says, if you guys don't fix this roster limit issue that I've pointed out now multiple times, I'm going to blow up the settlement. So what we have now is that the plaintiffs, the Plaintiffs Council, and the NCUBLEA and the power conference folks have to get together
and have to make a decision. Do we want to blow up this settlement and take this thing to trial where if we lose, the liability for the NC DOUBLEA at major conferences is twelve billion dollars, which I believe would essentially liquidate the NC double A if you want to roll the dice on court, or do we want to grandfather in roster limits and figure out some sort of way to make restitution to the athletes that have been harmed by our refusal to grandfather in roster limit clauses.
And on the surface, you would think, well, that's that's an easy decision. Of course you should grandfather in the roster limits. Why are we going to let the thirty first person on a track roster blow this whole thing up? But as we wrote, today. It actually gets pretty messy because a lot of athletes got cut last year, and you might have some people that are on other schools now entirely or maybe out of the game, And do
you let them back in? Do you allow a waiver to let some Olympic sport athletes potentially compete for two schools in one calendar year. You might have to if you're gonna want to comply with this ruling. We're gonna find out in a little over a week what they decided.
To do a little over a week.
So is that can we finally say we actually have like a hard deadline, like a drop dead date.
Is that what we're expecting now?
I'm gonna have to go double check on my computer fit exact date. But when Wilkins letter last week was you've got fourteen days figure this out, Yeah, we can finally you know, crap or get off the pot. I would. I would. I would still be pretty surprised if this settlement is not approved. But given the way the NCAA and Power Conference attorneys have kind of acted over the last couple of months, I can't say at zero percent.
Yeah, And that's why I followed up, because you know, every day. I mean, you're one of my first stops because we utilized a lot of the stuff you ride for the show. And then I try to see if Ross has anything the usual suspects, and it seems like all you guys that are plugged in are doing the best you can to nail down a date, but it
seems to be fluid. Are you Is there any part of you that's surprised that we are sitting here now looking May right in the face in the next few days and we are still dealing with all this ambiguity.
I'm a little surprised, and I probably shouldn't be. You know, one thing that was just reiterated to me by so many athletic directors, oh for February and March, whether they were at big schools or small schools, was we don't know what's going on, right. We are intellectually aware of this settlement. Charlie Baker sent ings out a couple of messages, but honestly, we hear about it from you or from Ross or from the cole often before we do anybody
in Indianapolis. And that's just because all of this is being done by a handful of of attorneys, some of whom who don't you know, are outside council. And I think it was pretty clear that the folks that were doing the negotiating over the house settlement were not plugged in and didn't really care all that much about softball players or soccer players or how any of this stuff might affect Utah Valley University. And it turns out the
judge has held a little bit differently about that. So, if you were going to limit your decision making and your inputs to this very small group of people and this very small class of athletes, and yeah, there are a lot of problems here that I think could have been addressed a couple of months ago and are not. That's sort of the story of the NCAA though.
For college football fans college back, I mean fans of collegian athletics, but mainly you know, college football fans in college basketball too, both of the revenue generators have been
adversely affected. What would you say as far as what's realistic to hope and expect once this is across the line, like on the scale of there will still be a ton of chaos on one end of the spectrum and this will finally bring guidelines and guardrails on the other end of the spectrum that will clean this stuff up. What's realistic to expect pretty quickly after this is across the line.
I think.
I think if and when this is this is settled, what I would tell for what I would tell fans is now you can have some measure of structure for the next academic year. And honestly, that's about all I would say. The folks from in at Indianapolis and at the Power conferences are really hoping that this settlement would create something of a de facto CBA that would provide cost certainty and structure over the next over the next decade, and protection from additional litigation. At this point, I think
there's no chance of that happening. As soon as this is done and dusted, there will be three other lawsuits ready to go to challenge this on titleline consideration to challenge this from the athletes that opted out and still want another another crack at the ANTITRUSTNATA, and the second that Deloitte and or whoever ends up kind of functioning as this intermediary clearing house tries to invalidate a Bagman deal. They're going to be in federal court two weeks later.
So there's going there's gonna be some stability just because you know, millions of dollars of contracts have been sent out that are contingent upon this thing happening in July. But I can't tell you what's going to happen in twenty twenty seven. Your athletic director and your football coach can't tell you, and I think anybody that says they absolutely can is selling you something.
Okay, So let's move over here because I feel like, yeah, I don't know, Matt, maybe you've been coming on the show for four or five years, and after nil and transferportal became a reality, and it was clear that administrators and leaders had failed everybody because there there wasn't anything that was prepared as far as okay, now now we know that this is the reality, but here's how it's going to work. Here are the mechanisms, okay, And none of that was in place, which has led to a
ton of chaos and sports that we all love. And I've asked you at different stops whether or not we are at some point going to move into a reality of college athletics looking very much like professional athletics and the players will be able to unionize and they will be able to collectively bargain with whatever the governing body looks like. And where will there be a commissioner? Will college football look like the NFL? Will college basketball look
like the NBA? And you know, a smart guy like you has been able to help us understand based off of you know, the Trump administration and changes they're going to make. How you know things have changed in that direction. Where where are we at now as far as your belief of what I know?
You just said, you don't know what twenty twenty seven is going to look like.
But my opinion, Matt, is the only thing that will settle most of the issues that are causing the chaos is a pro model. I still believe that to be true. Do you think at some point we are going to see that whenever?
That is my opinion on this. I think is pretty different from most of my national reporter colleagues, and they may very well be right. Maybe this is me being you know, too much of a chicken little or something, but I legitimately think there is a better than fifty percent chance that this Congress passes some sort of college sports bill. Now, that bill may be something that every single economist and agent and lawyer on Twitter absolutely hates.
It might be a bill that I really don't like, but I think there is more momentum and a political coalition that's that's more equipped to make that happen than there has been over the past couple of years. In my professional opinion, like the dry Little Secret is no matter whether you want a clusive bargaining agreement and and and athletes as employees and a union and that kind of structure, or whether you want to try to roll this thing back to nineteen ninety seven and give the
schools a lot more empowerments to enforce amateurism rules. Either of those solutions is going to require Congress, because right now the NC double A is not empowered to make or enforce virtually any kind of rule without the sports system ruling and shipping away at it. So I don't look at that and necessarily think that was lack of administrator leadership. The lack of administrator leadership was probably more in two thousand and seven than in twenty twenty four.
But you could come up with the best plan in the world. I can sit out here and I can write a three thousand word compromise that a lot of people would agree with tomorrow, and a second it's enforced, it's going to get smacked down on anti trust grounds.
I personally think that there are in there are sixty votes in the US Senate to pass something that says, Okay, we're going to give the NC DOUBLEA a limited and conditional anti trust exemption to enforce some of these rules, and we're going to say that college football players cannot be employees and that designation only is true if the NC DOUBLEA commits to XYZ and we can reassess it every two or three years, and it's gonna make it's
gonna make a lot of trial. War is pretty angry, but that might be the most reasonably the easiest path here, because I mean, you know this even better than I do. Locally, Right, there's a lot of states that don't allow or don't want collective bargaining for public employees. And if you're in a place you're not gonna let the firefighters and the cops and the teachers do it. You're not gonna let middle linebackers do it either.
Okay, So let's operate off the hypothetical that what you just outlined will be the direction. Do you agree with the direction? Is that what you would like to see happen for the sport? Do you think that's the right move, because I maintain mad that I and I will stay on.
The hill where I do think the right move is the pro model.
I mean, if players sign contracts at least they're on campus for a couple of years, if there is a salary cap, and I'm using professional terms, then maybe it does even the playing field a little bit. And of course there's always money paid into various ways, but that's not new, that's been going on forever. Uh So, if if there is a salary structure, a salary cap, and contracts where players are on campus for a couple.
Of years, I believe that to be the right route.
If the congressional bill that you're talking about is the route, do you think that will go a long way to alleviate.
Some of the issues that we always talk about.
I think the bill that's coming is something that's going to be written by Ted Cruz, and I admit I am generally not the kind of person who's going to go and say with my full chest, I love this bill that Ted Cruz wrote or that that Senator Lee is also going to support that. I'm sure we agree on something. It's a it's probably a smaller rist and my understanding because i've I've I've heard about drafts of this of this bill is kind of circulated around and
is not it's not really a secret anymore. It wouldn't look like that very much like it wouldn't move to that professional model like now in my opinion, which I know makes for lousy sports radio. Is I think it depends on the kind of athlete you're talking about. Like, do I do I think that professionalization and employment status and contracts of track athletes and Division one college athletics
makes sense? I'd say probably not. It's very rare that I run into somebody who wants that and and that model will probably lead to worse outcomes than what we have right now. Do I think that big twelve football players and Big twelve basketball players should be employees and have a union and head collectively bargain. I do, But I also am am I can't. I don't. I don't say that with like deep authoritative absolutely, because I I
it's one thing to say we want collective bargaining. When a union doesn't exist, it's another thing to have somebody on the other side of that table to do that negotiating. And that doesn't exist right now. And if it's created by management by Congress, by Jim Kabayle at athletes dot Org out of kind of fiat, I think it's gonna get its butt kicked for the first several years, which is often what happened to athlete unions. So then it's like, Okay,
I do I well this do? I want something that will make my life easier as a reporter, my life easier as a fan, and will probably benefit my personal fandom. I went to Ohio State, I root for the bluest of the blue blood football programs, like it would probably benefit me, and hope that it would benefit athletes in twelve years, even if it sucks for people in the short term. That's harder as not a copount honest to guys like I don't think there's a I just don't
think there's an easy answer out there. If there is, we probably would have done it by now.
So for college football and college basketball fans that cannot stand the fact that we no longer get to know these kids we no longer get to. You know, the great Rick mcjari's teams always had the Keith van Horns and the Andre Millers and the Britton Johnson's that stayed
until they were juniors and seniors. And you and I have talked about the dynamic of the best Utah football teams were comprised of kids a coach with recruited that maybe weren't all that highly thought of and then developed into juniors and seniors and NFL players and those who have been the best Utah foot ball and basketball rosters. I think it's pretty much the same thing with Breagham Young.
So fans that cannot stand the fact that they're losing their favorite players every year, would you just say that you better get used to it, because that's how it's going to be.
Probably unless the Byus and Utah's of the world begin to recruit a very different kind of person and begin to really go out of their way to offer value independent of just money. And a lot of programs like to talk about, hey, we want to be transformational, we don't want to be transactional and like and I believe in their heart they mean that, but it's hard to get a twenty year old to buy into it when
you don't under a twenty year ol. Like if we go back at time and talk to our twenty year old selves and look at various schools, I mean like, hey, well, because of this school, look how much money their forty year old alumni make. And look how this is connected to US world and news report, and look at it. All these things that will pay off in your thirties.
We wouldn't care, would care about the amount of money that's available right now, playing time, maybe availability of cute girls, and maybe proximity to mom and dad, right And I know that schools try to do this. I know that both BYU and Utah don't recruit every single five star guy because you need somebody who's going to be comfortable in Utah, somebody who's going to be successful in this kind of environment. Probably not somebody who wants to be
on every single commercial. But I think it will be very difficult in the foreseeable future to keep eighty five percent of the kids that you sign as high schoolers, or eighty percent of them on your team moving forward. It's it's difficult to look somebody in the eye and say no, you shouldn't go accept that eight hundred thousand dollars check at Arkansas.
That's hard, Yeah, for sure.
And you know one more thing here than I do have a BYU question, because we were talking about this earlier in the show, Like the dynamic of NI, I don't think is a bad I don't think it's a bad thing. I don't think in theory. I think it's a positive thing. Nil itself, to me, isn't the problem, right, It's the way it's administered.
It's the lack of guidelines and guardrails.
So you know, ultimately to your point, I would never have the nerve to tell anybody to turn out a bag like we're all trying to make our way through the world, and if you could parlay your newsletter into ten times what you're making right now, then go do it.
Whatever that looks like.
If I had a different offer to do the show in a different market for five times my salary, I want to go be able to do that. So I don't necessarily begrudge any young athlete for going to get their money at all. But is there any sort of way that we haven't necessarily discussed to make sure that those decisions and I know they've tried to close the portal here and the calendar is not as wide open as it used to be.
But outside of signing a contract, I.
Just don't see any other way of keeping these kids on campus if they can. I mean, we've had a couple of transfer portal losses for the Utes just over the past couple of weeks.
You know, Zach William's going to USC and there's.
All this debate online about you know, there's the incestuous nature between the Utah and BYU coaching staff.
Right, and so are you poaching?
I've seen this on Twitter, right right, right, Yeah.
Yeah, they're poaching our player and like you can't call it poaching because it's allowed.
It's not against the rules. Like nobody is doing anything to fary us here.
So is there a way to you know, because again to your point, go get your back, I'm not saying I'm not saying don't. But is there a way to at least keep these kids on campus for a couple of years. That's a good situation for them and the institution.
So I think there's there's a couple of things. If I can wave a magic wand right, because we actually we do have contracts, right Like I in addition to running a newsletter, I have a software product that that collects coach and administrator and vendor contracts and I sell that to news rooms and agencies and other people. And there are contracts between schools and athletes that are in there.
And we're seeing this right now with Arkansas about Arkansas's ability to recoup some of that buyout money from you know, from from Nico's little brother. And and there's there's a good legal case to be had that those those posits are not enforceable. So then even a contract doesn't necessarily help, Like it kind of depends on what some judges and
lawyers end up saying. One policy that does not get discussed very much federally that I think would meaningfully help, and this is something that I think lawmakers could do, even in Utah, is to have actual aggressive and meaningful agent licensing metrics and a law enforcement body or some
kind of enforcement body. Maybe it's the Utah State Bar, maybe it's the FTC maybe I don't know, and anybody short of the Highway Police that basically requires you if you're going to represent an athlete in these kind of deals, to pass some kind of baseline competence and ethics exam, just like we do for lawyers. If I want to practice law on the state of Utah, I have to
be barred in this. In the state, I'm on a registry, and if I act on ethically, I can lose my license and not continue to practice law.
There's and and and For professional.
Athletes in the NBA, in the NFL and NHL, their agencies have created these kind of benchmarks. To the extent that state laws or federal laws exist governing sports agents, they're almost uniformly not enforced. And I think a lot of the problems legitimately in college athletics roster management come from unqualified, unscrupulous, and you know, an agent with poor ethics.
And if there were meaningful professional consequences to the guys that are trying to, you know, push people into the portal who aren't in there right now so they could collect twenty percent, I think that's going to drop some of this stuff down, because.
It's it's not the people at c AA and and Rock Nation and Wassermen that are are escalating what we're seeing so much, particularly in college basketball.
All right, before I say you lose.
You know, there's continues to be I think it's a fascinating story.
You know, for years and years and years.
As soon as the ability to pay players became a reality and we kind of understood what NIL was. I did a show the next ask said, this is great news for BYU.
It really is.
If they want to get in the game, if they want to get involved, if they want to start really opening up their checkbooks. And I've got to be careful here because people get mad. I'm not saying the church. I'm saying a lot of the alums that have gone on to start MLMs, whether they're legal or not, they make a lot of money. And you know these CEOs of companies, Silicon Slopes and such. And the number I've been told Matt is BYU currently has nine seven figure donors.
And the irony is a lot a lot of the a lot of the money spent, a lot of the resources spent is being spent on the basketball program.
And I wonder how this lands with Collate.
But since you and I last spoke, the reports are aj the bans is being paid seven million dollars for five months in basketball.
You reference that we do have contracts well.
According to Jeff Goodman, Robert Wright, the Baylor freshman signed a contract with Baylor for a million, BYU offered three and he said, okay, I'm gone. Richie Saunders is coming back. Reported seven figure deal for Richie. When you do the math based off the reporting, BYU basketball has a roster that's going to cost whoever's writing checks for the Royal Blue Collective about thirteen to fifteen million dollars. I wonder what you make of You know, Travis Hanson who played
at BYU and others. Here's what Travis had to say said, quote, there's this narrative that we outbid people.
We don't.
We outlove them, We outdeveloped them, and we outpurposed them. And it just makes me want to throw up in my mouth because don't tell me I'm not seeing what I'm seeing. I just wonder why they can't, because look, I don't think you should run from it like you should be doing victory laps. That you have enough donors and you have enough economic power to attract players and give Kevin Young a roster the most people believe is
a top five roster in college basketball next year. Why don't they just say the thing that's actually happening.
You know, boy, that is a really good question, and I would love to have that conversation, even if it has to be off the record with some folks that have BYU dot edu email addresses. And I say this not to point a finger at BYU. I think some of that approach is almost universal everywhere in college athletics.
I remember when I was at the National Championship game in football and Ohio State one and the castetti had fallen, and I'm standing next to Ross new York, who's Ohio State athletic director, and I wrote a story about this. One of the first things he told me was we did not have the highest payroll in college football, which I actually believe, and I would as I would talk to agents on the football side, they would say, like, Ohio State was very competitive, but they're usually not the
highest bidder. And I don't know anybody that says, hell yeah, where the highest bidder. Absolutely, we're going to go drop the most money other than Texas, A and M. And we kind of know they kind of know how that happens.
I think personally part of the issue. And when I'm about to say here is not me being critical this is just my what what I have perceived and seen through, you know, having lived most of my life as the latter day saying the BYU and the church as an extension of that, do not really drop the bag on anybody. If you're going to go if you're being a professor, if you're going to be a professor of Uyu or a software developer or somebody else, you're usually not paid
top of market. And part of that is because like, well, don't you want to come work here and be in provo and be in the heart of everything, And for some people they absolutely do, and that drops you know, that that drops the labor price down a little bit. The you know, we all know that the folks that are doing a ton of work at the ecclesiastical level are unpaid. Like there is a huge culture of I'm not doing this for the money, I think anywhere at
a church affiliated institution. And I am not criticizing that. In many ways, I think that's very noble. But if that is true, and you're anybody working within an LDS enterprise, and then you look out and then you see a donor, you know, not an LDS employee, but you know, a donor you suddenly paying top dollar for basketball I and and that, and that's kind of what's going out there in the marketplace. I can see how that might rev
you the wrong way. I again, not a criticism, but I feel like I get mixed messages from listening to people at CEES or or are really close to the program about like, we don't want to be the high bitter. We want to be a value centered program. We want to do X, Y or Z versus the numbers that
can get reported by secular basketball media. And I don't know if there is a way you can square the circle with we want to do things the b YU way, however you define that, and on what's happening now, I don't I don't blame anybody for going I don't know if this makes sense, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, no, for sure.
For sure, it's an interesting time out this way, and that's a good team. Kevin has done a good job. And I'm you know, like I said, I have no yeah, for sure, and I have no issues with you doing what you have to do within the landscape of what's allowed to acquire talent. Just don't tell me I'm not seeing what I'm seeing it's very flood the zone, muddy the water Steve Bannon like. But anyway, I've kept you too long, Matt. Where can people go get the work?
You bet? You can find my work which covers off the field stories in the college athletics industry at extra Points mb dot com. Working on some other original reporting and some stuff related to video games, which I know is the most consumers would rather hear me talk about than antitrust law, as you can find all of that at extra Points MBE dot com.
Enjoy that Chicago Sunshine Man. Thanks for the time, Okay.
No, okay, yeah, thank you.
I appreciate you all right.
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