The final approval hearing for the House vs. NCAA settlement will take place next week on April 7. The settlement was preliminarily approved last October, and if passed, NCAA schools that opt into the settlement will be allowed to directly pay their own athletes. The settlement will come with a permissive cap, which is estimated to be around $20-22 million for the 2025-26 season, per the University of Cincinnati.
Ahead of the hearing, Georgia football coach Kirby Smart shared some candid thoughts and concerns about the current landscape of college football, and what the settlement will mean for the NCAA.
“Everybody’s on pins and needles because we don’t know exactly what’s going to come out of this,” Smart said earlier this week.
Though Smart wants athletes to get paid, he worries people will try to manipulate the cap and is unsure that the ruling will actually help competitive balance in the NCAA.
“There’s a lot of people doing, not illegal things,” Smart said. “They’re just manipulative money things to try to move this, move that so I can free up this. And what’s going to happen? There’s probably going to be a bubble or a spike. And then agents are literally trying to take advantage of that every minute they can. They want to get all they can for their client. But at the end of the day, it may backfire because there’s going to be a correction in the market at some point when this cap hits if the cap is truly what the House Settlement wants it to be.”
He added: “All we’re trying to do is make for competitive balance. It’s really unfortunate, I don’t know if competitive balance is going to come out of it.”
At the heart of Smart’s concerns is that he doesn’t feel the athletes will benefit down the line from the current NCAA landscape.
“Kids are going to struggle the next 10 years,” Smart said. “When they look back and somebody says, I’m going to go back and look at this and say, what happened to the kids that went to two and three and four places? I will assure you, we will not be happy with where those kids that jumped for greener grass went to. And I think the portal is a good thing for a lot of kids that are third, fourth, fifth year. But it also gives you a way out that I don’t think is good for kids right now.”
“What’s going on right now is not good for anyone.”
Amid all the uncertainty, what will stay true for Smart and Georgia is that they will continue to recruit players who are there for more than just money.
“What I do know is we’re going to continue to recruit people who love football, are passionate about football, and that don’t put money as the No. 1 answer,” Smart said. “I’ve never met a really good player, that that’s all they cared about.”
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