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1. The news broke Friday night.
My Yahoo colleague and friend, Ross Dellenger, undoubtedly had a story ready to roll. It led like this:
“College athletics is officially entering a new world.
“A California judge on Friday night a little bit past 9 p.m. ET granted approval to the NCAA’s landmark settlement of three antitrust cases, often referred to as the “House settlement,” ushering in an era where schools are permitted to share revenue with athletes within a new enforcement structure led by the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC.
“Claudia Wilken, the 75-year-old presiding judge in California’s Northern District, granted approval of an agreement between the named defendants (the NCAA and power conferences) and the plaintiffs (dozens of suing athletes) to settle three consolidated cases, all of them seeking more compensation for athletes.
“Despite plenty of hurdles in the settlement’s years-long approval process, those who negotiated the deal have long expected it to be approved because of the sheer numbers involved. More than 85,000 athletes have filed claims for the backpay and just 600 have opted out or objected to the agreement — a paltry number that did not faze the judge.
“Wilken’s decision, coming two months after the final hearing in Oakland, California, puts an end to what was thought to be one of the last looming hurdles of a deal: roster limits. In a concept authored by the power conferences, the settlement imposes new limits on sports rosters, many of which had not previously existed.”
The part of Dellenger’s story that caught my attention — mainly because I’ve been writing and talking about this part for what feels like years now — was the following:
“With its approval, the settlement ushers into college sports a more professionalized framework but one, many believe, that is ripe for more legal scrutiny. Already, attorneys are gearing up for future legal challenges over, at the very least, the new NIL clearinghouse, Title IX and the capped compensation system — much of which can be resolved, legal experts contend, with a collective bargaining and/or employment model that college executives have so far avoided.
“The settlement’s approval is only the first in what many college leaders describe as a two-step process to usher in stability in the college sports landscape.
“Step 2 may be even more difficult: lawmakers producing a congressional bill to codify the settlement terms and protect the NCAA and power conferences from legal challenges over enforcement of their rules. Five U.S. senators have been meeting regularly in serious negotiations over legislation, but no agreement has been reached.”
I highly recommend reading Dellenger’s piece. If you’re at all interested in the future of college athletics, it’s a must-read.
2. I’ve never met Pete Nakos, but I’m a fan of his work. He’s relentless, a young guy with old-school reporting chops. He posted on X on Saturday that “The NIL Go clearinghouse run by Deloitte, which has been the talk of college sports for over a year, will be put to the test. All third-party NIL deals of $600 or more must be approved by the clearinghouse that will vet contracts.”
Nakos is right, of course, but I’ve got real reservations about how this plays out. I just don’t see how this doesn’t get tested in the courts, and I mean immediately. How does Deloitte, or anyone else, determine what is or isn’t market value? How does that work? When that gets appealed, and it will, will a judge issue a preliminary injunction? Will that open the floodgates?
Again, I’ve got worlds of questions about this, and while I’ve never been an attorney a day in my life — I do watch a lot of trials on Court TV — my legal red flag is flapping in the wind here.
Dellenger reported Friday that Bryan Seeley, a former assistant U.S. attorney who has served for more than a decade as MLB’s vice president of investigations and deputy general counsel, has been announced as the CEO of the College Sports Commission, college sports’ new enforcement entity.
3. Dellenger posted Saturday “Schools will have a projected salary cap for 20.5 million for all sports in the 2025-26 athletic year. Most power conference programs are planning to distribute 90% to football and men’s basketball.”
Again, I’m not even remotely questioning Dellenger’s reporting, but I am questioning how this settlement holds up legally.
How can schools implement a salary cap that wasn’t collectively bargained by the group of people receiving the compensation for their labor? Again, I just don’t see how it holds up. It will absolutely be tested in the courts — likely very soon.
4. CBS Sports’ John Talty had a great line in his piece on Saturday.
Talty was writing about the winners and losers of the House settlement.
“There's never been a better time to be a lawyer with an interest in college sports.”
He’s so right.
As he wrote in his piece, “there is considerable industry skepticism about how a clearinghouse called NIL Go will actually hold up to legal scrutiny and stop boosters from using NIL solely as "pay to play," but if it does work, as the NCAA and Power Four conferences desperately hope it does, the days of spending $3 million on a defensive end for NIL will be over and eliminate an advantage schools with especially well-heeled boosters have exploited the last four years.”
Talty opined he is looking “for attention to turn to collective bargaining/employment/unionization as the next big topic college sports has to grapple with. There are organizations including Athletes.org that have anticipated this moment and are ready to help push for collective bargaining to help solve many of the new issues that come with the House settlement's approval.”
I agree with him, but as I’ve been saying and writing for a long time now, I just don’t see how that happens without the athletes becoming employees. And neither side, at least of this writing, wants that.
5. Talty’s CBS Sports colleague, Gary Parrish, like virtually everyone in sports journalism, weighed in on Saturday.
Parrish had an interesting take.
Parrish basically opines that he believes the House settlement, should it hold, means the return of under-the-table payments to student-athletes.
“Do you actually think a SEC school with millions tied up in football is going to concede a recruiting battle in basketball to a Big East program sans football because, you know, the money just isn't in the budget, according to the rules?” Parrish wrote. “LOL (laughing out loud). When it comes to that, not all basketball staffs, but certainly lots, will simply do what they've always done, i.e., find a way to get the player even if it requires circumventing the rules.
“Again, this weekend, cheating returned to college sports.
“It's inevitable.
“Every Power Four conference features a coach who has violated one recruiting rule or another. If you think they won't do it again, if required, you're silly. And now every time a player picks a school with little known-money left in the budget over a school that's reportedly offering much more, fans on the wrong end of the commitment will assume something happened in violation of the rules and scream for an investigation.
“We lived that life for decades. Who really wanted that again?”
I know what Parrish is saying, and in some ways, I agree. In others, however, I don’t. Back in the day — you remember 2019, don’t you? — everyone cheated, paid relatives, funneled money through hospitals and/or churches, left shoe boxes full of cash on front porches, etc. But the money then was nothing like the money now. Nothing.
It’s insane now. A college basketball coach told me this past week that the actual money being thrown around is even more than cynical skeptics like me believe. I just don’t know that people are going to distribute that money under the table. Maybe I’m wrong.
The rest of Parrish’s column, which I highly recommend, is full of cynicism I fully share. Some of the ideas college administrators have come up with in an attempt to coerce schools into obeying the terms of the House settlement are naive and, frankly, absurd.
Honestly, they’re desperate.
“Trust me when I tell you, this is only the beginning,” Parrish wrote. “Because when a solution to a problem just creates more problems, you're not really fixing anything as much as you're simply trading in one set of issues for a new set of issues that will have to be addressed again, sooner or later.”
I couldn’t possibly agree more.
6. How does it impact Ole Miss?
That’s what most want to know. It’s a fair question. Most fans don’t really care how the sausage is made. They just want good sausage.
Ole Miss has certainly made “good sausage” in the unregulated NIL/transfer portal era.
In a world where NIL Go actually has enforceable power, I think it would generally work against Ole Miss.
Why? I wonder if the lack of corporations in Mississippi — and the existence of two Southeastern Conference schools in one small state — would limit the ability of Ole Miss to land big deals that met NIL Go’s requirements. Is C-Spire, for example, going to do a true NIL deal with an Ole Miss player without doing one with a player from Mississippi State? I highly, highly doubt it.
Again, I couldn’t be more cynical about the ability for the NCAA and NIL Go or whoever to truly implement these rules. But in a world where they stuck, I do think things would be more challenging for Ole Miss.
Ole Miss, thanks to the Grove Collective, has been ahead of the game over the last few years. These rules, if enforced, would level the playing field and put schools in bigger markets at an advantage, at least in my opinion.
7. Speaking of Ole Miss, The Ringer wrote one of the worst pieces of journalism recently about the Rebels’ football coach, Lane Kiffin.
And boys and girls, that is saying something these days.
The Ringer’s Joel Anderson wrote “Kiffin’s most recent attempt at amusing his nearly 720,000 followers on X crossed a line. And I hope enough of the nation’s top college football recruits and their families are paying attention. I’m talking to the Black ones in particular.
“Last week, in response to a post from a follower complimenting him for not referring to the Gulf of Mexico as an ocean, Kiffin responded by calling it the “Gulf of America,” the preferred term of President Donald Trump. He included Trump’s X handle in the post and added an American flag emoji, a not-so-subtle endorsement of the president’s ridiculous crusade to rename the gulf as an insult to Mexico.
“Kiffin’s post wasn’t an explicit endorsement of Trump or all of his policies, but Trump’s supporters certainly seemed to take it that way, which is why I’m comfortable thinking of it as such. And if Kiffin isn’t willing to explain the thinking behind his post, or take it down, then I think Black recruits and transfers should think about going somewhere else.”
Where to start? Dear God, where to start?
First, how incredibly racist it is on the part of Anderson to lump all black people into one demographic? We don’t do that with white people, Indians, Asians, Hispanics, Norwegians, etc., but Anderson feels comfortable opining that all blacks feel the same way about the sitting American president.
Second, Kiffin made a post on X about a body of water that is officially recognized these days as the Gulf of America. Personally, I don’t care what we call the Gulf. I just want to go there, rent a chair, ice down a few beers, open a good book, maybe listen to a Major League Baseball game and essentially disappear for a few days. I’ll take a cooling-off dip here and there, and I’ll call it whatever the sharks want me to call it so they don’t try to eat me.
Third, there might be schools that have done as much as Ole Miss has to make up for its unfortunate past — James Meredith happened more than 60 years ago; at some point, Mr. Anderson, you have to let that go — but no school has done more. The Confederate flag has been gone for quite some time now, and with all due respect to Brandon Bolden and others who have gotten confused recently, the KKK rally some reference only happened because that horrific group of humans believed Ole Miss had done too much to appease African-Americans. And Ole Miss did nothing to make those racist idiots comfortable. The university did all it could to discourage them while also obeying the First Amendment.
Anderson’s stupidity knew no real bounds. He wrote:
“It goes without saying that Trump is largely popular in Mississippi, if we’re considering his landslide win in the general election there. But college football at the level Ole Miss aspires to play depends heavily on the contributions of Black people, and they overwhelmingly don’t support Trump or his politics, even if he made marginal gains among that base in November.
“For years now, I have advocated for Black athletes in this country to use their fledgling and fleeting power when and where appropriate. Even before it was legal, white power brokers and college boosters fought for their attention with money and cars and other once-impermissible “benefits.” Black athletes are among the few classes of people who can compel bigwigs across the South to consider significant changes to their culture and institutions—simply because of concern about those athletes choosing to go elsewhere.”
I’ve lived in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in my life. It’s hard to get more Southern. I’ve also traveled to every other corner of this country. And I feel quite comfortable, having raised my three children in Mississippi, saying that there is no place that does more to make all feel welcomed than Mississippi. It’s almost an obsession, and I say that positively. Walk into Larson’s Cash Saver in Oxford sometime and tell me Mississippi is overtly racist. You can’t. You won’t, not if you’re being honest.
Kiffin was having fun on X. It’s what he does. He owes no one — not Dickie Scruggs, not The Ringer, not his X followers — an apology. Oh, and just in case you haven’t read the first six thoughts here in 10 Weekend Thoughts, the players Kiffin recruits — black, white or anything else — are mostly going to the school that pays the most — Gulf of America be damned.
8. Just some leftover thoughts here:
— The baseball portal is alive and well. I’m just going to do something many of my colleagues won’t do — Mike Shula is an Ole Miss beat joke for a reason — and admit I can’t compete with Chase Parham on this. He’s been the lead writer on the Ole Miss baseball beat since at least 2010, and he’s incredibly sourced. I’ll do my best in this space to update portal targets and acquisitions and such, but I’m not winning that contest. And I’m not going to steal his content. Not everyone else on the beat can say that.
— I haven’t been able to watch much of the super regionals. I know the SEC, as of this writing, is down to LSU, Tennessee and Arkansas. LSU is a win away from Omaha and obviously, either the Volunteers or the Razorbacks (the Hogs won Game 1 Saturday, 4-3) are headed west later this week. What can we read into the SEC’s disappointing showing? My opinion: Not much. It happens. The talent is more distributed, perhaps?
— The Stanley Cup Finals have been must-watch TV. I’m not sure what I’m watching at times, but I can tell you Edmonton and Florida have played two dramatic games that could’ve gone either way. The intensity has been off the charts, and I assume the hockey has been pretty damned elite as well.
— I’m not over Game 1 of the NBA Finals yet. My Thunder led by 15 with a little more than nine minutes left and by nine with a little less than three minutes left and still lost. Tyrese Haliburton, who has been the star of these playoffs, hit a huge shot at the buzzer to give Indiana a Game 1 win. Game 2 is Sunday night in Oklahoma City. It’s must-win time for the Thunder. One way or the other, we now have a series. I still think OKC is the best team, but the Thunder’s collective youth scares me.
9. It’s time to eat. Here’s our resident Parisian chef, Burton Webb, with Taste of the Place, Lesson Lesson 291 — Grilled Greek Pork Tenderloin with Lemon-Oregano Marinade & Cucumber-Tomato Salad. This dish is sunshine on a plate: pork tenderloin marinated with lemon, garlic, oregano, and olive oil—grilled to perfection and paired with a fresh cucumber-tomato salad and optional feta or yogurt sauce on the side.
The Chef’s Tidbits
— Tender = Quick: Pork tenderloin cooks quickly and stays juicy if not overdone—perfect for warm evenings.
— Greek Flavors = Balance: Lemon, oregano, and garlic bring brightness and depth without heaviness.
— Keep it cool: Pairing it with a crisp cucumber salad keeps the plate light and seasonal. Things You Will Need:
Serving: 4–6 people Prep Time: 20 minutes (plus marinating) Cooking Time: 20–25 minutes
Utensils Needed:
Grill or grill pan Mixing bowls Sharp knife Tongs and cutting board Zester or fine grater Ingredients Needed:
1½–2 lb pork tenderloin 2 garlic cloves, minced Zest and juice of 1 lemon 1 tsp dried oregano (or 1 tbsp fresh) 1 tsp salt Cracked black pepper 3 tbsp olive oil For the Salad:
2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved 1 large cucumber, diced ¼ red onion, thinly sliced 1 tbsp red wine vinegar 2 tbsp olive oil 1 tbsp chopped fresh dill or mint Salt & pepper to taste
Optional: crumbled feta cheese
Optional Yogurt Sauce:
½ cup Greek yogurt
1 tsp lemon juice Pinch of garlic, salt, and olive oil Mise en Place:
— Marinate the pork: Combine lemon zest, juice, garlic, oregano, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Rub onto pork tenderloin. Marinate for 30 minutes or up to 2 hours.
— Make the salad: Toss tomatoes, cucumber, onion, herbs, olive oil, and vinegar. Chill. Add feta just before serving.
— Whisk yogurt sauce if using, and refrigerate.
Cooking Instructions:
Step 1: Grill the Pork
— Heat grill to medium-high.
— Grill pork for about 20 minutes, turning every 5–6 minutes until internal temp reaches 145°F.
— Rest the meat 5–10 minutes, then slice into thick medallions.
Final Step & Presentation:
Arrange sliced pork on a platter with the cucumber salad on the side. Drizzle with any resting juices. Serve with yogurt sauce or extra lemon wedges.
From the Mississippian in Paris! Bon appétit!
10. I’ll have coverage of recruiting and whatever else comes up this week. Until then, here are some links of interest to me — and hopefully, to you — for your reading pleasure:
Thunder need Chet Holmgren, Jalen Williams to outplay their experience in NBA Finals
What key plays from Thunder-Pacers Game 1 tell us about the NBA Finals going forward
Knicks’ firing of Tom Thibodeau raises a question: What do we want from NBA coaches?
Steelers finally get their quarterback in Aaron Rodgers, but buyer beware
Win or lose, NiJaree Canady is the face of college softball — and her star is only rising
Once loathed by Panthers, Brad Marchand delivers the biggest goal of their season
Oilers won’t dwell on missed chances after close Game 2: ‘What’s it going to do?’
How a 1970s Canadian band provided the surprise song of the Stanley Cup playoffs
The implications of Corbin Burnes’ season-ending injury go far beyond the Diamondbacks
Chicago may be ‘the place quarterbacks go to die,’ but Cubs pitcher Cade Horton is thriving
