As Final Four looms, schools are scrambling to spend money on players: ‘Everybody is playing beat the clock’

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SAN ANTONIO — The contracts are ready to be signed.

Some, perhaps, are even in print. Terms are there. Financials are agreed upon.

“The contracts are printed off,” says Blake Lawrence, CEO of the name, image and likeness platform Opendorse, used by dozens of schools. “After a team’s final game, at the final buzzer, as fast as possible, they’ll get a signature.”

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The eight teams, both men and women, competing at this weekend’s Final Four are in a race not just for a championship but to solidify next season’s roster. They are scrambling to sign current players and transfers to compensation agreements before those agreements become subject to a more rigid new enforcement entity that will prohibit booster collective pay.

School general managers, administrators and coaches are working to strike deals in what many describe as a “mad cash dash” to a deadline date of Monday.

That includes those still alive in the NCAA tournament.

“Everybody is playing, ‘Beat the clock,’” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl told Yahoo Sports. “It’s obviously really challenging. It presents even more challenges for us because of what our focus is.”

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At the women’s Final Four in Tampa, Texas, UCLA, South Carolina and UConn start play Friday, with the title game scheduled for Sunday. Auburn, Duke, Florida and Houston all begin play Saturday in the men’s Final Four here in San Antonio, with the title game Monday night.

Monday also looms as a pivotal day to the future of college athletics.

A hearing is scheduled in a California courtroom, where a judge could, though unlikely on that day, approve the NCAA’s landmark settlement of three antitrust lawsuits. The settlement of cases House, Hubbard and Carter — legal challenges over athlete compensation — would usher in a cap-based revenue-share concept and the new enforcement arm to police booster-backed compensation contracts.

It’s pretty simple for schools: Before the judge grants approval of the settlement, sign players to contracts so that those deals, if paid out by July 1, are not subject to the new enforcement. Deals signed after she approves the settlement are subject to both the new revenue-share cap and enforcement clearinghouse, an entity operated by Deloitte expected to prohibit fabricated donor-backed contracts.

The date of approval is a moving target. No one quite knows when California Judge Claudia Wilken will make a decision on the settlement. While most involved in the case believe she will eventually grant approval of the settlement (she already granted preliminary approval in the fall), Wilken may not make her decision until days or weeks after the hearing. After all, Monday’s expected seven-hour hearing is scheduled to feature witness testimony from 14 lawyers and athletes objecting to the settlement.

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Most schools are playing it safe: Just sign players by the end of Monday’s hearing.

The situation is “f***ing bananas,” says one basketball agent.

It’s a “pre-settlement cash dump,” says a school general manager.

The compensation figures being paid to athletes are “wild,” says Tommy Gray, the CEO for Altius, a company that provides dozens of schools with consultation and strategic planning. Schools aren’t just hurriedly signing players to deals but they are “frontloading” the contracts, the act of paying out those deals before July 1 — another important settlement-related date by which payments become subject to the new revenue-share cap and clearinghouse.

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“It’s a mad dash to frontload,” said Gray. “It’s fascinating.”

Some schools are frontloading to athletes as much or more than $20 million in booster collective payments this spring and plan to distribute another $3 million to $5 million to rosters in revenue-share payments this fall, expanding a roster budget to nearly $30 million in 2025-26 and allowing them to push revenue-share payments to the following year’s roster. “And that’s just football,” Gray adds.

The basketball numbers are significant.

South Carolina forward Collin Murray-Boyles received an offer of $2.5 million to play at another SEC school next season, his coach, Lamont Paris, recently said. Paris, as well as many stakeholders in the sport, believe that a power conference starting basketball player is valued at seven figures.

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One agent said his client just transferred for an annual salary of $2 million starting next year. The player averages less than 10 points a game, the agent told Yahoo Sports under condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak about his client’s financials.

“Everyone has been calling it ‘The Wild West,’” says one athletic administrator whose team is competing in the Final Four. “Well, the next seven days, it will be the Wildest of the West. Monday is D-Day.”

On Monday, some 1,700 miles away from the men’s Final Four site, a 75-year-old retiring California judge will hear testimony from objectors to a settlement that stands to alter college athletics forever. The industry sits on the edge of a knife, teetering on a legal decision from an outsider who is ruling from, of all places, downtown Oakland — far from a college sports hotspot.

Conferences and schools have invested thousands of hours and millions of dollars into this new revenue share infrastructure and enforcement entity. Schools have signed thousands of athletes to revenue-share agreements, all of them contingent on the settlement’s approval.

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Though it is expected to distribute at least $20 billion to college athletes over its 10-year existence, the settlement has been the target of wide-spread criticism from an array of groups: the Department of Justice (arguing the rev-share cap is anticompetitive); the Department of Education (arguing the revenue distribution violates Title IX policy); hundreds of athletes who will see their roster positions eliminated because of new roster limits; and even the named plaintiff in the case, Grant House, who told Yahoo Sports in December that he did not approve of some of the settlement’s concepts.

However, plaintiff and defendant attorneys have publicly expressed strong support for its approval, gesturing toward the sheer numbers: Of the 400,000 members of the settlement class, only about 600 of them objected or opted out.

The settlement’s effectiveness, even if approved, is in doubt too. Legal challenges to many of the issues raised above are possible if not likely — a reason that college administrators have spent several months in an aggressive lobbying effort for lawmakers to pass a federal bill to codify the settlement terms.

A slew of events, in fact, are scheduled to unfold over the next week.

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Members of the House of Representatives are planning a roundtable discussion with college leaders Saturday in San Antonio. The House Education and Workforce Committee is holding on Tuesday what will be the 13th hearing on college sports since the NCAA’s lobbying effort began in 2019. A day later, thousands of college coaches, administrators and athletes are scheduled to lobby in a “College Sports Day on the Hill” event.

Next Friday in Madison, Wisconsin, members of the House Judiciary Committee, including Rep. Jim Jordan, are expected to join NCAA president Charlie Baker in a roundtable discussion. Meanwhile, negotiations between U.S. senators, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, continue over a college sports bill that would grant a limited antitrust protection based on settlement terms; deem college athletes as students and not employees; and preempt varying state laws, some of which contradict the settlement.

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“College athletics is at an inflection point,” Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh told lawmakers at the most recent congressional hearing last month. “It is critical now, more than ever, that Congress work together (for a bill). We need your help to enhance this model or opportunity for all sports, not just football and basketball.”

In the meantime, all of college sports is presuming the settlement will be approved, and school officials — administrators, coaches, staff members — are working to build both their football and basketball rosters with front-loaded cash this spring.

Signing players to contracts before Monday and then paying out most or all of those contracted dollars before July is paramount for two reasons. The cash doesn’t count against a school’s revenue-share pool cap, which is expected to be $20.5 million in Year 1 of the settlement (the 2025-26 academic year). Secondly, the contracts are not subject to a new Deloitte-run clearinghouse. Using a fair-market value analysis, the clearinghouse is expected to reject third-party NIL deals — especially those from boosters — that do not fall into Deloitte’s “compensation range.”

While the Final Four plays out, the basketball portal is open, igniting a free-for-all spending spree with that Monday deadline looming.

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At Auburn, Pearl is spending “90%” of his time on preparing for the games. And the other 10%? He’s recruiting. In fact, he was part of a few Zoom calls with recruits earlier this week, he said.

“I have personally looked at the kids we really want, but my staff, in between watching games, has taken a lot of it. We are focused on two to three guys (in the portal),” he said. “The rest, we are reaching out and saying, ‘Look, we are busy right now. If you’re still available come Tuesday, we have some interest.’”

Will they wait?

Or will they hurriedly sign by Monday’s date?

“I do recognize that everybody else in my league is on a private plane 12 hours a day recruiting,” Pearl said, “but I wouldn’t trade that for what I’m doing right now: playing in the Final Four.”

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