Mandel: Monday’s House v. NCAA hearing was a moment more than a decade in the making

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OAKLAND, Calif. — On Monday, I returned to U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken’s courtroom for the first time since covering the O’Bannon v. NCAA trial in 2014. That was a three-week debate about whether college athletes making money — any money — would mark the death of the enterprise.

Wilken didn’t buy the NCAA’s defense.

It was a profound moment in the history of college sports, even if Wilken’s narrow decision for the plaintiffs at the time only led to athletes receiving modest scholarship stipends.

“Back then, the myth of amateurism was impenetrable,” said Michael Hausfeld, the lead attorney for O’Bannon. “Now it’s totally gone.”

Eleven years later, Hausfeld was also back in Wilken’s courtroom, concerning a much more drastic change to the landscape: The proposed House v. NCAA settlement, which would allow universities to share $20.5 million in revenue in the first year, and escalating from there, with their athletes.

Quite a leap from those $5,000-or-so stipends back in 2014.

Wilken spent the day listening to testimony from individuals with objections to the House settlement. Hausfeld, representing former Iowa basketball star Jordan Bohannon and several other athletes, was one of them.

While his clients who played before 2021 stand to earn a cut of the settlement’s $2.75 billion in NIL back pay, Hausfeld is more concerned about the future. He believes the schools’ $20.5 million spending cap, coupled with a coming clearinghouse (run by Deloitte) charged with curtailing NIL deals from boosters, could cause future athletes to lose money.

“The market should be a free market,” Hausfeld said before the hearing. “There’s a shiny object (the $20.5 million in revenue sharing), but only if (the schools) are able to shut off the collectives — because that’s what the settlement seems to do. If you shut that off, you’re removing billions of dollars that the athletes otherwise will receive, with that funding now going through the NCAA for them to control that.”

“Basically, I think it is a good settlement. I think it’s worth pursuing,” Wilken said at the end of a 6 ½ hour hearing.  But she gave the parties another week to address several issues she raised that they may want to “fix.”

The entire college sports industry has been operating for months on the assumption that Wilken will approve the settlement. Many schools made revenue-sharing deals with players in last winter’s football transfer portal, to take effect in July. Basketball programs were rushing to sign transfers with collectives’ dollars before Monday’s hearing, before name, image and likeness (NIL) regulations might go into effect immediately. (They did not.)

Their confidence comes from the fact Wilken gave the settlement preliminary approval last October, and the terms have not changed since. What did happen was that 73 individuals — out of a class of 390,000 current and former athletes — filed objections with the court over various issues. Monday was their day to be heard.

She heard from LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne, who appeared via Zoom and said her estimate for NIL back pay did not come close to matching her actual earnings. And Gracelyn Laudermilch, a high school track athlete in Pennsylvania, who said she lost an offer from her dream school due to the settlement’s roster limits. And Gannon Flynn, a freshman swimmer for Utah, who said current athletes now live in fear of getting cut.

And she heard from nearly a dozen lawyers.

Wilken was exactly as I remembered her from O’Bannon: an equal opportunity skeptic. She questioned NCAA attorney Rakesh Kilaru about the ramifications of roster limits and chuckled at objector attorney Steven Molo for suggesting rosters should be unlimited.

Statement on settlement hearing. pic.twitter.com/xfsxUvikAl

— NCAA News (@NCAA_PR) April 7, 2025

Of all the issues at play, she seemed most interested in the inclusion of unknown future athletes (“a 10-year-old playing kickball on the asphalt”) in a settlement that will run for the next 10 years. Wilken seemed concerned that an athlete in, say, 2031, would have had no say in the terms before they approved them. But on all other matters, including Title IX, she seemed mostly unmoved.

“That’s too bad,” she said to one lawyer arguing male athletes would get most of the back pay. “You can’t change the past.”

As for Hausfeld, arguing before Wilken did not go so well this time. He mostly confused the judge, who thought he was saying (incorrectly) that NIL deals from collectives would count against the schools’ $20.5 million cap. He also suggested that schools were using the settlement to form a “group boycott” against collectives.

“I’m not following you,” she said more than once.

For what it’s worth, the people who run those collectives have no plans to close down their shops.

Wilken, on several occasions, got frustrated with objectors who were seemingly relitigating the case. This wasn’t an antitrust hearing, she said. Her sole job is to determine whether the settlement is fair to the two sides.

“It’s a compromise,” she said.

All indications are she will ultimately approve it, whether this week, next week or later this spring. I remain skeptical that it will solve much of anything.

Players in the marquee sports will keep getting richer and richer NIL deals, whether from their school, a collective, or both, because salaries continually skyrocket in every pro sport. Much to the chagrin of naive university presidents.

Boosters aren’t going to stop buying recruits just because their favorite school now has $20.5 million on its ledger. Lawsuits will fly the first time Deloitte tells Phil Knight or Larry Ellison or Texas Tech’s billionaire oil booster that their NIL deal for a transfer quarterback is “above fair market value.”

The transfer portal won’t slow down unless, or until, the schools agree to enter into collective bargaining with their athletes. That seems not remotely imminent.

And Congress is not going to swoop in with the magic antitrust exemption for which the conferences have already spent millions in lobbying efforts. Which means the next big NCAA legal issue — athlete employment rights — will proceed.

But if nothing else, the House settlement, like the O’Bannon and Alston decisions before it, is important symbolically. The NCAA and its members are finally acknowledging theirs is a multibillion-dollar commercial enterprise, not an after-school activity. The revenue from their massive TV contracts will finally be accessible to the athletes that generate it.

Monday’s hearing lasted 6 ½ hours, but it was a moment more than a decade in the making — much of which took place in the same courthouse. Back in 2014, Wilken correctly assessed that college sports could survive the radical idea of athletes making a little bit of money on the side.

Based on most of her questions Monday, she also seems fine with them making a whole lot of money from their own schools.

(Photo: Andy Lyons / Getty)

This news was originally published on this post .

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