University of Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne has worked in college athletics for over three decades, including previous stints as the AD of Arizona and Mississippi State.

He’s seen it all, at least until late Friday night, when he began officially facing a new challenge — paying college athletes directly, or more specifically deciding which teams Alabama would pay directly, and how much, in an effort to keep the entire operation going.

Claudia Wilken, a federal judge in California, approved a settlement Friday between the NCAA and athlete plaintiffs that established a revenue sharing system that allows athletic departments to pay out about $20.5 million directly to their players. The agreement lasts 10 years, and the money is expected to increase annually.

While college athletes have been taking in outside payments for their name, image and likeness, the so-called House settlement allows it to come from school coffers (media rights, ticket sales, etc.). What was once mostly unregulated is now mostly regulated.

NIL deals will have to go through a clearinghouse to determine whether they are in line with actual endorsement or promotional value — say Caitlin Clark and State Farm — and not just a workaround for boosters to pay recruits.

Whether all of this can withstand additional legal challenges, practical operational concerns and/or schools actually following the rules remains to be seen. The potential magnitude of the House case is indisputable, though.

“I tell our coaches and our students, ‘The three most significant events in the history of college athletics are, first, the NCAA’s foundation [1905], second, the adoption of Title IX [1972] and all the opportunities that were created because of it, and, third, the House settlement,'” Byrne told ESPN.

Byrne welcomes an established system to replace the “fluidness” of the past few years and is happy for athletes to be paid. But there on the front lines of implementation, athletic directors have to make this work.

“It’s challenging,” he said.

Start with this: Not every student-athlete will now be paid. Indeed, the vast majority won’t.

Byrne has to weigh how to allocate the $20.5 million in a way that makes the most sense competitively and financially for Alabama. The school has a powerhouse football program, but it also has 20 other teams, including recent national champions in softball, gymnastics, women’s golf and men’s golf. Men’s basketball also reached the 2024 Final Four.

Alabama, like many other major universities, tries to win in everything.

“I tell our coaches, ‘We don’t have a sport here at the University of Alabama just to have a sport,'” Byrne said.

For generations, though, it has been one sport — football — that has made most of the money to fund those other teams. Alabama, like most places, saw only football ($26.4 million) and men’s basketball ($5.9 million) deliver a profit in fiscal 2024, according to public records. Everyone else lost, sometimes millions — women’s basketball, for example, came in $4.2 million under.

The department expenses ($262.8 million) outstripped revenue ($234.8 million) for a $28 million deficit. That’s up from $13 million the year prior — mainly, the school says, due to one-time costs associated with Nick Saban’s retirement.

No one is going to cry for the Crimson Tide, but with a new $20.5 million expenditure hitting budgets (and increasing each year), even the biggest schools are trimming staff, reallocating funds and trying to figure out how to properly plan for a new world while maintaining traditional success.

Does that mean investing almost everything in football and men’s basketball, thus leaving other teams out of the money, despite potential complaints? Does it mean cutting programs? Can places maintain robust support systems in, say, nutrition or mental health?

The old way wasn’t “fair” to football and men’s basketball players, who didn’t have a choice as the money they generated was spent elsewhere, but the House case brings into question whether broad-based participation, let alone success, is even possible?

Ohio State, for example, fields 33 varsity teams. Boston College has 29. Stanford 36. Do some of them need to move to club-program status?

Or put it this way: If this is a “challenge” even in Tuscaloosa, imagine what everyone else is facing.

“How do you keep your department healthy long-term so you can keep offering opportunities?” Byrne said. “In the past, we tried to be all things to all people. Every coach is going to want revenue share for their athletes, and I don’t blame them.

“But if the goal is to have as many programs as you can,” he continued, “you are going to have to be strategic.”

One rough initial estimate within the industry is that 75% of the $20.5 million will get allocated to football players, 15% to men’s basketball, 5% to women’s basketball and 5% to other sports — softball, volleyball, hockey, soccer, lacrosse or whatever specific sport a school prioritizes.

In practicality, athletic directors across the country believe that number will skew even further to football and men’s basketball because success there generates the ticket sales, marketing dollars, merchandise revenue and donations needed to prop up the entire enterprise. A dollar invested in a great quarterback or point guard will produce a return. A dollar invested in a swimmer almost assuredly will not.

Even at the biggest schools, there is a finite amount of money — and now a $20.5 million hole to fill.

No one wants to cut sports. No one wants to under-commit to certain teams. College athletic leaders got into the business to oversee more sports and more athletes in more ways, not to contract or pinch pennies.

Business is business, though, and college sports just became even more about business.

Schools are now free to begin paying their athletes directly, marking the dawn of a new era in college sports brought about by a multibillion-dollar legal settlement that was formally approved Friday.

Judge Claudia Wilken approved the deal between the NCAA, its most powerful conferences and lawyers representing all Division I athletes. The House v. NCAA settlement ends three separate federal antitrust lawsuits, all of which claimed the NCAA was illegally limiting the earning power of college athletes.

Wilken’s long-awaited decision comes with less than a month remaining before schools are planning to start cutting checks to athletes on July 1. Both sides presented their arguments for approving the settlement at a hearing in early April. While college sports leaders have been making tentative plans for a major shift in how they do business, the tight turnaround time means schools and conferences will have to hustle to establish the infrastructure needed to enforce their new rules.

The NCAA will pay nearly $2.8 billion in back damages over the next 10 years to athletes who competed in college at any time from 2016 through present day. Moving forward, each school can pay its athletes up to a certain limit. The annual cap is expected to start at roughly $20.5 million per school in 2025-26 and increase every year during the decade-long deal. These new payments are in addition to scholarships and other benefits the athletes already receive.

Friday’s order is a major milestone in the long push to remove outdated amateurism rules from major college sports. Since 2021, college athletes have been allowed to make money from third parties via name, image and likeness deals. Boosters quickly organized groups called collectives that used NIL money as de facto salaries for their teams, in some cases paying millions of dollars mostly to top-rated basketball and football players. Now, that money will come straight from the athletic departments.

“It’s historic,” former college basketball star Sedona Prince, one of the co-lead plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits, told ESPN. “It seemed like this crazy, outlandish idea at the time of what college athletics could and should be like. It was a difficult process at times … but it’s going to change millions of lives for the better.”

In June 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the NCAA in a case that made it clear that college athletics should be treated less like an education-based endeavor and more like a lucrative entertainment industry. The decision unleashed a flood of fresh legal challenges to NCAA rules that have led to unprecedented turmoil.

The settlement approved this week will not put an end to the barrage of legal challenges. Questions about whether athletes should be considered employees and the current rules that dictate how long an athlete can play college sports remain unanswered.

However, NCAA president Charlie Baker and others believe the deal will help schools regain control and tamp down the skyrocketing, largely unregulated market for paying college players through third parties.

The NCAA and its schools are hoping that federal lawmakers will now intercede to help solve the industry’s remaining legal problems. Industry leaders have asked Congress to write a law that would prevent athletes from becoming employees and provide the NCAA with an antitrust exemption to create some caps on player pay and transfers.

Salary caps and free agency restrictions in professional sports are legal because they are negotiated as part of a collective bargaining agreement with a union. College sports leaders say many schools won’t be able to afford to fund their teams if players are deemed to be employees and allowed to unionize.

The settlement gives the schools power to create new rules designed to limit the influence of boosters and collectives. Starting this summer, any endorsement deal between a booster and an athlete will be vetted to ensure it is for a “valid business purpose” rather than a recruiting incentive.

Many sources in the college sports industry have doubts about whether the limit on booster spending — aimed at protecting competitive balance — will be effective in slowing the rapid increase in money flowing to athletes at the NCAA’s richest schools. Some believe the rule will spur new lawsuits.

The power conferences are launching a new enforcement organization to monitor payments that come from schools and boosters, a duty that was previously one of the main functions of the NCAA’s national office. College sports officials hope the new organization will have a more streamlined and effective approach to investigating potential violations and punishing those who break the rules.

The new enforcement organization, called the College Sports Commission, on Friday night announced the hiring of MLB executive Bryan Seeley as its CEO. Seeley’s job is described as having to “build out the organization’s investigative and enforcement teams and oversee all of its ongoing operations and stakeholder relationships.”

According to the news release announcing his hire, “Seeley and his team will also be responsible for enforcement of the new rules around revenue sharing, student-athlete third-party name image and likeness (NIL) deals, and roster limits.”

Sources told ESPN’s Pete Thamel and Jeff Passan that Seeley has been the target for weeks, with the formalization of the settlement triggering his hire.

“This is new terrain for everyone,” Baker wrote in an open letter Friday night. “Given the defendant conferences’ new ownership of complicated pieces of rulemaking and enforcement, there will be a transition period and certainly bumps in the road. Opportunities to drive transformative change don’t come often to organizations like ours. It’s important we make the most of this one.”

Wilken refused to approve the settlement in early April because several athletes objected to a term of the deal that allows the NCAA to set a limit for how many players each team can carry on its roster. The limits would have potentially resulted in thousands of athletes losing their place on their team. Lawyers for both sides agreed in late April to alter the deal so that no athletes would lose their opportunity to play college sports as a direct result of the new roster limits.

Friday’s approval of the House settlement is expected to usher in an imminent overhaul to how college sports work.

One of the most prominent changes came together quickly, as Major League Baseball executive Bryan Seeley was named CEO of the new College Sports Commission on Friday night. Sources told ESPN that Seeley has been the target for the role for weeks, and the long-awaited formalization of the House settlement triggered his hire.

Sources told ESPN that Seeley is expected to make seven figures in the new role, as he’ll quickly become one of the most prominent figures in college sports.

Seeley is MLB’s executive vice president, legal & operations, and he brings investigative experience, which will be key in this role. In the post-settlement era, the NCAA will no longer be in charge of the enforcement of most rules. (It will still maintain purview over things like academics, but it will not patrol benefits.)

The CSC is the new era’s enforcement arm that will have final say in doling out punishments and deciding when rules have been broken. It’s one of the most important roles in this new era, as the industry has been craving some type of guidance since the advent of name, imagine and likeness has made the descriptor “wild, wild west” a common one in regard to the generally unregulated college sports industry.

In a formal announcement, Seeley’s job is described as having to “build out the organization’s investigative and enforcement teams and oversee all of its ongoing operations and stakeholder relationships.” Per the release: “Seeley and his team will also be responsible for enforcement of the new rules around revenue sharing, student-athlete third-party name image and likeness (NIL) deals, and roster limits.”

Seeley was hired by the four power conference commissioners — the ACC’s Jim Phillips, Big Ten’s Tony Petitti, Big 12’s Brett Yormark and SEC’s Greg Sankey. They released a joint statement on his hire: “Bryan brings unwavering integrity and a wealth of relevant experience to his new role leading the College Sports Commission and working to ensure a smooth implementation of this new system. We’re grateful to have an individual with his credentials and expertise at the helm, and we look forward to his leadership as we transition into this new era of college sports.”

In Seeley, college sports will be getting a seasoned investigator with experience in both the private sector and professional sports. It’s the type of background the commissioners sought in their search for the role.

Following Seeley’s graduation from Harvard Law School, he served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., prosecuting federal white-collar fraud and public corruption cases as well as local violent crime.

MLB hired Seeley to take over its Department of Investigations in 2014. The department has a wide swath of responsibilities, including cases pertaining to domestic violence, performance-enhancing drugs and age fraud. Seven years ago, Seeley added compliance and security to his management portfolio, and he ascended to executive vice president in 2022. Over his decade-plus at MLB, Seeley earned a reputation as a strong and competent manager whose department, which had let go of three employees following allegations of unethical behavior, consistently delivered solid work.

“Bryan is an exceptional choice to lead the College Sports Commission,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “During his time at MLB, Bryan demonstrated unparalleled integrity, a commitment to fairness, and the ability to navigate complex challenges with precision and care. I have no doubt he will bring the same level of excellence to the College Sports Commission. College sports will greatly benefit from Bryan’s expertise and vision.”

In March, Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski summed up the role of enforcement in the new era as having to be more efficient and punitive than when the NCAA was in charge of enforcement.

“We’ve screwed this thing up now to the point where we have to be willing to draw a line in the sand, and that will create some pain,” Bobinski told ESPN then. “There’s no two ways about it, and we’ll find out who’s just going to insist on stepping over the line. But if they do, you got to deal with it forcefully and quickly.”

The new era will not be without its complications. The CEO is in charge of running the systems that have been put into place by the commissioners — LBi Software and accounting firm Deloitte have been lined up to handle salary cap management and to manage the clearinghouse for NIL. Those NIL deals will be outside of the revenue share directly from schools, and how they are approved has been the focus of much conversation around college sports.

The clearinghouse that Deloitte has established will be known as NIL Go, which will be used to verify whether deals between athletes and boosters or associated entities are for a valid business purpose rather than a recruiting incentive. It’s described as a new technology platform that will be in place to assure that athletes’ NIL deals are in compliance with the rules.

According to information distributed at recent spring meetings, for example, investigations into athlete deals under the CSC are recommended to be resolved in 45 days. That’s a distinct shift from the ponderous NCAA process.

According to sources, the association documents being circulated for schools to sign to enter the new era detail the CEO’s role as making “final factual findings and determinations” on violations of rules. The CEO also will “impose such fines, penalties or other sanctions as appropriate” in accordance with the rules.