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Friday’s order is a major milestone in the long push to remove outdated amateurism rules from major college sports.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.