NCAA and Eleven Major Conferences Throw Their Pennies at Thankful Athletes

By Johnny Ginter on February 4, 2017 at 10:35 am
Straight cash, homie
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Chalk one up for the athletes.

The NCAA and 11 major athletic conferences announced Friday night they have agreed to pay $208.7 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit filed by former college athletes who claimed the value of their scholarships was illegally capped.

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The settlement will be fully funded by NCAA reserves, the association said. No school or conference will be required to contribute.

The antitrust lawsuit was a result of a combination of several different lawsuits, but focused primarily on one filed by former West Virginia football player Shawne Alston in 2014. All Division I men's basketball, women's basketball, and football players who did not receive cost of attendance scholarships from between 2009 and 2017 will receive roughly $6,000, according to attorney Steve Berman.

While the settlement hasn't been finalized, and the NCAA still contests any part of any settlement that implies that athletes should be paid, they acquiesced on this particular issue because the standards for how scholarship money is calculated has been changed to include total cost of attendance in recent years.

200ish million dollars may sound like a lot, but fret not for the NCAA, which took in roughly a billion per year as recently as 2014.


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