Good morning! Trump administration fires another woman from top military role, Mira Murati adds advisors to new venture, and women’s college basketball closes out its last season before a major change.
– Off the court. After UConn won the NCAA women’s college basketball championship on Sunday, coach Geno Auriemma weighed in on a huge change barreling toward women’s college basketball and the entire NCAA. Colleges are expected to soon be able to pay players—and that ability “will ruin parity,” Auriemma said on Sunday.
He was referring to parity in tournaments; when one basketball program pays more than the other, on-court advantage goes beyond traditional powerhouses like UConn. “[When] it’s money-driven, it’s going to be, who is going to become the Dodgers and Yankees?” the coach said.
On Monday, Judge Claudia Wilken sat down to approve a settlement that will decide how those questions are answered. House v. NCAA is a landmark settlement of three different antitrust cases in college sports. The settlement would allow schools to pay athletes $20.5 million each in revenue-sharing next year, and $2.8 billion would go toward back pay for athletes who played before name, image, likeness rules were reformed, which allowed students to earn money from their brands without losing NCAA status.
Wilken didn’t approve the settlement on Monday; she said she’s seeking to resolve some remaining issues before signing off. Some athletes testified against the agreement on Monday; NIL superstar Livvy Dunne said the formula it uses to calculate NIL value placed hers too low. Smaller schools object that it will leave them behind and limit the development of athletes for less prominent, non-revenue generating but sometimes Olympic sports.
Earlier this year, I chatted with Sedona Prince, a lead plaintiff on the case. She is in favor of athletes being paid directly by their universities, in addition to NIL earnings. “It’s two different things, right?” she says. The 24-year-old suffered serious injuries during her college career at Texas Christian University; her time in college basketball just ended with a loss in the Elite Eight. The experience caused her to rethink how college sports operate. “My mom had been talking to other parents of kids who had been going through these injuries and had been paying their own medical bills,” she says. “It just outraged us as a family.” She wanted to sue her school, and ended up joining this lawsuit. She sat through a “brutal” seven-hour deposition and her lawyers have been logged into her social media accounts for years, she says, to view any messages related to college earnings. She gained more attention, too, when she posted a video about the drastic disparity between the men’s and women’s weight rooms during the NCAA tournament, igniting a debate about gender equity in college sports.
While the debate around the House settlement comes down to a few highly impactful details—exactly how much athletes should be paid, what the end of amateurism will mean across the entire NCAA—Prince stands firm on her main point. “We’re adults,” she says. “There are 18- to 22-year-olds working 9-to-5s.” She’s excited the settlement could give a boost to athletes who didn’t get to benefit from the NIL era. “We’re not done,” she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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