Student athletes at Pitt will now receive financial compensation for the role in NCAA sports.
This change follows the House v. NCAA settlement, a landmark antitrust case in the collegiate sports world that went into effect July 1. The case marks the beginning of revenue sharing — or student-athlete compensation — for playing under the NCAA, which includes large Division I schools like the University of Pittsburgh.
The deal is set to pay $2.7 billion to NCAA athletes who played from 2016 to 2024 who didn’t earn from their Name, Image, Likeness deals due to strict NCAA policies about student compensation outside of scholarships.
Scholarship caps for players have now been replaced with roster limits in an effort to align with the new settlement.
Cordelia Brazile, sports historian and visiting lecturer at Pitt, described athlete pay as “historically one of the dividing lines between collegiate sport and professional sport.”
Schools are now allowed to pay up to $20.5 million to student athletes for the 2025-2026 year – a cap that could increase to as high as $33 million in the 2034-2035 academic year. As time goes on the cap is predicted to rise by 4% every year, but $20.5 million is currently the maximum spending for universities on collegiate athlete payment.
The University of Pittsburgh has not officially released a plan on how it will go about revenue sharing for athletes. However, athletic director Allen Greene put out a statement on June 7, describing Pitt’s “unwavering commitment” to athletic championships and encouraging donations through the Panther Club, the University’s source of fundraising for athletics.
“With this courtroom decision, the future of college athletics remains ever-changing,“ Greene said. “We can and should expect more shifts in the coming months and years.”
University spokesperson Jared Stonesifer explicitly highlighted Pitt’s past planning for student-athlete compensation.
“Pitt has an unwavering commitment to competing at the highest levels in the Atlantic Coast Conference and nationally,” Stonesifer said. “University of Pittsburgh leadership has long been engaged in planning for the onset of the revenue-sharing era. That foresight has Pitt strongly positioned to support our student-athletes for the 2025-26 year of competition and beyond.”
Matt Plizga, associate athletic director, strategic communications, declined to comment on NIL and the House settlement at this time.
A critical part of the deal is the allocation of back-pay damages — payment to athletes from 2016-2024 who were denied payment due to the NCAA’s strict NIL rules, with a plan to give 90% of damages to football and men’s basketball players, 5% to women’s basketball players and 5% to all other sports.
The fight for college athletes to earn payment has evolved with the idea of “amateurism” alongside debates over what constitutes “labor” when it comes to student athletes, according to Brazile. One popular example of the labor debate in college athletic history is the failed 2015 case where Northwestern University Football’s team attempted to unionize.
“They tried to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board and be recognized as workers for the university, which was shut down for various reasons at that time,” Brazile said. “That sort of question of, ‘Are athletes workers?’”
With so many factors at play, Brazile recognizes the downsides and the benefits of the deal, including the “honest conversations” it’s brought to the collegiate sports world.
“I do think that it is a good thing for us to have perhaps more honest conversations about the particular situation that college students find themselves in as both athletes, as employees, as sort of their own agents in a commercialized collegiate sport landscape,” Brazile said. “I hope the people making these decisions are keeping welfare in mind for college athletes.”