The Lawsuits, Pt. 1

Including a pro tip for how to follow all the college sports litigation.

If you’ve been a regular reader here, you’ve likely gotten used to the format: italicized intro, subscribe button, photo, title, essay. But as I was mapping this post out in my head, I realized the intro was also the start of what I wanted to write, so this is me skipping a step and getting right into it.

The Lawsuits, Pt. 1

I spent most of last week out West, reporting a feature I can’t wait to write and share with you all. Then once I finished working, I very much indulged in my hometown Eagles, watching the Super Bowl at Northstar Cafe, a gem of a dive bar in San Francisco. (Go Birds.)

While there, as I explained my job to a friend of a friend, he said: “Wait, college sports are, like, crazy now. Right?”

Yes! Right!

Which felt like a good reminder to write again, since a lot has happened in the last few weeks, including two new lawsuits: Hill v. NCAA and Allen v. NCAA. These are notable in how they relate to House v. NCAA, the antitrust case that’s still hanging over the entire industry. By the end of January, class members for House — athletes who competed between 2016 and 2024 — had to decide whether to opt out of the settlement. Athletes who opted in secured their share of nearly $2.8 billion in damages, should the judge grant final approval in April.

Those who opted out won’t get a cut of that $2.8 billion. But, crucially, they maintain the right to sue the NCAA on their own, hoping to score even more money for missed opportunities to profit off their name, image and likeness (NIL). These are the athletes we’re focusing on, since they’re the ones bringing the Hill and Allen cases.

Just like House, Hill and Allen seek damages for the use of these athletes’ NIL by the NCAA and power conferences. Or in other words: They seek damages for the NCAA and power conferences making billions on athletes while the players couldn’t earn a cent.

Hill includes 67 athletes as plaintiffs. Allen includes 33. To help explain what these new cases tell us, I called Sam Ehrlich, a lawyer turned assistant professor at Boise State’s College of Business and Economics. Sam is an ace on all things college sports law. Recently, he launched a website tracking every bit of litigation, including more than 80 briefs and letters filed in objection of the House settlement. For reporters like me, this is what’s called the Lord’s work. Anyway, here were Sam’s broader thoughts on Hill and Allen in the context of House.

“With these lawsuits, the lawyers are basically saying: We want to go back to before the House settlement process began,” Sam said. “We want to continue litigating this as much as we can, trying to get as much as possible in damages for our plaintiffs. Not in a class-action sense, like House, but money for our individual athletes that better reflects what we feel Kessler and Berman could have gotten if they had taken this all the way to trial.”

Jeffrey Kessler and Steve Berman are the lead plaintiffs attorneys for House. The idea, then, as Sam laid it out, is that the lawyers for Hill and Allen — and Fontenot v. NCAA, a similar, longer-standing case — believe their clients can get more money than their individual cuts of the almost $2.6 billion in House damages. Those athletes chose a longer process, passing up a surer payout for the chance of a bigger one.

To that end, Ehrlich noted that the complaints for Hill and Allen are just about identical to the most recent complaint in House, which was filed before a settlement was on the table. That’s further proof that the Hill and Allen lawyers are picking up where House left off, potentially gaming out what the damages could have look like if the NCAA and power conferences lost at trial. The NCAA pursued a settlement in the first place because it didn’t want to face that number.

---

Before we go, a few key notes on House: If the settlement is approved, it would also permit Division I schools to pay athletes directly for the first time. That seismic change, often referred to as revenue sharing, would come with caveats. Schools would have the option to share revenue with athletes, meaning many could (and certainly will) decline. Plus the payments are subject to a cap, which will start at $20 million and rise annually, incrementally, for the next 10 years.

Title IX is an uncertainty, in that schools and the federal governor are unsure how — or if — it should apply to revenue share payments. From there, the list of complications goes on and on. It’s a lot to process, for sure, but that’s only reason to plug Sam’s litigation tracker once again.