Ohio State’s Ross Bjork is part of a committee of 10 athletic directors that is overseeing the implementation of college sports’ new revenue-sharing model and rules enforcement.
The NCAA, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC announced Wednesday that they have formed a Settlement Implementation Committee that is overseeing the implementation and enforcement of the model being created by the House v. NCAA settlement. That committee consists of 10 athletic directors from those conferences as well as the legal and compliance teams of each conference and the NCAA.
Bjork is joined on the committee by Texas A&M’s Trev Alberts, Oregon State’s Scott Barnes, Oregon State, Kentucky’s Mitch Barnhart, Georgia Tech’s J Batt, Washington’s Pat Chun, Cincinnati’s John Cunningham, Washington State’s Anne McCoy, Clemson’s Graham Neff and Arizona’s Desireé Reed-Francois.
Per the NCAA’s announcement, the committee has already been “meeting numerous times per week for the past several months, dedicating countless hours to discussing the settlement's implementation and working diligently to ensure its short- and long-term success.” The athletic directors on the committee have been “actively gathering input from their peers in their conference and are channeling that feedback back to the group.”
The committee's formation comes as the NCAA and its major conferences prepare to implement a new model this summer – assuming the House v. NCAA settlement receives final approval at a hearing scheduled for April 7 – in which colleges will be permitted to directly share revenue with their athletes for the first time. The revenue-sharing cap will be set at 22% of the average annual athletic department revenue from those five conferences, a number that’s estimated to be approximately $20.5 million for the 2025-26 academic year.
The new settlement will also create a clearinghouse that requires Division I colleges and athletes to report all NIL deals valued at $600 or more. A new enforcement entity is being created to ensure that schools follow the revenue-sharing and NIL rules created by the settlement; according to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, the enforcement entity is preparing to issue significant penalties for those who violate the rules, including a reduction on the number of transfers programs can add, a reduction of a school’s future revenue-sharing pool, financial fines and coach suspensions.
Per the NCAA’s release, the Settlement Implementation Committee includes four working groups, each focused on a specific area of the settlement:
1. Drafting new rules and clarifying existing rules to facilitate consistent compliance with all aspects of the settlement.
2. Developing a digital platform for the reporting and measurement of payments made to student-athletes by their institutions to ensure compliance with the cap set forth in the proposed settlement.
3. Creating a system to ensure that third-party name, image and likeness deals entered into with student-athletes are legitimate deals that will use the student-athlete's NIL to advance a valid business purpose.
4. Forming a new entity to enforce these rules with an emphasis on efficient investigative procedures, timely decision-making, appropriate penalties, and ensuring accountability for bad actors.
Bjork told 97.1 The Fan last week that he is a part of the working group that’s goal is to ensure a strong enforcement arm will be in place when the new model goes into effect on July 1.
“There will be a new entity that will govern the revenue-share cap. It will govern NIL. It will have rules of enforcement on if you violate the cap, here's what that means,” Bjork said. “If you do an NIL third-party agreement that doesn't meet the clearinghouse standards, that could be a violation. If you pay under the table, like the old-school days, those things could be violations.
“So there's going to be things that are housed in this A4 (autonomous conferences) entity that are rules. There will be things that are still left kind of on the NCAA side. How that merges and how that bridges, those mechanics are being worked out right now. There's no question that we have to be governed differently at the A4 level; the Big Ten, the SEC, the Big 12. What that looks like, the mechanics around that, there is a lot of work. I'm actually on a subgroup working on the enforcement piece of this. How do penalties get decided? Who decides that? All of those things are being baked in right now. But we have to go fast because the clock's ticking.”
Bjork says it is important for the conferences to be in agreement on the enforcement model so that there’s no dispute about whether those rules can be enforced later.
“We all want this governance, we all want this enforcement, until it happens to us,” Bjork said. “So there needs to be agreement on the front end that, ‘OK, we're signing up for this entity. We agreed to the House case rules of engagement. We agreed to revenue share.’
You need to follow the rules. Whatever the rules are going to be, you have to follow. And if there's enforcement and if you go against those rules, OK, here can be the penalties. And we need to live with that.
“Now, can you negotiate that? Absolutely. You need to be able to negotiate. But who decides that? It can't really be our peers anymore. We would sit in front of these committee on infractions and you'd have an AD judging another program; we've got to get away from those kind of models. ... If we don't all agree to this and agree that we're not going to sue and we're not going to take it to the Attorney General's office and we're not going to go to federal court because we don't like an outcome, because this is what we signed up for, absolutely we have to agree to that. And that's part of it. There will be agreements that we have to sign that say ‘We're going to follow this.’”
