Hey there,

The good news: This week, we were finally given a timeline for the House Settlement. The bad news: The whole timeline is in Legalese instead of plain English.

Don’t worry — today, we’re translating that timeline into easy-to-understand, trackable events. You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand what’s going on with the future of college sports… you just need to be an NIL Wire All-Access subscriber! It’s a lot cheaper than Law school, too — sign up for All-Access here if you’re not already part of the team.

Oh, one last thing: This is a super important edition for student-athletes, parents, coaches, and ADs — quite literally thousands of dollars could be at stake based on whether or not you know this timeline. Let’s get into it!

— Cole, Justin and Collin

Translating the House lawsuit timeline from "Legalese" into English

After an entire summer of negotiation, both sides of the House v. NCAA lawsuit finally found common ground in early September. The result was something that would change college sports forever – the House Settlement deal.

The deal was met with excitement by some, and resentment by others. It would fundamentally alter the business model of college sports, including a $22 million “salary cap” that would allow for schools to share revenues with their student-athletes.

But then on September 5^th, she sent both sides “back to the drawing board.” The chances of a deal going through were getting slimmer seemingly every day. The NCAA and plaintiff’s lawyers took a month to rework some language within the deal, and then resubmitted it. Finally, on October 7^th, Judge Wilken granted preliminary approval to the deal.

But the story is far from over. Yes, preliminary approval is a very big deal… but there are still a bunch of hurdles before the deal becomes, well, real. Enacted. It’s still just hypothetical in a lot of ways. 

Luckily, Judge Wilken has now given a timeline: 

There’s not really any context around this timeline, though, which makes it really confusing for non-lawyers. We see the words on the page… but what do any of these dates actually mean? 

Today, I thought we’d go through the timeline and translate each event from convoluted “Legalese” into plain English. It’ll give you and I an easy way to track where we are in the process right now, and what needs to happen before the landmark deal actually goes through.  

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