... is about as clearly as I've ever heard Whit speak and outline things. Usually, transcripts of Whit interviews are, um, rough, but he's pretty clear here about what they're doing with rev share. I'd still like to see this presented in orderly fashion via the written word, and publicly accessible. Here it is. ================================= Roth: That was a lot. That’s the background on it, but what are the terms? What’ll it actually mean for Tech athletics and our student-athletes? Babcock: It is really complex and how we navigate it will be crucial. And here are the terms of the settlement for the folks that don’t really understand it, it’s a lot out there. Part of the settlement, the first part, are back damages, and that will be paid backwards to student-athletes that didn’t receive the opportunities that the student-athletes are today. That has a six-year statute of limitations, and part of the lawsuit settlement is the NCAA will owe $2.8 billion [total] or $280 million a year over 10 years in back damages through this lawsuit. That money will primarily be paid through March Madness. Instead of the money coming to the schools throughout all the divisions of college athletics, it will now go towards that lawsuit, and that ultimate impact to Virginia Tech will be approximately $1 million a year for 10 years. And all of those back damages, all of that money, former student-athletes can opt into the class action, should they choose to, and that $2.8 billion will be distributed 75 percent to football players, 15 percent to men’s basketball players, five percent to women’s basketball players and five percent to Olympic sports athletes. So that’s just the back damages part. The terms of the forward-moving part, and again, this part would begin July 1 if the settlement does receive formal approval on April 7. So moving forward, for as long as we can remember, there were scholarship limits and no roster limits. For example, in football, you could have 85 guys on scholarship. You could carry, really, as many people as you wanted as long as it balanced out with Title IX. We carried 120. Now with the new rules, it will go the other way. There will be roster maximums or caps, but no restrictions on scholarships up to the roster limit, meaning football’s roster will be 105 players. You could, if you so choose, you could now fund up to 105 full scholarships. And baseball, for example, used to be restricted on 11.7 scholarships among 30-some players. Now I believe their roster size max would be 34, and hypothetically, if you wanted to pay for a full scholarship for everybody on your roster, you could. I’m not sure that’s strategically smart, and it’s really expensive, and you’ve got to certainly balance Title IX on top of that. But the other part of the settlement moving forward is what I’m sure a lot of our fans have read about. It will now be permissive, beginning July 1, to share up to $20.5 million of athletic department revenue will our student-athletes. It doesn’t mean you have to do it, but to compete at the top tier, that’s the level to get to, and there’ll be a revenue cap management system, Bill. It’s a group called LBI that does cap management for a lot of the pro leagues. NIL will still exist — there was no jurisdiction in the lawsuit over collectives or NIL — but after July 4, those NIL deals will have to be made public for anything over $600 and it’ll have to go through a fair-market value clearinghouse. Deloitte will be the organization that runs this for us. None of the salary cap, none of the NIL and none of the enforcement on those two subjects will come from the NCAA moving forward. So it’s a lot going on. It’s a long answer. You’ve also got Title IX considerations, getting further clarity on how enforcement of the cap and all these new rules will work. We’ve got a few other pending lawsuits, and then maybe on down the line, some form of collective bargaining, so it’s dang sure a new era and we’re up to the challenge and everybody’s in the same boat, but it will be a totally different paradigm than what we’re used to, but hopefully more structure than the Wild West NIL era we’ve been in lately. Roth: So what you’re saying, Whit, is for next year, Virginia Tech plans to share $20.5 million with the student-athletes that are participating in Virginia Tech sports, correct? Babcock: Yeah, that is certainly our goal, and that is what top-tier athletics look at. We will be able to share that $20.5 million. Any new scholarships that are added up to $2.5 million count against the cap. We will add approximately 40-45 new scholarships at Virginia Tech across a number of sports, including football. If you offer your student-athletes Alston awards or academic incentives, those also count against the cap up to $2.5 million, and then the revenue share payments count against the cap too, obviously. For us, on the revenue share component, we will primarily focus on three sports: football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. And then with our Olympic sports, our investment will primarily be in the form of additional scholarships. Again, I’m really glad that there will be transparency, or there’s supposed to be transparency, on what people are sharing with their student-athletes, transparency on what the NIL deals are and supposedly a much more professional enforcement agency than the NCAA’s been able to provide. And all of this is magically going to happen in the next eight months. So yes, we are going to be at that level. Quite frankly, we have pieced it together for Year 1, and when I say Year 1, that would be July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026. We’ve used some one-time funds, we’ve gotten some assistance from campus, we’re ready to go. The challenge will be, and what we’re working on all the time as well, is how do we make it sustainable? Twenty million dollars, we don’t just have that laying around. Again, we can put it together for this first year, and now we’re working on how we partner with campus, what we can do internally to generate more money, how we can get leaner. We even have folks working with state government, not for state funds, but to make it a little easier for us to help ourselves. We’ve got really good alignment with the president [Tim Sands] and the board. It is all hands on deck as we attack this new paradigm, and not only survive in it, but thrive in it. And when you think about how we spent our money in the past before we could share it with student-athletes, this takes me back to television money changed everything. How did we spend the revenue we made? We built incredible facilities. We paid coaches a lot in a lot of sports. ADs, our staffs got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and it’s going to take a while to turn this ship in a different direction and build the program around the student-athletes first. If this was Corporate America, they’d probably have tremendous layoffs, tremendous cuts. Thankfully, we’re not. We will have to get leaner, but it is an ongoing, productive conversation with a lot of people figuring out how to make this sustainable, how to position Virginia Tech at the top and where we want to be, and hopefully all of this salary cap and NIL transparency will level the playing field a little bit. It will look a little more like pro sports, and at least for me, I’m still hanging onto the cause, so to speak. I do believe there’s something in the sauce of the student-athlete experience, and as long as they’re still students at Virginia Tech and they want to be enrolled here and they represent Virginia Tech well, I’m going to cheer for them, whether they come in as a freshman, a senior or whatever revenue share they may make, but it is definitely changing.