BLOOMINGTON – Athletic directors across the country appear to lean into transportation metaphors, largely picking from one of two modes when discussing college sports’ move toward a looming revenue sharing model.

Scott Dolson, Indiana’s AD for more than four years now, keeps to the ground. Prepping for this brave new world is, he says, like changing the tires on a moving car.

Provided a revenue-sharing agreement reached between plaintiffs and the NCAA stemming chiefly from the House case receives judicial approval, universities will begin paying athletes across the board from the start of the 2025-26 academic year. The process of which will come with pitfalls and obstacles, and unforeseen consequences. But foremost, Dolson is encouraged it is finally on track.

“First of all, I think everyone is pleased and excited that the settlement, in principle, has been reached. It’s just been hanging over our heads with the anti-trust challenges. It’s exciting that we do have some potential certainty,” Dolson said. “It’s definitely a really good thing that we’ve got it to this point.”

The settlement — actually consolidating three separate antitrust lawsuits and reached last month — would distribute roughly $2.8 billion in (essentially) backpay to former college athletes, reaching as far as 2016. More meaningfully moving forward, however, it would create a revenue-sharing model guaranteeing college athletes financial compensation, effectively moving college sports into a bold new era in its history.

It will require official judicial approval in the coming weeks. But if it passes muster, college athletics’ fundamental model will be remade forever.

In real terms, that leaves Dolson with myriad challenges to manage.

The first and most tangible will be financial. The financial portion of the settlement will be funded via a shared burden between the NCAA, Power Five conferences, Group of Five conferences and on down. The conferences are expected to absorb those costs by lowering per-school media rights distributions in the coming years.

DOYEL: NCAA is weak, Power Four is greedy, and smaller conferences are paying the price.

The immediate burden on the schools will be funding athlete compensation, which is expected to be capped at roughly $22 million in the first year of this landmark agreement, and then escalate by percentage points in years two and three. The wider number will be more thoroughly evaluated in year four.

Schools may account for some of that money in Alston-related payments (education-related financial awards schools can offer athletes as a result of a separate antitrust case) and increased scholarship funding. Athletic departments will be permitted to count as much as $2.5 million annually toward that cap in scholarship funding, providing Title IX obligations are met. Rosters will be capped, but schools can choose to fund athletes’ scholarships as fully as they desire under the settlement, moving past longstanding equivalency structures.

How else Title IX impacts revenue sharing remains to be seen. There’s no clear answer for whether schools will be required to share revenue equally between men’s and women’s sports. Coaches generally expect those decisions to be made at the conference level, but firm guidance on that particular issue will likely take some time.

For now, Dolson must educate (and at times perhaps ease the minds of) his coaches, while he clears the necessary room in his budget to accommodate eight figures worth of new expenses.

Navigating the massive revenue shortfalls stemming from the pandemic taught athletic departments better streamlining and efficiency. Knowing some form of revenue sharing was on its way put those learned skills to use once more.

“We’ve been anticipating this for a while,” Dolson said. “Coming out of COVID, because we had a similar exercise in terms of trying to scrub our budgets, scrub our resources, it’s not like this is brand new for us.”

Accompanying that are myriad decisions — some difficult and few with much of a road map — about how and where to distribute revenue.

If decisions about revenue-sharing allocations between men’s and women’s sports are taken at the conference level, that will provide obvious and needed guidance. Additional scholarship allocations (which can go north of that $2.5 million cap, just not counted toward the $22 million) will be made at the departmental level.

Which will leave athletic directors both intriguing opportunity, and tough decisions to make about priorities, particularly in what are currently only equivalency sports (sports that do not fully fund every scholarship but receive the equivalent of a certain number of scholarships and distribute that money according to their own needs).

“As different dominos fall, every bit of information we can get helps us frame our decision making,” Dolson said. “The biggest decisions will be made relative to the scholarship offerings per sport and how to analyze and allocate those."

Name, image and likeness concerns will not be replaced by revenue sharing. They will change, with the NCAA attempting to take greater oversight in ensuring NIL deals reflect athletes’ true brand power and are not inflated. How that will happen is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps more relevant to Dolson now is the experience of NIL reform. After navigating three years (and counting) of shifting policy and ever-evolving best practices around NIL, Dolson has learned the value of adaptability.

“Having been through the evolution of NIL, which continues to evolve, I think we did learn a lot of lessons from that,” he said. “I think it gives us confidence moving forward into this new opportunity in terms of revenue-sharing.”

Dolson credited Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti — who put the final touches on the conference’s latest media rights deal and will probably already have an eye on the next one — for the strength of his leadership through these rule changes.

And IU’s athletic director heaped praise as well on his counterparts at other Big Ten institutions, who are unified, he said, in preserving the conference’s “core values” at what Dolson described as “an inflection point in the history of college athletics.”

But Dolson, like everyone else in college sports, knows well there can only be so much preparation for such a meaningful shift in not just policy but culture. Questions will emerge without obvious answers. Mistakes will be made. Lessons will need learned from.

Like building an airplane while flying it or, to Dolson’s preferred metaphor, changing the tires on a car while it’s driving down the highway.

“That’s what it felt like with NIL at times, and I’m sure this will feel that way as well, but we continue to balance that,” he said. “I’m excited for our student-athletes.”

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: How Indiana University preparing for NCAA athletes revenue sharing