As Washington coach Jedd Fisch explained on the first day of the December signing period, players on the Huskies’ 2025 football roster will be primarily compensated via two different entities — one old, and one very new.
From January through June — for players who are enrolled, anyway, which is most of the team — UW’s donor collective, Montlake Futures, will handle name-image-likeness payments, as has become standard operating procedure. Beginning July 1, though, the school may begin paying players directly, assuming a federal judge grants final approval of the landmark House v. NCAA settlement in April.
As a reminder, the House settlement includes two main components:
- The NCAA — via its own reserves and reduced distributions to member schools, primarily in the Power 4 conferences — must pay about $2.8 billion in back damages over the next 10 years for lost NIL and revenue-sharing opportunities to former athletes.
- Athletic departments may now share up to about $20.5 million annually with athletes (and that figure is set to rise each year). Fisch has said on several occasions that UW plans to share the maximum allowable amount of revenue. While precise details remain scarce, informed observers estimate Power 4 programs will direct the majority of their revenue-share allotment — between $13-16 million — to football players.
Fisch and others have referenced a “standardized” revenue-sharing contract template being used across the Big Ten; Sportico shared some details of one such agreement after viewing a copy last month.
I requested and recently received a blank copy of a template for a memorandum of understanding (MOU) from the UW via a public records request. It’s a fascinating study in how rapidly college athletics are evolving.
Because this is only a template, it’s possible that the precise nature of these deals will vary from athlete to athlete or school to school — this is a good comparison of how schools in different leagues, including the Big Ten, are structuring their deals — and any House-related contracts are of course conditioned on the settlement receiving final approval (the MOU stipulates as much). But the template is largely intended as a plug-and-play document to be used across the Big Ten, and should give you a strong sense of what these deals are likely to entail, and the manner in which players are going to be paid.
Here’s what I found most interesting from studying the MOU template.