The Dog That Didn't Bark: What FY2025 Financial Reports Actually Tell Us About the House Settlement

This is the second installment in a series on the FY2025 NCAA financial reporting changes. Last time, I covered the new categories the NCAA added to the form. This time, I'm looking at what schools actually reported in them, and what the numbers reveal.

The House v. NCAA settlement was supposed to usher in a new era of athlete compensation transparency. The first year of financial data is in. Seventy-two of seventy-six schools reported exactly $0 in direct athlete revenue sharing.

That is mostly not the scandal it looks like. But mostly is doing real work in that sentence, and the exception is as interesting as the rule.

Recall from last time that the NCAA created line 44, "Institutional NIL Revenue Share," specifically to capture House settlement payments. This is direct institutional NIL money flowing to athletes, distinct from scholarships or Alston style academic benefits. Seventy six schools now have FY2025 data in the public record. Only four of them reported anything other than zero on it. Penn State reported $18.4 million. Louisville reported $12.7 million. Texas reported $3.2 million. UTEP reported $188,000. Everyone else, including Ohio State, Michigan, Georgia, and Tennessee, reported zero.

So where is the money?

For three of those four schools, the answer is a calendar problem, not a compliance one. Final approval of the House settlement came down on June 6, 2025. The first legally permissible revenue sharing payment date was July 1, 2025. And for the overwhelming majority of athletic departments, the fiscal year ends June 30. Do that math and the picture snaps into focus. For most programs, FY2025 ended the day before a single dollar of institutional NIL money could legally move. It is not that schools are hiding revenue sharing payments. It is that the reporting window closed 24 days before the payments could start.

Texas is the cleanest case. Its fiscal year ends August 31, not June 30. That means its FY2025 report actually captures about two months of live revenue sharing payments. $3.2 million works out to roughly a sixth of the school's reported $18 million annual cap allocation. That is close enough to two months out of twelve that it reads less like an anomaly and more like the model working exactly as the calendar would predict.

Louisville is a labeling quirk rather than a timing exception. The school reports its fiscal year by start date, so its "FY2025" filing actually spans July 2025 through June 2026. That is a full first year under revenue sharing, not a fragment of one. The $12.7 million figure lines up with the $12.5 million deficit Louisville's athletic director had already projected publicly for the first budget of the revenue sharing era. The number is not an outlier. It is the same story other schools will tell next year, arriving one reporting cycle early because of how Louisville dates its fiscal year.

UTEP's $188,372 is the hardest of the four to explain with a single mechanism, but the underlying logic still holds. Any dollars that show up under a same year reporting clock are, by construction, partial year dollars. A smaller athletic budget with a slightly different payment cadence produces a smaller partial year number.

Then there is Penn State, and Penn State breaks the pattern.

Penn State's fiscal year ends June 30, same as almost everyone else. There is no Texas style calendar offset, no Louisville style labeling quirk. By the same logic that explains why Ohio State, Georgia, and dozens of other June 30 schools reported zero, Penn State should have reported zero too. Instead it reported $18.4 million, more than Louisville, the single largest figure of any school in the dataset. The report's comments field, where schools are supposed to explain unusual entries, is blank.

The explanation is not a calendar quirk. It is in the fine print of the category itself. The NCAA's definition for line 44 does not limit it to House settlement payments. It instructs schools to include institutional NIL payments "not currently permitted or permitted prior to the House settlement approval." That second clause matters. It means line 44 was built to capture two different things: new revenue sharing dollars that only became legal on July 1, 2025, and pre-existing institutional NIL payments that some schools were already making before the settlement through other arrangements. Penn State's number almost certainly reflects the second category, not the first.

That is a more useful finding than a clean calendar story would have been. It means line 44 cannot be read as a pure revenue sharing tracker, not yet. A school reporting a large number on it might be an early mover on House payments, like Texas or Louisville, or it might simply have an existing institutional NIL program that predates the settlement entirely, like Penn State appears to. The form does not currently let an outside reader tell the two apart.

If FY2025 does not cleanly show us the House settlement, it does show us the baseline schools were already operating from before it.

Line 43, "Enhanced Educational Benefits (Alston or other)," predates House by four years. It has been on the books since the 2021 Supreme Court ruling. Sixty eight schools reported figures on it this year, totaling $106.7 million across the dataset. This is the floor. It is what enhanced compensation looked like before revenue sharing existed as a legal category. Wisconsin reported $8.2 million. Ohio State reported $5.1 million. Virginia Tech reported $4.4 million. All three reported $0 on line 44.

That gap is the thing to track, with the Penn State caveat now attached to it. When FY2026 numbers come in, the interesting comparison will not simply be whether line 44 went up. It will be the delta between line 43 and line 44, read alongside whether a school's line 44 number already existed in some form in FY2025. A school that reported zero on line 44 this year and a large number next year is probably showing genuine new revenue sharing activity. A school like Penn State, which already had a number there, is a harder case, and the form as currently built will not resolve it on its own.

There is a wrinkle worth naming before we get to FY2026, and it complicates the calendar reading further. Sportico has reported that FBS schools are increasingly opting out of sharing their MFRS data with the College Sports Commission, the body responsible for enforcing the revenue sharing cap in the first place. That is a strange position. The same schools whose compensation is capped by this framework are resisting the disclosure that would let anyone verify they are staying under it. It means line 44's near universal zero this year tells us about a reporting window and a definitional gap. What it tells us in future years may depend as much on disclosure behavior as on actual payments.

FY2026 is where this gets real. It will be the first full fiscal year with House payments in effect for essentially every school, with reports due in January 2027. The open questions are straightforward to state and hard to predict. Will schools actually use line 44 as designed, or will some of them route revenue sharing spending into line 43 or "Other Operating Expenses" instead, the way facilities costs used to hide inside general overhead before the form gave them their own line? Will the NCAA tighten the line 44 definition so pre-existing NIL payments and new revenue sharing dollars are no longer combined in one number? And will the 319 schools that opted into revenue sharing, 82 percent of Division I, actually report at the scale the settlement implies?

That scale is worth sitting with on its own. The settlement's compensation cap starts at roughly $20.5 million per school. Multiply that by 319 schools and the number is $6.5 billion in potential annual athlete compensation, every year, going forward. FY2025 captured almost none of it, and what little it did capture turns out to be a mix of two different things wearing the same line item.

FY2026 is where the real accounting begins. Whether we will be able to tell new money from old money when it does is still an open question.

Sources House v. NCAA Settlement Approved: Ropes & Gray, https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/06/house-v-ncaa-settlement-approved-era-of-direct-payments-to-college-athletes-begins Judge grants final approval: ESPN, https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/45467505/judge-grants-final-approval-house-v-ncaa-settlement Texas: Why revenue sharing didn't play major role in $23.3M deficit: Yahoo Sports, https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/texas-longhorns-why-revenue-sharing-153551016.html Louisville projects $12.5M deficit in 1st revenue sharing budget: WDRB, https://www.wdrb.com/sports/louisville-athletics-projects-a-12-5-million-deficit-in-1st-budget-of-revenue-sharing-era/article_071eb72d-f599-45c0-90fe-26af47608af9.html Schools Ask NCAA to Withhold Data From College Sports Commission: Sportico, https://www.sportico.com/leagues/college-sports/2026/ncaa-schools-financial-reports-college-sports-commission-1234881489/ NCAA AUP New 2025: JMCO, https://www.jmco.com/articles/collegiate-athletics/ncaa-aup-new-2025/ Penn State, Louisville, Texas, UTEP, Ohio State, Georgia, Wisconsin, Virginia Tech FY2025 MFRS reports (direct PDF review)