The Future of Title IX After House v. NCAA

Authors

• Abigail Perkiss

Abstract

In October 2025, attorneys representing current and former Division I college athletes filed preliminary briefs in the Ninth Circuit, calling on the appellate court to reverse the settlement in House v. NCAA,¹ which in April 2025 turned intercollegiate athletics on its head. The brief argued that the terms of the settlement stand in violation of Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments, the legislation that prohibited sex-based discrimination in education programs and related activities that receive federal funding. According to the settlement terms, 90 percent of the backpay is earmarked to fund men’s football and basketball players, 5 percent is reserved for women’s basketball players, and the remaining 5 percent is allocated to all other student athletes.² For more than a century, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) required a strict amateurism model for collegiate sports, prohibiting student athletes from receiving payment beyond educational expenses.³ But as revenue from college sports has ballooned, critics have argued that athletes should be compensated for their labor.⁴ Following a series of successful antitrust lawsuits that weakened the legal defense of amateurism,⁵ in 2021 the NCAA allowed athletes for the first time to earn money from their name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights^.6 House v. NCAA pushed those boundaries further. There, petitioners sought backpay for lost NIL earnings and injunctive relief to stop the NCAA from enforcing restrictions on athlete compensation.⁷ The resulting settlement authorized universities to pay college athletes directly for their performance and ruled that the NCAA must pay nearly $2.6 billion in damages to former athletes for NIL earnings that they would have reasonably earned during their collegiate careers.⁸ The consequences of the House decision are profound; the settlement created a roadmap for direct payment to athletes for the first time in the history of the NCAA. But the court offered no guidance for how schools should implement these new policies while remaining compliant with Title IX. This Essay revisits the history of legislative intent concerning Title IX, the law’s impact on the NCAA, and the ongoing questions about its future in this rapidly evolving contemporary moment.

Recommended Citation

Abigail Perkiss, The Future of Title IX After House v. NCAA, 130 Dick. L. Rev. 955 (2025).
Available at: https://insight.dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/dlr/vol130/iss3/6