Checks worth "thousands of dollars, in some cases more than $20,000, have been arriving this month in the mailboxes" of current and former NCAA athletes from the $208.7M settlement of "one part of a lawsuit against the NCAA and 11 major conferences concerning the association's athlete-compensation limits," according to Berkowitz & Epstein of USA TODAY. The settlement "applies to a little more than 43,000 athletes" in the FBS and D-I men's and women's basketball. The overall average settlement check going out is "a little over $3,800." This is the "second time in 3½ years that money from a legal settlement has gone to college athletes." In April '16, nearly 25,000 checks went out from a $60M deal "related to lawsuits concerning college sports video games" that involved the NCAA, EA and Collegiate Licensing Co. The settlement figure was "based on a negotiation that resulted in the NCAA paying an amount intended to equal about 93% of the difference between the value of a traditional athletic scholarship and the actual cost of attending schools" across D-I each year from '10-15. In the end, check recipients are getting "somewhere between 50% and 60% of what they would have gotten had they been able to receive a scholarship based on their schools' cost of attendance while they were in college" (USA TODAY, 10/7).
