He glided toward the mic, sat down, then prepared for the grilling about how much money he makes, why he left Tennessee, who betrayed who when he departed, and what it all means for the college football world that his story now defines.

Bottom line: If quarterback Nico Iamaleava handles the rest of the season as well as he did with his half hour of Q&A at Big Ten media days Thursday, chances are, UCLA will be good — maybe even very good — in 2025.

“I think, it’s just, keep my head down and be humble,” the 20-year-old lightning rod of a quarterback said. “And try not to let the outside noise affect you.”

If he succeeds at that, he will have more discipline than a great majority of college football fans, experts and journalists who have filled the internet and air waves with timelines and tick-tock analysis of a decision that shook the sport and seemed to say everything about the burgeoning power players wield in a world of name, image, likeness deals and a rapidly rotating transfer portal.

The thumbnail of the story is that Iamaleava was a successful quarterback who led Tennessee to the College Football Playoff last season, then abruptly picked up stakes to head closer to home and play for UCLA.

Money seemed to be the most obvious motive.

Reports circulated that he was looking for a raise — maybe a doubling to nearly $4 million a year — to come back to the Vols. Then, one day last spring, Iamaleava missed practice. Just as abruptly, he was gone.

Tennessee coach Josh Heupel handled it diplomatically.

“Today’s landscape of college football is different than it has been,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, the situation, and where we’re at with Nico.”

Before he’d even enrolled at Tennessee, Iamaleava was causing his share of turmoil. It was his NIL deal with the Vols that triggered an NCAA investigation and a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Tennessee and Virginia in January 2024.

The NCAA settled that lawsuit, and though there aren’t as many questions about who makes the payments to the players (the colleges can do it themselves now), recriminations that flowed when Iamaleava enrolled at Tennessee kept flowing after he made his move to UCLA.

Asked about what triggered his move and exactly when it happened, Iamaleava said it came around the time “false stuff about whether it was a financial thing or not” started coming out that made him “not feel comfortable in the position I was in.”

Then, in a revelation that not everyone appears quite ready to accept, he said moving closer to where he grew up, in Long Beach, California, about 30 miles from the UCLA campus, was the biggest piece of the puzzle.

“My driving factor to come back home was my family, and I hope every Tennessee fan understands that,” he said. “It was really one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make.”

He will not delve into finances, though most of the reporting has shown that Iamaleava will make about as much, or just barely more, with UCLA than he was making at Tennessee.

“All that stuff is for my business team and my agents to handle,” he said. “I just focus on football.”

Among the other questions consuming college football, and that Iamaleava’s saga reflects as well as anyone’s, is how a player who makes more money and generates more hype than anyone else in the locker room can possibly fit on a team that is still, at its core, filled with teenagers whose football lives will end in college.

UCLA’s second-year coach, DeShaun Foster, said he scouted that part when the prospect of Iamaleava coming to Westwood became real.

“He’s a team guy and a family guy,” Foster said. “It just felt good that we were getting the right kind of quarterback.”

From a pure talent standpoint, hardly anyone argues that. Iamaleava was considered one of the country’s top prospects coming out of high school. He threw for 2,616 yards and 19 TDs last year in leading the Vols to the playoffs.

But, as one of the theories about his departure goes, he and his family were less than thrilled about Tennessee’s ability to protect him.

None other than ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit dove into the mix when he said he’d heard Iamaleava’s dad had gone to Heupel in December and said “like, hey, listen, you’ve got to get better at offensive line, better at receiver.”

Speaking not so much about that specific story, but to the realities of football, Foster said he knows keeping things clean in the pocket for Iamaleava will be key to his success.

“If he stays upright, things are going to go the right way,” Foster said.

And if they do, there’s at least a chance Iamaleava could be a one-and-doner at UCLA. He is widely thought to have NFL talent if he improves his mechanics and accuracy — two areas that will be helped by better protection.

During his back-and-forth with reporters, the quarterback brushed aside questions about pro football.

He also said he pays no mind to the billion-dollar questions swirling around the college game every day — all revolving around money, freedom to transfer and other issues that have turned UCLA’s quarterback into a villian in some places, a hero in others, and a player to watch everyhwere.

“I love college football,” he said. “Everything that goes on with my name, that’s not going to change my love for the game. Obviously, everyone has to move on. I’m excited about what’s next for me. But I’m where my feet (are), and right now, I’m a UCLA football player and I’m excited to go to camp.”

The contract for a rivalry that dates to 1926 expires after their game in 2026.

Both schools have expressed a willingness to lock down more games, but differences over how many appear to be holding up the negotiations.

USC’s move to the Big Ten gave the Trojans less flexibility in their nonconference schedule. Big Ten teams have nine conference games and only three open slots.

Speaking at Big Ten media days Thursday, Trojans coach Lincoln Riley said he was, of course, hopeful the series will continue. But not at any cost.

“I want to play the game. Absolutely. It’s one of the reasons I came here,” Riley said. “But also my allegiance and my loyalty is not to Notre Dame and it’s not to anybody else. I’m the head football coach at USC, and I’m going to back USC.”

Some of the uncertainty revolves around the College Football Playoff.

The Trojans have lost six of the last seven against Notre Dame. If CFP leaders decide to award four automatic bids to the Big Ten, which is the conference’s preference, a long-term deal to play the Irish might be more palatable to USC.

A system with more at-large bids, however, would make it more difficult, from a CFP standpoint, to absorb a nonconference loss.

Northwestern video vibes

Preston Stone is a good ol’ Texas boy who starred in high school for Parish Episcopal in Dallas and then spent four years at SMU. After entering the transfer portal following last season, however, he finally got to visit a team he once admired from afar — behind a video-game controller when he was 11 years old.

“For absolutely no reason whatsoever, when I was a little kid playing NCAA 14, I would always be Northwestern,” Stone said. “They had really cool black uniforms and they had a fast quarterback in Kain Colter, who I used to love playing with in the game.”

So after touring the campus and meeting Wildcats coach David Braun and offensive coordinator Zach Lujan, Stone was sold on transferring from the Lone Star State to Evanston.

“Facilities are incredible. I think we have the best indoor in the whole country,” Stone said. “You could feel a level of sincerity from Coach Braun. That was just different.

“And first meeting Coach Lujan, you could tell from the first couple minutes with him how incredibly smart of an offensive mind he is. I knew that if I came here, they were going to set me up for success.”

An encore for UCLA’s Foster

If UCLA improves on the field as much as coach DeShaun Foster did behind the mic at Big Ten media days, this could be a good year for the Bruins.

Foster spoke Thursday and made fun of his 2024 appearance, which included a cringeworthy 72-second opening statement highlighted by this observation about the program he was taking over: “I’m sure you guys don’t know much about UCLA, our football program, but we’re in LA.”

In heading to the lectern Thursday, Foster didn’t shy from that moment. He acknowledged he took some ribbing from players and others after last year’s effort.

“Last year I stood up here and reminded everyone that UCLA is in LA, which, looking back, might have been the most obvious geography lesson in Big Ten history,” Foster said. “But you know what? Important things are worth stating clearly. We are in LA, and we’re proud to be in LA.”

Underneath all those laughs, though, was a serious message. Foster, embarking on his second season in Westwood, said the moment “taught me a valuable lesson: Authenticity resonates more deeply than perfection.”

He faces a big challenge. The Bruins haven’t won a conference title since 1998 and haven’t played on Jan. 1 since that season’s Rose Bowl.

Bolstering UCLA’s hopes is the arrival of quarterback Nico Iamaleava from Tennessee. Iamaleava helped the Volunteers make the College Football Playoff last season.

Son of ‘Chocolate Thunder’ returns to Penn State

Penn State’s Nick Dawkins, the son of the late NBA star Darryl Dawkins, is one of four returning starters on the offensive line this season. That might not have been the case had the Nittany Lions not lost to Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff.

“After that game specifically, I was pretty dead set after that for sure,” Dawkins said of his decision to return. “I had some thoughts prior to the season ending, from a personal standpoint for my NFL draft stock, if it would be the best decision to come back. But when something like that happens, it kind of trumps all the individual stuff.”

Dawkins said it became more about the legacy of Penn State football and what he wanted to leave behind for the program’s history.

“My whole life, I’ve been representing my last name, and my last name has had so much legacy and worth attached to it before,” said Dawkins, who received All-Big Ten honorable mention last season. “I’ve always been a part of something bigger than myself and that’s how I view my life, and Penn State falls right into that category.”

At Big Ten football media days, Petitti said any change that adds at-large bids and increases the discretion and role of a selection committee — a format the SEC and others have shown a preference for — “will have a difficult time getting support of the Big Ten.”

Petitti also bolstered the idea of a weekend’s worth of conference play-in games for some of the four automatic bids that would go to the Big Ten in its preferred version of a 16-team playoff, even though the games could put some of the Big Ten’s top-seeded teams in jeopardy of being shut out of the CFP.

The likely slate for that would include a conference title game between Nos. 1 and 2 and play-in games involving the Nos. 3-6 seeds.

“There are 18 members in the Big Ten, you have 17 possible opponents and you play nine,” Petitti said. “There’s a lot of discrepancy. Let alone making comparisons across leagues, there’s a lot of issues about how you compare teams inside the Big Ten. … Where we came down is we were willing to take that risk.”

Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, whose team earned the 10th seed in last year’s playoff and lost 27-17 to Notre Dame in a game that didn’t feel as close as the score, echoed the commissioner’s thoughts and pointed out that Ohio State finished fourth in the conference last season and went on to win the national title.

If “you want to put the best teams in the playoffs, give the best leagues the AQ, but make them earn it with play-in games,” Cignetti said.

Though there is a Dec. 1 deadline for expanding the playoff for 2026, Petitti said he wouldn’t put any any firm date on it. That echoed a sentiment SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey voiced earlier this month when he said the 12-team format, which went into effect last season and offers automatic spots to five conference champions, could stay in place until the two conferences can agree.

Petitti said recent meetings between Big Ten and SEC athletic directors have produced good results on a variety of topics and he expects another such summit would do the same.

“The goal would be to bring people back together, have a conversation about what we think works, then kind of go from there,” he said.

The Big Ten and SEC ultimately will decide the new format, with input from the Atlantic Coast and Big 12 conferences along with Notre Dame and the five smaller conferences that are part of the system.

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said his preference is a format with five automatic bids and the rest at-large, which is also what Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark has said his conference favors.

“Fairness and access should also be part of the equation,” Phillips said Tuesday at ACC media days in Charlotte, N.C., while backing the work of the selection committee that would have a bigger role with 11 at-large selections to sort through.

Conferences currently earn $4 million for every team they place in the playoff, and that number could grow, which adds to the stakes of how the next version of the playoff takes form.

Embedded in the debate is the nine-game conference slate the Big Ten plays versus eight games for the SEC. That extra nonconference game, some believe, gives SEC teams a chance to bolster their schedules, which then adds value to any calculation the committee would consider in determining at-large bids.

The SEC is exploring moving to nine conference games.

Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman portrayed a Big Ten that is unified around the format of nine regular-season conference games, a new round of play-in games and something like four automatic spots in a 16-team playoff going to both the SEC and Big Ten.

“It means you’re going to have probably eight or nine, maybe 10 schools that are jockeying for the fifth and sixth spots as you get into November,” Whitman said. “It’s so cool when you just think about what it would mean for our fan bases and the enthusiasm around those games. And it minimizes some of the subjectivity that would be placed around the selection committee.”

AP’s Aaron Beard contributed.

Rakesh Kilaru, who served as the NCAA’s lead counsel for the House settlement that was approved last week, told The Associated Press an appeal on Title IX grounds filed this week will hold up payments due to around 390,000 athletes who signed on to the class-action settlement.

He said he has seen appeals take up to 18 months in the California-based federal court where this case is playing out, though that isn’t necessarily what he expects.

“I will say that we, and I’m sure the plaintiffs, are going to push,” Kilaru said.

A schedule filed this week calls for briefs related to the appeal to be filed by Oct. 3. Kilaru doesn’t expect anyone on the defendant or plaintiff side to file for extensions in the case “because every day the appeal goes on is a day damages don’t go to the student-athletes.”

He said while the appeal is ongoing, the NCAA will pay the money into a fund that will be ready to go when needed.

The other critical parts of the settlement — the part that allows each school to share up to $20.5 million in revenue with current players and set up an enforcement arm to regulate it — are in effect regardless of appeals.

“I think everyone thought it was important and good for this new structure to start working because it does have a lot of benefits for students,” Kilaru said. “But it’s very common for damages to be delayed in this way for the simple reason that you don’t want to make payments to people that you can’t recover” if the appeal is successful.

A group of eight female athletes filed the appeal. Their attorney, Ashlyn Hare, said they supported settlement of the case “but not an inaccurate one that violates federal law.”

“The calculation of past damages is based on an error that ignores Title IX and deprives female athletes of $1.1 billion,” Hare said.

Kilaru agreed with plaintiff attorneys who have argued that Title IX violations are outside the scope of the lawsuit.

Other objections to the settlement came from athletes who said they were damaged by roster limits set by the terms. One attorney representing a group of those objectors, Steven Molo, said they were reviewing Wilken’s decision and exploring options.

NCAA President Charlie Baker, like his predecessor a proponent of federal legislation to lock in some of the seismic changes hitting college sports, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that draft legislation circulating in Washington is what the association has been asking for. Now, it’s simply a matter of passing it.

“One of the messages we got from them was, ‘Clean up your own house first, and then come talk to us,’” said Baker, a former Massachusetts governor whose political acumen was a key selling point when he was selected for the NCAA job in 2023.

The NCAA delivered, Baker said, with new rules that guarantee better post-graduate health care and scholarship protections for athletes, and then with the crown jewel of reforms — the $2.8 billion lawsuit settlement that a federal judge approved last week.

The most fundamental change from the settlement is that schools can now directly pay players through revenue-sharing.

For that to work, though, Baker and the NCAA have been lobbying for a limited form of antitrust protection that would prevent, for instance, lawsuits challenging the spending cap prescribed by the settlement, which will be $20.5 million in the first year. The Washington Post reported that draft legislation would include room for that sort of protection.

Baker suggested that antitrust exemption might also include a carve-out for eligibility rules, which is not part of the settlement but that has landed the NCAA in court as a defendant in various lawsuits challenging a long-held rule that athletes have five years to complete four seasons of eligibility.

“The consequences of this for the next generation of young people, if you play this thing out, are enormous,” Baker said. “You’re moving away from an academic calendar to sort of no calendar for college sports, and that is hugely problematic.”

Baker said the other top two priorities for the legislation are:

A preemption of state laws that set different rules for paying players, which amounts to “competitive advantage stuff” for state legislatures seeking to give their public universities a recruiting edge.

“That’s not just an issue for the NCAA on a level-playing-field basis, it’s an issue for the conferences,” Baker said.

Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, agrees with that, recently saying that it was not good to have a league spanning 12 states operating under 12 different laws guiding player payments and other elements of college sports.

A ban on college athletes being deemed employees. Recently, Tennessee athletic director Danny White suggested collective bargaining for players was “the only solution.” Whether that would lead to a direct employment model is difficult to know, but Baker said he’s not the only one against it.

“This is something every student leadership group I’ve ever talked to has pretty strong feelings about,” he said. “They want to be students who play sports, they don’t want to be employees because a lot of them worry about what the consequences for their time as students will be if they’re obliged to be employees first.”

Some questions and answers about this monumental change for college athletics.

Q: What is the House settlement and why does it matter?

A: Grant House is a former Arizona State swimmer who sued the defendants (the NCAA and the five biggest athletic conferences). His lawsuit and two others were combined and over several years the dispute wound up with the settlement that ends a decades-old prohibition on schools cutting checks directly to athletes.

Now, each school will be able to make payments to athletes for use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). For reference, there are nearly 200,000 athletes and 350 schools in Division I alone and 500,000 athletes and 1,100 schools across the entire NCAA.

Q: How much will the schools pay the athletes and where will the money come from?

A: In Year 1, each school can share up to about $20.5 million with their athletes, a number that represents 22% of their revenue from things such as media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne famously told Congress “those are resources and revenues that don’t exist.”

Some of the money will come via ever-growing TV rights packages, especially for the College Football Playoff. But some schools are increasing costs to fans through “talent fees,” concession price hikes and “athletic fees” added to tuition costs.

Q: What about scholarships? Wasn’t that like paying the athletes?

A: Scholarships and “cost of attendance” always have been part of the deal for many Division I athletes, and there is certainly value to that, especially if athletes earn their degree. The NCAA says its member schools hand out nearly $4 billion in athletic scholarships every year.

But athletes have long argued that it was hardly enough to compensate them for the millions in revenue they helped produce for the schools, which went to a lot of places, including multimillion-dollar coaches salaries. They took those arguments to court and won.

Q: Haven’t players been getting paid for a while now?

A: Yes, since 2021. Facing losses in court and a growing number of state laws targeting its amateurism policies, the NCAA cleared the way for athletes to receive NIL money from third parties, including so-called donor-backed collectives that support various schools.

Under House, the school can pay that money directly to athletes and the collectives are still in the game.

Q: But will $20.5 million cover all the costs for the athletes?

A: Probably not. But under terms of the settlement, third parties are still allowed to cut deals with the players. Some call it a workaround, but most simply view this as the new reality in college sports as schools fight to land top talent and then keep them on campus.

Top quarterbacks are reportedly getting paid around $2 million a year, which would eat up about 10% of a typical school’s NIL budget for all its athletes.

Q: Are there any rules or is it a free-for-all?

A: The defendant conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12) are creating an enforcement arm that is essentially taking over for the NCAA, which used to police recruiting violations and the like. Among this new entity’s biggest functions is to analyze third-party deals worth $600 or more to make sure they are paying players an appropriate “market value” for the services being provided.

The College Sports Commission promises to be quicker and more efficient than the NCAA. Schools are being asked to sign a contract saying they will abide by the rules of this new structure, even if it means going against laws passed in their individual states.

Q: What about players who played before NIL was allowed?

A: A key component of the settlement is the $2.7 billion in back pay going to athletes who competed between 2016-24 and were either fully or partially shut out from those payments under previous NCAA rules. That money will come from the NCAA and its conferences (but really from the schools, who will receive lower-than-normal payouts from things such as March Madness).

Q: Who will get most of the money?

A: Because football and men’s basketball are the primary revenue drivers at most schools, and that money helps fund all the other sports, it stands to reason that the football and basketball players will get most of the money.

But that is one of the most difficult calculations for the schools to make. There could be Title IX equity concerns as well.

Q: What about all the swimmers, gymnasts and other Olympic sports athletes?

A: The settlement calls for roster limits that will reduce the number of players on all teams while making all of those players — not just a portion — eligible for full scholarships. This figures to have an outsize impact on Olympic-sport athletes, whose scholarships cost as much as that of a football player but whose sports don’t produce revenue.

There are concerns that the pipeline of college talent for Team USA will take a hit.

Q: So, once this is finished, all of college sports’ problems are solved, right?

A: The new enforcement arm seems ripe for litigation. There are also the issues of collective bargaining and whether athletes should flat-out be considered employees, a notion the NCAA and schools are generally not interested in, despite Tennessee athletic director Danny White’s suggestion that collective bargaining is a potential solution to a lot of headaches.

NCAA President Charlie Baker has been pushing Congress for a limited antitrust exemption that would protect college sports from another series of lawsuits, but so far nothing has emerged from Capitol Hill.

Nearly five years after Arizona State swimmer Grant House sued the NCAA and its five biggest conferences to lift restrictions on revenue sharing, U.S. Judge Claudia Wilken approved the final proposal that had been hung up on roster limits, just one of many changes ahead amid concerns that thousands of walk-on athletes will lose their chance to play college sports.

The sweeping terms of the so-called House settlement include approval for each school to share up to $20.5 million with athletes over the next year and $2.7 billion that will be paid over the next decade to thousands of former players who were barred from that revenue for years.

The agreement brings a seismic shift to hundreds of schools that were forced to reckon with the reality that their players are the ones producing the billions in TV and other revenue, mostly through football and basketball, that keep this machine humming.

The scope of the changes — some have already begun — is difficult to overstate. The professionalization of college athletics will be seen in the high-stakes and expensive recruitment of stars on their way to the NFL and NBA, and they will be felt by athletes whose schools have decided to pare their programs. The agreement will resonate in nearly every one of the NCAA’s 1,100 member schools boasting nearly 500,000 athletes.

“Approving the agreement reached by the NCAA, the defendant conferences and student-athletes in the settlement opens a pathway to begin stabilizing college sports,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said.

The road to a settlement

Wilken’s ruling comes 11 years after she dealt the first significant blow to the NCAA ideal of amateurism when she ruled in favor of former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon and others who were seeking a way to earn money from the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL) — a term that is now as common in college sports as “March Madness” or “Roll Tide.” It was just four years ago that the NCAA cleared the way for NIL money to start flowing, but the changes coming are even bigger.

Wilken granted preliminary approval to the settlement last October. That sent colleges scurrying to determine not only how they were going to afford the payments, but how to regulate an industry that also allows players to cut deals with third parties so long as they are deemed compliant by a newly formed enforcement group that will be run by auditors at Deloitte.

The agreement takes a big chunk of oversight away from the NCAA and puts it in the hands of the four biggest conferences. The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC hold most of the power and decision-making heft, especially when it comes to the College Football Playoff, which is the most significant financial driver in the industry and is not under the NCAA umbrella like the March Madness tournaments are.

Roster limits held things up

The deal looked ready to go since last fall, but Wilken put a halt to it after listening to a number of players who had lost their spots because of newly imposed roster limits being placed on teams.

The limits were part of a trade-off that allowed the schools to offer scholarships to everyone on the roster, instead of only a fraction, as has been the case for decades. Schools started cutting walk-ons in anticipation of the deal being approved.

Wilken asked for a solution and, after weeks, the parties decided to let anyone cut from a roster — now termed a “Designated Student-Athlete” — return to their old school or play for a new one without counting against the new limit.

Wilken ultimately agreed, going point-by-point through the objectors’ arguments to explain why they didn’t hold up.

“The modifications provide Designated Student-Athletes with what they had prior to the roster limits provisions being implemented, which was the opportunity to be on a roster at the discretion of a Division I school,” Wilken wrote.

Her decision, however, took nearly a month to write, leaving the schools and conferences in limbo — unsure if the plans they’d been making for months, really years, would go into play.

“It remains to be seen how this will impact the future of inter-collegiate athletics — but as we continue to evolve, Carolina remains committed to providing outstanding experiences and broad-based programming to student-athletes,” North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham said.

Winners and losers

The list of winners and losers is long and, in some cases, hard to tease out.

A rough guide of winners would include football and basketball stars at the biggest schools, which will devote much of their bankroll to signing and retaining them. For instance, Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood’s NIL deal is reportedly worth between $10.5 million and $12 million.

Losers, despite Wilken’s ruling, figure to be at least some of the walk-ons and partial scholarship athletes whose spots are gone.

Also in limbo are Olympic sports many of those athletes play and that serve as the main pipeline for a U.S. team that has won the most medals at every Olympics since the downfall of the Soviet Union.

All this is a price worth paying, according to the attorneys who crafted the settlement and argue they delivered exactly what they were asked for: an attempt to put more money in the pockets of the players whose sweat and toil keep people watching from the start of football season through March Madness and the College World Series in June.

What the settlement does not solve is the threat of further litigation.

Though this deal brings some uniformity to the rules, states still have separate laws regarding how NIL can be doled out, which could lead to legal challenges. NCAA President Charlie Baker has been consistent in pushing for federal legislation that would put college sports under one rulebook and, if he has his way, provide some form of antitrust protection to prevent the new model from being disrupted again.

Ten conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director came to the unanimous agreement they needed Thursday to shift the model that drew complaints last season.

The new format was widely expected after last season’s jumbled bracket gave byes to Big 12 champion Arizona State and Mountain West champion Boise State, even though those teams were ranked ninth and 12th by the playoff selection committee.

That system made the rankings and the seedings in the tournament two different things and resulted in some matchups — for instance, the quarterfinal between top-ranked Oregon and eventual national champion Ohio State — that came earlier than they otherwise might have.

“After evaluating the first year of the 12-team Playoff, the CFP management committee felt it was in the best interest of the game to make this adjustment,” said Rich Clark, executive director of the CFP.

The five highest-ranked champions will still be guaranteed spots in the playoff, meaning it’s possible there could be a repeat of last season, when CFP No. 16 Clemson was seeded 12th in the bracket after winning the Atlantic Coast Conference.

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey was among those who pushed for the change in the second year of the agreement, though he remained cautious about it being approved because of the unanimous vote needed.

Smaller conferences had a chance to use the seeding issue as leverage for the next set of negotiations, which will come after this season and could include an expansion to 14 teams and more guaranteed bids for certain conferences. The SEC and Big Ten will have the biggest say in those decisions.

As it stands, this will be the third playoff system for college football in the span of three years. For the 10 years leading into last season’s inaugural 12-team playoff, the CFP was a four-team affair.

The news was first reported by ESPN, which last year signed a six-year, $7.8 billion deal to televise the expanded playoff.

Under court order to come up with an updated plan, the attorneys in court filings suggested that schools compile lists of all the players they cut in anticipation of the settlement being approved — a number that certainly could be in the hundreds and perhaps far more.

Those “Designated Student-Athletes,” as they’re called in the new legal filing, can be invited back to compete for roster spots — no guarantees — or go to new schools.

Either way, those athletes they won’t count against the new roster limits that are coming under the plan unveiled last fall and given initial approval by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken last October.

Stressed athletes and coaches wait as deadline nears to solve NCAA’s ‘changing’ roster limits issue

The proposal would also give the exemption to high school recruits who were promised spots that were later rescinded and would last for as long as those players are eligible in college.

Wilken has already signed off on the key components of the settlement, which includes allowing each school to share up to $20.5 million each year directly with their athletes and the more than $2.7 billion in back pay that will go to players who said the NCAA and five biggest conferences wrongly kept them from earning name, image and likeness money.

The latest proposal capped a two-week scramble after Wilken sent attorneys for both sides back to the negotiating table, saying the roster limit details of the plan as written were unacceptable.

The plan calls for replacing scholarship limits (85 for football and 9.9 for men’s wrestling, for example) with roster limits (105 for football, 30 for wrestling). A school can offer scholarships to every player on a team, but that will cost money and most predict that walk-ons or partial scholarship athletes will be left out.

Wilken clearly sympathized with the hundreds of players who lost roster spots as schools began preparing to implement terms of the settlement. About a dozen told their stories during an April 7 hearing.

Wilken asked lawyers to rework that part of the deal. The NCAA’s first response to Wilken’s request — which included the idea of “grandfathering in” current players to their roster spots — was to change nothing, arguing that undoing roster moves already in play would create more turmoil in an already chaotic process. Wilken told them to do it anyway or put the whole plan at risk.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys said they did Wilken one better, not only giving schools a chance to bring back players they cut without it counting against their limit, but putting the exemption in play for a new school, as well.

“Plaintiffs believe that these changes to the settlement agreement exceed the protections that the court requested,” their court filing read.

The attorneys noted there is no guarantee that the athletes will win their roster spots back.

“While defendants insisted that the changes to the settlement agreement recognize that individual schools and their athletics departments retain discretion to independently determine which athletes will be on their rosters, that has always been the case; and it remains unchanged whether or not there are roster limits,” they wrote. “The revisions to the settlement agreement ensure that class members who have or would have lost roster spots or promised roster spots as a result of the new roster limits will be in the same position as they would have been in if roster limits were never implemented, i.e., roster limits do not apply to them.”

The judge is expected to give opponents to the plan a brief window to file updated objections before her final decision. Steve Berman, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, predicted earlier this week that those objecting to the plan will not be satisfied with the new proposal.

The clock is ticking for the NCAA and its 1,200 member schools that have more than 500,000 athletes on various teams. Terms of the settlement were supposed to go into effect July 1 and football practice starts soon after.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Florida’s Walter Clayton Jr. came up with the perfect going-away present for that spirit-crushing Houston defense that bullied, battered and bedeviled him all night.

It was a defensive gem of his own. Right before the buzzer. For the win and the national title.

The Gators and Clayton somehow overcame Houston’s lockdown intensity, along with a 12-point deficit Monday night to will out a 65-63 victory in an NCAA title-game thriller decided when the Florida senior’s own D stopped the Cougars from even taking a game-winning shot at the buzzer.

Clayton finished with 11 points, all in the second half. What he’ll be remembered for most was getting Houston’s Emanuel Sharp to stop in the middle of his motion as he tried to go up for the game-winning 3 in the final seconds.

“Just go 100 percent,” Clayton said when asked what he was trying to do at the finish. “We were just trying to get a stop, and we happened to get it. I’m happy we got it done.”

With Sharp looking for room, Clayton ran at him. The Houston guard dropped the ball and, unable to pick it up lest he get called for traveling, watched it bounce.

Alex Condon dived on the ball, then flipped it to Clayton, who ran to the opposite free-throw line with the buzzer sounding and tugged his jersey out of his shorts. Next, the court was awash in Gator chomps and orange and blue confetti.

“We guarded them hard and then I saw the ball loose and I just hoped we beat them to the ball,” Florida coach Todd Golden said.

This marked the fourth comeback in six March Madness wins for the Gators (36-4). They led this game for a total of 64 seconds, including the last 46 ticks of a contest that was in limbo until the final shot that never came.

Houston coach Kelvin Sampson called it “incomprehensible” that the Cougars couldn’t get a shot off on either of their last two possessions.

About the last one, Sampson said: “Clayton made a great play. But that’s why you’ve got to shot fake and get into the paint. Two’s fine.”

Will Richard had 18 points to keep the Gators in it, and they won their third overall title and first since Billy Donovan went back-to-back in 2006-07.

This time, it’s Golden, in his third year, bringing the title back to Gainesville, where the Gator faithful can celebrate a win on one of college sports’ grandest stages for the first time since Tim Tebow was playing quarterback for the football team in 2008.

This was the first hoops title for the Southeastern Conference since Kentucky in 2012, and the outcome the power conference was hoping for (expecting?) after placing a record 14 teams in the tournament.

The Cougars (35-5) and Sampson were denied their first championship, and ended up in the same spot as the colorful Phi Slama Jama teams from the 1980s — oh-so-close in second place.

This was a defensive brawl — the Gators failed to crack 70 for only the second time all season — and for most of the night, Clayton got the worst of it.

He was 0 for 4 from the field without a point through the first half. Met at the top of the circle, then double-teamed and trapped when necessary, he didn’t score until hitting two free throws with 14:57 left.

The player who scored at least 30 points in the last two games, who averaged 24.6 through the first five games of the tournament, who almost singlehandedly outscored UConn and Texas Tech down the stretch of those March Madness comebacks, finished with one 3-pointer. Before that, he had a pair of three-point plays off drives to the hoop that kept the Gators in striking range. He finished 3 for 10.

He also became part of not one, but two stops that put these Gators in the history book, and possibly cemented himself as the best basketball player to wear the orange and blue.

After Alijah Martin made two free throws to put Florida ahead 64-63 — its first lead since 8-6 — the Gators lured Sharp into a triple-team in the corner, where Clayton pressured him, and then Richard got him to dribble the ball off his leg and out of bounds.

Florida made one free throw on the next possession and that set up the finale.

The ball first went to L.J. Cryer, who led the Cougars with 19 points. Blanketed by Richard, he threw to Sharp, who was moving to spot up for a 3 when Clayton ran at him. That left him with no choice but to let the ball go.

“It was a great defensive play by Walter,” Condon said. “I just dived on it, and hearing the buzzer go was a crazy feeling.”

Instead of the 69-year-old Sampson becoming the oldest coach to win the title, the 39-year-old Golden becomes the youngest since N.C. State’s Jim Valvano in 1983 to win it all.

This gut-wrenching loss came two nights after the Cougars fashioned a wild comeback of their own, from 14 down against Duke.

All three Final Four games were decided down the stretch, none by more than Florida’s six-point win over Auburn on Saturday. Any thought that the men’s game had been overtaken by the increasingly popular women will probably go on hold at least for a year.

The three women’s Final Four games, capped by UConn’s blowout of South Carolina on Sunday, were decided by an average of 24.7 points.

“When it gets down to the two best teams left,” Sampson said of the thriller he barely lost, “it’s not going to be easy for either team.”

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