Basketball Settlement West LLC: Athlete Payouts and Claim Buyers

“Basketball settlement LLC” isn’t one company. The phrase is being used two different ways in the wake of the House v. NCAA settlement, and the difference matters if you’re an athlete trying to figure out where your money is or a fan trying to understand why your school suddenly has a subsidiary. On one side are private investment firms — Sycamore Grove Claims Group, LLC is the largest — buying athletes’ frozen back-damages claims for a fraction of face value. On the other are university and conference entities like Champions Blue, LLC and American RISE Ventures, built to run athletics as a commercial business under the settlement’s new revenue-sharing rules. Both categories exist because of the same $2.576 billion deal, but they do opposite things: one takes money from athletes, the other pays it to them.

The Settlement Behind the LLCs

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken granted final approval to the House v. NCAA settlement on June 6, 2025, in the Northern District of California.¹ The deal has two parts. The first is $2.576 billion in back damages, paid over ten years at roughly $280 million a year, for Division I athletes who competed between June 15, 2016, and September 15, 2024.² The second is a forward-looking revenue-sharing system: schools can now pay athletes directly, capped at $20.5 million per institution for 2025-26, rising about 4% annually to roughly $32.9 million by 2034-35.³

The back damages are split into three classes: football and men’s basketball at Power Five schools, women’s basketball at Power Five schools, and all other Division I athletes. Roughly 95% of the fund goes to football and basketball players; the remaining 5% is split among every other sport.⁴

Basketball Payout Estimates

Payouts vary sharply by sport, conference, and claim type. Averages published by class counsel:

Power Five men’s basketball players: about $91,000 in broadcast NIL damages, ranging from $15,000 to $280,000, plus roughly $40,000 in pay-for-play. These figures are shared with football players in the same class.⁵
Power Five women’s basketball players: about $23,000 in broadcast NIL, ranging from $3,000 to $52,000, plus about $14,000 in pay-for-play.⁵
Big East men’s basketball players: pay-for-play averages of about $6,700.⁵
Top non-Power Five men’s basketball (AAC, Atlantic 10, Mountain West, plus Gonzaga): about $2,400.⁵
Top non-Power Five women’s basketball: about $300.⁵

Going forward, reports indicate up to 90% of ongoing revenue-sharing money is expected to flow to football and men’s basketball, reflecting where the underlying media and ticket revenue is generated.³

Why the Money Hasn’t Arrived Yet

Five days after Judge Wilken’s final approval, eight female athletes from schools including Vanderbilt, the College of Charleston, and the University of Virginia filed an appeal arguing the 95/5 split violates Title IX.⁶ One group of appellants contends women should receive 47% of the back damages — roughly $1.14 billion — under Title IX proportionality principles.⁷

The appeals, consolidated in the Ninth Circuit, triggered an automatic stay on the entire $2.576 billion in back-damages payments. Opening briefs were filed in October 2025 and answering briefs in January 2026. As of mid-2026, oral argument has not been scheduled.⁸ The revenue-sharing provisions were not stayed and have been operating since July 1, 2025.⁷ That freeze is the reason the first category of “basketball settlement LLC” exists at all.

Claim-Buyer LLCs: Private Firms Buying Athlete Awards

With final payouts potentially delayed, by some estimates, until 2037, private firms started offering athletes immediate cash for the rights to their future settlement checks. The most prominent is Sycamore Grove Claims Group, LLC, which reported purchasing over $300 million in claims from more than 3,000 NCAA athletes as of early 2026.⁹ Another firm, NCAACreditor, advertises cash offers within 12 hours and payment within 24 hours of closing.¹⁰

Class counsel at Hagens Berman has warned that these companies are unaffiliated with the settlement and that offers typically run just 10% to 20% of a claim’s potential value.¹¹ There is also a tax trap: an athlete may owe tax on the full original value of the claim, not the reduced amount actually received from the buyer. Contracts typically become binding after a cooling-off period of about 10 days, with no recovery if the eventual payout exceeds expectations.¹⁰

On September 16, 2025, Judge Wilken issued an order regulating these transactions. Buyers must:

Disclose the tax implications of the sale at least twice — once during initial marketing and again at the transaction itself.
Notify the settlement fund within 15 days of closing.
Provide a signed indemnification form protecting the fund’s administrators from financial losses.

Class counsel was authorized to monitor buyer compliance, and the settlement website was required to add a FAQ on tax consequences. The settlement fund will only disburse directly to third-party buyers for purchases completed before the appeals are exhausted.¹⁰ Sycamore Grove has separately declined to purchase claims from residents of Arkansas, Georgia, Nevada, and Tennessee as of late 2025.⁹

University and Conference LLCs

The second use of “settlement LLC” refers to entities created by schools and conferences to run athletics as a commercial business under the new revenue-sharing regime.

Champions Blue, LLC (Kentucky)

The University of Kentucky’s Board of Trustees approved Champions Blue, LLC in April 2025. It is a nonprofit, single-member limited liability company operating as a holding company for UK Athletics, technically a wholly owned subsidiary of the Beyond Blue Corporation, and qualifies as a “disregarded entity” for tax purposes. Its board must include a majority of senior university administrators, with additional outside directors.¹² The university says the structure mirrors how it governs its community hospitals and allows athletics to move faster on NIL, multimedia rights at venues like Rupp Arena and Kroger Field, and new revenue streams while remaining under Board oversight.¹³

Other Schools

Clemson announced Clemson Ventures in August 2024 as an affiliated organization with a “private-sector business structure,” growing from a roughly 10-person multimedia rights operation into a roughly 40-person unit covering sales, marketing, original content, and an in-house NIL agency.¹⁴ Texas Tech formed Texas Tech Athletics Partners LLC through a 10-year deal with Learfield. Michigan State created Spartan Ventures. West Virginia is building Gold & Blue Enterprises; Athletic Director Wren Baker estimated settlement costs at roughly 20% of the university’s annual athletic budget.¹⁵

Conference-Level: American RISE Ventures

The American Athletic Conference launched American RISE Ventures in May 2025 under Commissioner Tim Pernetti and Chief Commercial Officer Bryan Calka. The division consolidates the conference’s sponsorship, media rights, and brand partnerships as a “single seller” of league-wide assets, a structure Pernetti described as creating a clearer path for potential private equity investment.¹⁶¹⁷

Why Schools Are Building Them

The logic is consistent across schools. Isolating commercial activity in a separate legal entity limits the university’s financial exposure, speeds up procurement and hiring, allows performance-based staff pay, and can attract outside investment. It also addresses tax risk: funneling commercial revenue through a tax-exempt parent invites IRS scrutiny over unrelated business income, which a separate entity absorbs cleanly. The trade-off, accountants have noted, is that donations directed to an LLC rather than the university’s foundation may not qualify for charitable tax deductions.¹⁸

These structures also serve a direct settlement purpose: facilitating “above-the-cap” NIL deals. A school’s commercial arm can package student-athlete NIL rights alongside university sponsorship and media assets, creating deals that sit outside the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap because they are structured as third-party NIL transactions with a valid business purpose rather than direct institutional payments.¹⁸ Third-party endorsement deals above $600 must be reported to NIL Go, a compliance portal operated by Deloitte, and deals with boosters or collectives must demonstrate a “valid business purpose” at fair market value.³

Where Things Stand

As of mid-2026, the settlement’s two halves are moving at different speeds. Revenue sharing is live, LLCs at the school and conference level are proliferating to work within and around the $20.5 million cap, and enforcement runs through the College Sports Commission led by former MLB investigations chief Bryan Seeley.¹⁹ The back-damages fund remains frozen pending the Ninth Circuit’s ruling on the Title IX appeals, with no oral argument date set. That freeze is what keeps claim-buyer firms like Sycamore Grove in business — and what makes evaluating one of their offers, against Judge Wilken’s disclosure rules and the class counsel’s warnings, the most consequential decision an eligible basketball player is likely to face before the money finally moves.

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