It’s been a little over a week since a judge approved the House vs. the NCAA settlement with institutions, pundits, reporters, fans, and most everyone else working to understand what it means for collegiate sports moving forward.

What is known is that the settlement involves a lot of money, beginning with the mandate for the NCAA and member institutions to pay nearly $2.8 billion in back payments to athletes who competed in college dating back to 2016. The settlement also stipulates a sort of salary-cap of roughly $20.5 million to be paid out to athletes directly from member institutions on top of scholarship agreements and other benefits already received. That salary cap is expected to grow every season, potentially reaching up to $32.9 million per year by the end of the 2034-35 academic year, according to YahooSports.

It’s a resolution that has long been anticipated by Collegiate Athletic Directors across the country, including Santiago, who spoke about how it may affect Cougar Athletics moving forward in an interview conducted on BYUtv’s Sports Nation.

“What it did was give us time to prepare,” Santiago said regarding the long anticipation of the settlement. “We have a great team in BYU Athletics and in the administration. We were prepared and we’re ahead of the game. It was actually met with some excitement.”

The hope of the settlement is to streamline and regulate payments to athletes, all of which has gone about in relatively clandestine manner since 2021, when courts determined that athletes could receive money off of their name, image and likeness via undisclosed arrangements. Now those payments will largely be disclosed and administered directly from athletic programs around the country.

“This actually shifts the power of college athletics back to the universities, which for us at BYU, we think, is a strategic advantage,” Santiago explained. “It kind of evens the playing field back and it gives the universities the opportunity to invest in its student athletes. For us, it really, really feels that we can rise to the top, doing it the right way.”

The new arrangement doesn’t do away with NIL arrangements paid out by third-party institutions, however, but does regulate those payments with all NIL payments of over $600 by a new clearinghouse system called NIL Go, which will be managed by Deloitte, which is an auditing company. The aim is that NIL Go will be able to determine which NIL payments are valid with regards to paying athletes fair market value for the arrangement provided.

Since 2021 NIL deals haven’t necessarily been disclosed, nor have athletes signed legal agreements to receive payments, creating quite a bit of obscurity within collegiate athletics.

“The previous model of third-parties, and what people have described as the wild, wild west was unsustainable,” Santiago said. “I think it was sending the wrong message and creating a lot of difficult situations for student athletes across the country. People were operating within a space that wasn’t governed and this actually brings it back to where there are rules and regulations…This feels right.”

As far as which percentage of the $20.5 million goes to which individual athletic team, that’s completely up to the institution, as mandated by the settlement. It’s anticipated, however, that a great portion of the percentage will go to those sports programs that are actually profitable, namely football and men’s basketball.

“It’s called revenue share for a reason, and football is the leader…it’s the ship,” Santiago said. “The success of the football program leads everything, so the larger share of the revenue is going to go to support our football program. The next part of revenue share, as everybody knows, is men’s basketball…We’re going to invest resources and stay consistent in those areas with revenue share.”

Santiago did mention that all sports will be supported as much as possible, even though football and men’s basketball are the two main drivers of revenue.

“We’re going to invest in all of our sports,” Santiago said. “We’re going to spread it out because we want all of our student athletes to feel the impact of this and give them the opportunity to chase their dreams.”

BYU has generally adjusted well in attracting top athletes to its athletic programs since the advent of the NIL era. The Men’s Basketball Program recently signed AJ Dybantsa, who was largely considered the No. 1 recruit in the entire country, along with bringing in other top athletes via recruiting and the transfer portal. The football program hasn’t seen quite the influx of notable talent, but has ushered forth notable improvements with the recent signings of top athletes such as McKay Madsen and Alai Kalaniuvalu while receiving top transfer additions such as Keanu Tanuvasa (Utah) and Andrew Gentry (Michigan.)

How BYU further adjusts to the the new settlement remains to be seen, although administrators appear confident even better days are ahead for Cougar athletics.