Thanks for posting Poog.  The way this interview unfolds, it sounds like schools who opted into the House settlement will receive a sum of money and will then get to decide whether any, some or all will go to the athletes.  McLaughlin sounds like a pioneer when acknowledging that at VCU, the whole sum will go to athletes.

Forgive my ignorance but isn't this what's supposed to happen?  I could be misunderstanding this entirely but here's what I thought:

1) Those who agreed to the settlement will receive approximately $18 million-$20 million, in addition to whatever their collectives raise on their own to spend on athletes.

2) It will be up to each individual school to decide how to allocate these funds.  Not only amongst basketball players (and football players) but across all sports.  Should "non-revenue generating" sport participants receive anything?  Should the success of a sport have any bearing?

It would seem to me that if a school received this settlement and then opted not to share it with their athletes, or share a paltry portion of a settlement with its athletes, this would put the school at a major recruiting disadvantage moving forward.  Am I missing something beyond "this settlement is for athletes so why wouldn't they receive it in full?"

The other mystery to me, which should become clearer later today, is that there's a lot of talk about D1 basketball programs without football receiving the same settlement amount as those schools who have 85 scholarship football players.  While I fully understand how this would be of great benefit to GW, the pragmatist in me has to ask how this can even be possible.