The current rule is that schools can't pay players. The House settlement mandates that programs be allowed to over up to $20+ million per year from revenue to athletes by 2025-26 FB season.
It's going to be paid by the AD out of revenue, and the fortunate thing for Big Ten programs is that the way the TV contract and 12 team playoff payouts are designed, we're going to see a distribution bump over the next 2 seasons that's something close to $20+ million per year from conference distributions.
So for Big Ten teams, this will actually be relatively seamless. We won't have to dig around for extra money:
We're going to go from getting a Big Ten distribution around $60-65 million per year in 2023 to somewhere around $80-85 million per year by 2026. So it's more about managing how we pay the players that extra revenue coming into the program than finding the revenue. The TV deal + CFP payout increase to the Big Ten will cover the players for the most part.
SEC teams are in a somewhat similar situation as well with their new TV deal kicking in this year and the higher per team payout that we and them get from the 12 team playoff boosting their conference distributions.
For everyone else, they'll probably have to try to portion off some of their budget and might have to make cuts somewhere else. For Big Ten/SEC programs, it will be much easier to absorb.