The University of Minnesota last year advertised an opening for a” House Settlement Negotiator” in a further indication of the fast pace of college athletics.
According to a job description posted on October 16, that new position would be on a” little team” that oversees and implements the House v. NCAA settlement agreement, which was given preliminary approval earlier this month. The university claims to give preference to candidates with experience managing a professional sports group’s salary cap.
About a third of the negotiator’s work would be to engage in contract discussions with women’s baseball, tennis and men’s hockey players, as well as working with the school’s standard NIL social, Dinkytown Athletes, to “ensure a smooth and flawless combining of House Settlement economic sharing with NIL”.

In addition to the mediator, Minnesota’s revenue-share office could also include a” cover manager” and “offer letter/contract leads”, who had work in collaboration with the head coaches and managers of recruiting for Gophers football, men’s and women’s basketball, tennis and men’s soccer.
Minnesota athletic officials have previously said that they expect to max out the school’s allowable revenue sharing allotment, which, according to the House settlement terms, would be about$ 21 million per year.
In a phone interview, U of M’s associate AD/chief revenue officer Travis Cameron claimed the job posting was more of a trial balloon than a dead-set commitment to the department’s direction. It remains unresolved, for example, to what extent the work of paying players will be done internally or farmed out to outside companies.
” It depends on what candidates we get”, Cameron said. You’re going to see schools like Minnesota reach out to third parties if we go through this exercise and lose confidence in that direction.
A Gophers athletic director Mark Coyle reportedly mused about how his department might need to retool in order to address” cap management” in an August Q&amp interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
To be sure, the job posting notes that the negotiator’s start date is, as of now,” to be determined”. That could be said of the role, in general.
The posting does, however, show how schools may soon organize their resources and staffs in order to pay off some of their players by the following academic year.
” We are just trying to be ready to move quickly when ( the settlement ) does have that final approval, or if it gets that approval, but not put the cart before the horse”, Cameron said.
Many Division I athletic departments have recruited dedicated NIL general managers and analysts over the past year, either by hiring them as university employees or by working with them through third-party consulting firms like Altius.

Athletic departments are now attempting to figure out how to improve their organizational chats to address crucial tasks that are well known to the front offices of professional sports teams.
Earlier this week, Georgia Tech posted a job opening for an “executive associate athletics director-player management”, which would oversee its revenue-sharing activities. Georgia Tech AD J Batt stated in a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the position was necessary to “put our coaches and student-athletes in the best position to compete for championships at the highest level.”
According to Cameron, a number of other athletic departments have also started less obvious-than-glamorous salary-cap management positions.
” Everyone is sitting with their hand on the same button”, he said. ” We are all having the same conversations. Everyone wants to know what works best because, if done correctly, there are many opportunities to alter the course of your program.
As currently conceived, the U of M negotiator would need to have expertise in “quantitative analysis”, and would be tasked with creating and maintaining an “athlete value” database that would guide “potential contract offers” to players.
Apart from calling the compensation” competitive,” the job posting does not specify what the position would pay. The successful candidate would have to negotiate the first of many contracts, so this one would be the first.