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LOS ANGELES — The boy was going to be named Colt, until his parents watched an episode of the sitcom “Friends,” whereupon the character of Rachel goes on a date with a man named Kash.
Cash Jacobsen’s parents rather liked that name. They swapped the K for a C, and thus went the birth certificate. Years upon years later, their son has rounded into a three-star defensive tackle, a 290-pound force who committed to USC in November.
Ironically, however, a kid named Cash knows little of the money he could make at USC, in this befuddling era of college football. He had heard hard numbers, across his overall recruitment. He’d heard hard percentages. He’d heard, roughly, of the concept of “revenue sharing.”
“But I don’t know anything, really, deep about it,” he said.
The same goes for Willi Wascher, a three-star lineman in USC’s 2025 class out of Washington. “Don’t even know what it is,” Wascher said, when asked. A range of agents or recruit representatives in the NIL space, too, either play coy or legitimately don’t know much about the idea of rev-share, introduced by May’s significant settlement in House v. NCAA and establishing a model for schools to simply pay athletes directly to play for their programs.
It’s hard to discuss a law, in fairness, when it hasn’t been adopted yet. The settlement received preliminary approval from Judge Claudia Wilken in October, but it won’t receive a final verdict until April. But behind the scenes, revenue sharing has played a key role in the recruitment of this 2025 class, as USC and other programs across the nation have tried to leverage the future potential of a recruiting incentive that isn’t actually technically sworn into effect yet.
“We’re definitely talking about it,” USC head coach Lincoln Riley told reporters in mid-November, asked about conversations around revenue sharing with recruits, “and have been for a long time. I mean, it’s here. It’s coming, in some form or fashion. We know that.”
“It’s, I think, frustrating,” Riley continued, “for everybody to still not quite have all of the different parameters laid out for us, when both schools and players and families and all that are having to make decisions based on, essentially, information that we don’t fully have.”
The likely certainty: Schools will be able to distribute up to $20.5 million of their athletic revenue directly to athletes in 2025-26, an initial “cap” figure reported by Yahoo Sports.
The uncertainty: everything else.
Since the settlement was introduced in April, USC’s athletic department has dedicated a team of senior leaders to multiple meetings a week mapping out different revenue-sharing models. Unanswered questions, still, swirl around how schools will weigh and distribute that $20.5 million across their sports programs, and the future role of NIL collectives in college athlete payment, before its presumptive introduction July 1, 2025.
But programs, as Riley has pointed out, can’t fully sit and wait for answers to come. As Wednesday’s National Signing Day dawned, the traditional national letter of intent was eliminated, meaning collectives were tasked with translating revenue-sharing possibility into concrete contracts for 2025 recruits. There are two rough breakdowns of how schools’ NIL collectives have approached revenue-sharing, as multiple agents for players in this year’s class told the Southern California News Group. Some have presented contracts with simple total amounts, with little mention of the source of payment. Others have presented “bifurcated” deals, with a 12-month amount paid out through the collective from December through June and another amount paid through the school from July through January.
USC’s collective House of Victory, in specific, is operating with the flexibility to transition payments through USC itself if revenue-sharing comes into play. And overall, USC’s athletic department has still focused on fundraising through House of Victory, as one source with knowledge of the situation told the Southern California News Group, to position the collective as competitively as possible in 2025-26 — with or without that $20-million in revenue-sharing.
“We’re going all-in on 100% of what that goal, and budget, is,” the source said, speaking on House of Victory’s 2025-26 funding for football players. “And then, maybe in July, the payment mechanism shifts.”
“But, regardless if it comes through House of Victory or USC, we’re going to be at that number that we need to be to be successful.”
HOV’s 2025-26 budget grows
For weeks, in the lead-up to signing day, USC launched a significant push to pursue several defensive line targets. Eventually, talks with one – Georgia’s Kevin Wynn, a Florida State commit – cooled.
Wynn wasn’t simply looking for money. He wanted to own his own restaurant one day, and based much of his recruitment around that dream. But if he was looking for money, USC’s collective presented Wynn a heck of an offer: upward of $750,000, a source said.
It’s the kind of aggressiveness fans have clamored for from USC for years, wondering why a school brimming with a deep-pocketed donor base has often fallen behind other blue bloods in college football’s arms race. As USC’s athletic regime has continued to streamline and emphasize fundraising efforts to House of Victory, the collective’s 2024-25 budget stood north of $12 million, which Athletic Director Jen Cohen wrote in August was “more than double” the previous year. And a source with knowledge of the situation emphasized that budget has continued to grow.
“Regardless if the House settlement is approved or not approved, and regardless of all those circumstances outside our control – the number, and I’m talking specifically football here, will be significantly higher than where we were this year,” the source said.
That’s an ideal alignment in this current nebulous revenue-share space, as multiple agents told the Southern California News Group in conversations over the past two months. Schools who weren’t banking extensively on revenue sharing in 2025-26 – and could still provide the majority of payment infrastructure from their collectives – were in the best position for this new era, agents indicated, with a wide range of language and agreements introduced into contracts that provide wiggle room for payments to eventually transition from collectives to schools themselves.
“I think (USC has) handled things correctly, where they weren’t one of the first schools to be offering rev-share when it was uncertain, right, because there were schools who were doing that when it was months and months ago,” said Brian Davis, an attorney with California Power who represents USC quarterback Jayden Maiava.
Donor/etc.
The role of third-party collectives in the future era of revenue sharing is shaky, as a massive complication looms in the settlement’s terms: Any third-party NIL contracts over $600 must be reported to a clearinghouse database, and “pay-for-play” deals would be denied.
That leaves House of Victory’s long-term future uncertain. It could be folded into USC, eventually, as a sort of marketing agency arm of the athletic department. It could remain independent, if that language in the settlement is altered. But if language in the settlement around those collective deals changes come the summer, House of Victory is still prepared to supplement USC’s revenue-sharing operation with donor funds and NIL deals, as multiple sources told the Southern California News Group.
Eventually, USC might want to simply centralize all donor attention through the athletic department. The collective’s biggest challenge in fundraising, as former USC quarterback and current House of Victory board member Matt Barkley described, has come with securing recurring checks from legacy donors, who have often been tapped in multiple areas as USC is also pursuing massive capital projects in facility upgrades.
“Now, it’s coming back to those guys every year and saying, ‘We need more, we need more,’” Barkley said of House of Victory raising NIL funds. “And it’s a little challenging when we’re not, you know, in the top of the Big Ten. We’re so close, as a football program at least, you’re so close, and then, they want to know their money’s going somewhere and that’s working.”
There’s no set path forward – yet. The landscape, as presently constructed, is sheer chaos. But as USC has tread carefully into revenue-sharing waters, the full plunge could provide a gateway to donor alignment and true powerhouse funds that the fan base has long sought.
“It’ll help,” Barkley put it simply, “a lot.”
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