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    The Fans Want to Watch Football. Trump and Walz Will Be There, Too.

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    Donald Trump and Tim Walz are attending college games on Saturday that will draw plenty of viewers in the swing states of Michigan and Georgia.For college football fans, they are temples of the sport: the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium and the Big House at the University of Michigan.But to the presidential campaigns, they are this Saturday’s soundstages: ready-made stops for former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic nominee for vice president, to try to prove their Everyman mettle to any battleground-state voters who might be in the stands or watching from afar.“College football in the fall is the only place where you can find 100,000 potential voters in one location and you don’t have to pay for it,” said Angi Horn, a Republican strategist and Alabama football loyalist.“To pay for the amount of coverage and publicity and a crowd like that would cost millions,” she added. “They’re getting it for free — and you get to see a really good football game.”Mr. Trump is headed to Tuscaloosa, Ala., where the second-ranked Georgia Bulldogs, the gridiron pride of the neighboring swing state, will meet the No. 4 Alabama Crimson Tide. Mr. Walz is scheduled to visit Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, trawling for votes in one of the country’s biggest battlegrounds as the 12th-ranked Michigan Wolverines, last season’s national champions, host Minnesota’s Golden Gophers.Mr. Trump and Mr. Walz cannot reliably assume they will be Saturday’s star attractions as the campaigns encroach on a sport that is a cultural mainstay and surpasses Washington for ancient feuds and partisan obsessives. But their visits have been designed to invite a crush of local news coverage and social media posts and, their allies hope, cameos during national broadcasts that will soak up viewers in Michigan and Georgia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Era Dawns for the N.C.A.A.: Paying Athletes Directly

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      If approved by a judge, the $2.8 billion settlement of an antitrust lawsuit would allow for the first revenue-sharing plan for college athletes. The question now: How will it work?Since its founding, the N.C.A.A. has operated with a business model that defined the college athlete as an amateur. Over the years, as college sports evolved into a mega-enterprise, lawsuits and labor actions chipped away at that model, which came to be increasingly seen as exploitative in big-money sports like football and men’s basketball. But the N.C.A.A.’s $2.8 billion settlement on Thursday night in a class-action antitrust lawsuit represents the heaviest blow — and perhaps a decisive one — to that system. If approved by a U.S. district judge in California, the settlement would allow for the creation of the first revenue-sharing plan for college athletics, a landmark shift in which schools would directly pay their athletes for playing.This sea change, though, also carries its own questions, according to critics. Those include whether women would be compensated fairly, whether smaller conferences would bear a disproportionate burden of the settlement and whether this framework would do anything to limit the power of collectives — the booster-funded groups that entice players with payments to hopscotch from school to school. “It’s both a historic and deeply flawed agreement,” said Michael H. LeRoy, a law professor at the University of Illinois. “The idea that schools are paying millions of dollars to the people who are selling the TV contracts and filling the seats — that’s good. But it closes one Pandora’s box and opens four or five others.”In recent years, college athletes had already made significant strides in gaining the right to make money for their performances. Three years ago, they were allowed for the first time to individually market their name, image and likeness legally. And in March, the men’s basketball team at Dartmouth voted to form a union after a federal official ruled that players were employees of the school. Thursday’s settlement in the case of House v. N.C.A.A. was seen by many college administrators as an inevitable conclusion. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More