The Colorado State House is clearing the way for revenue sharing with student-athletes. A recently passed measure is in support of the national House vs. NCAA settlement which allows for the distribution of sports revenue streams from universities’ coffers to their student-athletes.

The House of Representatives passed Colorado House Bill 1041 in support of student-athlete name, image, and likeness (NIL). The bill will advance to the Colorado State Senate where it is favored for approval. The immediate benefactors of this approval, as you’d expect, are student-athletes at CU and CSU.

Passage will allow those two and other schools to provide NIL compensation to student-athletes. Under current Colorado law, schools and athletic associations are not allowed to directly pay student-athletes.

Once the national House vs. NCAA lawsuit settlement is finally approved, NCAA schools that opt-in (Power Four – SEC, Big 10, Big XII, and ACC) may distribute up to $20 million during the 2025-26 school year to their student-athletes through revenue sharing. CU is a Power Four member of the Big XII. CSU, a member of the newly reconstituted PAC-12 will fall under the bill as well – even though they fall outside the national settlement Power Four.

Under the Colorado bill, universities must publicly report money spent on NIL agreements each year, breaking it down by sport and gender, without identifying individual students or the financial details of their contracts. Lawmakers understandably concluded that too much visibility would add pressure and scrutiny to individual student-athletes, to say nothing of privacy and personal safety issues. The money distributed to student-athletes through revenue sharing will come from media rights, ticket and merchandise sales, and not from state funds or tuition.

It is anticipated that CU will be splitting up to $20 million in revenue with its student-athletes and CSU will be splitting as much as $8-10 million.

While DU is not a part of the national settlement, the Colorado law will allow direct payments from schools to student-athletes. This likely allows DU to create an NIL collective directly under its umbrella and redistribute revenue or donations to student-athletes. This could also open the door for selective payments by DU to share profit with a specific revenue-generating sport(s) (i.e., hockey & gymnastics) – even though the rest of the sports in the Denver Athletic Department portfolio are considered “non-revenue.”