🗞 Happy Friday. Antitrust Challenge of Division III’s Athletic Scholarship Ban Could Draw Institutions Into Fray. NCAA Committee Appointments. His Son’s Recruiting Was a Nightmare. So This Dad Decided to Fix the System. What Chain Pizza Is Best?

🎶 Your Morning Pick Me Up. Build Me Up Buttercup. The Foundations

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A MESSAGE FROM CONDE NAST

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“A new antitrust class action takes aim at one of the defining features of NCAA Division III: the prohibition of athletics-based financial aid. Division III is the NCAA’s largest division, with more than 400 schools and roughly 210,000 athletes competing in championship sports each year. The NCAA describes the nonscholarship model as a “core principle” reflecting the view that “athletics participation should not be financially rewarded in the same way as academic achievement.

The complaint alleges that the NCAA “has engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to fix the price of Division III athletic labor at zero by prohibiting every member of Division III … from offering a single penny of athletic scholarship.” Plaintiffs characterize Division III institutions as “competitors in every meaningful sense” and allege that many maintain substantial athletics budgets yet “have agreed not to deploy a single dollar of those budgets in the form of athletic aid.””

» Court Awareness. ““Co-conspirators” are defined in the complaint as “[e]very NCAA member institution and every NCAA member conference in all three divisions that adopted, implemented, or enforced the challenged agreement and is not named as a Defendant.” Therefore, more than just Division III member institutions may be implicated as third parties, although the complaint focuses primarily on that Division.”

» The Big Picture. “Although the NCAA is the only named defendant, the complaint alleges that Division III member institutions agreed to the challenged restraint. As a result, institutions will likely receive third-party discovery requests for records such as financial aid data, athletics budgets and financial aid reporting program submissions, and the plaintiffs could seek to add conference and/or institutional defendants as the case develops.”

The Management Council approved the governance and council appointments, effective Jan. 17, 2027. The MC recommended the Presidents Council appointments which the PC approved. Those terms will begin at the conclusion of the 2027 NCAA Convention.

Governance Committees

Management Council

Presidents Council

“Like just about anything these days in college sports, recruiting can be a nightmare experience for athletes and parents. Brian Cruver experienced it firsthand with his son Carson, a quarterback who eventually committed to Florida Atlantic and is now at Kentucky.

"It's just the most inefficient, painful, opaque process you could imagine," he told USA TODAY Sports. "Other parents we knew on our kids' teams going through it, none of us figured out how it all worked until it was over. So you go through it for years, and then you're finally like, 'OK, now I know how this works.' It's like too late.””

» Between the Lines. “A tech entrepreneur, Cruver wouldn't describe himself as a sports guy. But he knew something needed to change in recruiting to streamline the process. So in 2023, he and longtime friend Brett Andrew created Scorability, a database where college coaches can see everything there is to know about an athlete — from game tape and stats to transcripts and personality traits — and connect with them, all for free.”

» Why It Matters. “Athletes can see which programs have searched for them, viewed their profile or added them to a watchlist. They can also select target schools and signal their interest to those programs. Other features include guidance on recruiting coaches, information about interested teams and access to measurables from camps and combines.”

» Zoom In. “As of November 2026, 4,600 college programs — from junior colleges to Division I — across eight sports are using the system. Cruver said more than 1.2 million athletes are in the database, and in October alone, roughly 470,000 connections were made between high school athletes and college coaches.”

» Facilities. “All in-person classes are cancelled for the rest of the week at Rowan University, according to school officials. The reason behind the cancelations is because most of the buildings at the Glassboro campus are without heat and hot water after the Central Plant went offline.”

“At Food & Wine, we recognize that pizza from independent shops and chain restaurants are two entirely different food groups. There is no world in which we’d compare Domino’s to Una Pizza Napoletana, Pizzeria Sei, or really any pie on our 27 Best Pizzas list.

But when we want a taste of pizza from a national chain, we specifically are looking for that thick, chewy crust, that sweet tomato sauce, and that bubbly, synthetic-tasting cheese.

Which chain pizza is the best? We put the four most famous American brands to the test: Domino’s, Little Caesars, Papa Johns, and Pizza Hut.”

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