An attorney in the $2.8 billion legal case reshaping college sports said Monday he thinks “the agreement we will reach with the NCAA will solve the judge’s concerns” over roster limits that have delayed final approval.Steve Berman, co-lead counsel for the defendants, told The Associated Press that all is on track to file paperwork by Wednesday, which is U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken’s deadline for addressing concerns that prevented her from granting approval to the deal last month. Berman said he created a chart listing the several dozen athletes who lodged objections to the agreement based on roster limits. He said he thinks almost every one will be offered a solution. “We’re still negotiating, and I’m confident that everyone who lost a roster spot will have a chance to get a spot back,” he said.He did not go into detail about whether those spots would be on their previous teams or new ones. NCAA vice president of external affairs Tim Buckley said the NCAA would not comment on the litigation while negotiations are ongoing.Wilken looked favorably on other key components of the settlement — namely, the up to $20.5 million some schools can pay their athletes for name, image likeness (NIL) deals and the nearly $2.8 billion in back pay that will go to players who said the NCAA and five biggest conferences wrongly kept them from earning NIL money.But she asked lawyers to rework the part of the deal that will replace scholarship limits with roster limits. It’s a proposal that could make more overall scholarship money available but could cost thousands of athletes their spots on rosters in moves that began shortly after Wilken gave preliminary approval to the deal last fall. The NCAA’s first response to Wilken’s request — which included the idea of “grandfathering in” current players to their roster spots — was to change nothing, arguing that undoing roster moves already in play would create more turmoil in an …
