The Trump administration’s latest directive on Title IX offered athletic departments more certainty about paying players, while suggesting the federal government wouldn’t hold schools to rigid requirements to distribute the proceeds equitably between men and women.

Though experts say Wednesday’s largely expected decision to rescind guidance issued by the Biden administration will have more symbolic than real-world impact on the class-action lawsuit settlement and other issues reshaping college sports, some see that as exactly the reason it’s unwelcome news.

“Here we are experiencing this immense growth across all women’s sports and this sort of says we really don’t really believe that’s valuable,” UCLA women’s basketball coach Cori Close said. “It really feels like it’s putting women’s sports back 25 years, honestly.”

Had the Biden guidance stayed in effect, colleges would have had to grapple with how to equally distribute up to $20.5 million in NIL payments between men and women.

Now that it has been scrapped, schools can go back to their original plan for the House settlement, which in many cases involved funneling most of the money to football and basketball players.

“This change is an impact, but it’s a ‘what-we-expected’ impact because schools are going to follow the formula for NIL that they’d been planning all along,” said Rocky Harris, the chief of sport performance for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which has been watching the House settlement closely because around 75% of their athletes come from the college system.

Since the federal government isn’t a party in the House case, it has little to do with the legal strategies being used in the $2.8 billion lawsuit, which has implications for women’s sports at almost every level — future payments to athletes, damages to athletes who played before NIL was allowed and roster limits that will redistribute numbers across athletic departments.

In fact, almost all litigation involving the 1972 law — a statute that requires schools to award financial assistance in proportion to the number of students of each gender who play sports on campus — comes not from the government but from individuals.