It was supposed to close Pandora’s box, or so they said.
The House v. NCAA settlement, approved last June, pave the way for schools to pay athletes directly for the first time. More importantly, it created the College Sports Commission (CSC) and a portal dubbed NIL Go, where accounting giant Deloitte scrutinized any brand partnership with a college athlete to determine whether the deal was legit.
No more would the Arch Mannings and Bryce Underwoods of the world be allowed to collect over a million dollars to star in a Vuori ad or hold an autograph signing session. Instead, the money for athletes’ lofty valuations would come from an allotted $20.5 million that schools could now spend on players across their athletics programs each season. Any third-party deal needed to be submitted to Deloitte’s NIL Go portal and approved as being fair-market value.
Problem solved, right? Not exactly.
While officials claim a measure of order is emerging, athletes, agents and analysts are split on whether the chaos has been at all contained or simply reshaped.
CSC Rejects Just a Fraction of NIL Deals
Deloitte and the CSC reviewed nearly 18,000 submissions to the NIL Go portal from June 11 through the end of 2025, approving 17,321 deals worth a total $127.21 million and turning down 524 deals worth just under $15 million. Accepted deals valued an average of $7,344 each, while the average value of a declined deal was nearly four times higher at $28,512. Bryan Seeley, CEO of the CSC, told Volt that most rejected NIL deals involved “contracts that fell short of a ‘valid business purpose.’
“Our main priority is ensuring that the deal submitted by the student-athlete does not exceed a reasonable range of compensation,” he said.
According to Seeley, the ‘reasonable range’ incorporates what exactly the athlete is doing for the brand as well as the size of the athlete’s reach, be it through the sport they play, their follower tally on social media and the overall recognition of their university. He noted that the commission decided on more than half of NIL deals within 24 hours and about 75 percent within a week of athletes submitting them. In other words, most got a green or red light quickly, though a quarter of deals still waited more than seven days for an answer.
“All that’s happened is boosters, athletes and schools are all finding ways to circumvent these clunky new rules.” — Richard Southall, University of South Carolina professor of sport management
Seeley said that, as of mid-January of this year, only 10 total cases have gone to arbitration to challenge a rejection, and eight of those cases had been withdrawn. All 10 of the cases came as a result of a since-resolved administrative issue at a single school that Seeley and the CSC declined to identify. The small number of arbitration cases overall is perhaps a sign that the new guidelines are largely understood, or that nobody wants a prolonged fight over a sponsorship.
“In these first six months, the focus has been on educating stakeholders and adjusting deals to compliance, rather than punishing offenders,” Seeley said.
The CSC also noted that no infractions cases have yet been sent to an NCAA tribunal for enforcement action.
Ways Around the New System
On paper, the new system seems to be functioning as intended. Seeley and college sports leaders have touted the early numbers as proof that athletes can still profit handsomely while also curbing the influence of overzealous boosters and occasionally shady third-parties.
But like any regulations, the CSC’s are facing plenty of backlash, due especially to one main problem: People who don’t like the system seem more than happy to ignore it and simply execute gray-area deals on their own.
In one of its semimonthly statistics release earlier this year, the CSC also reportedly issued a memo to college athletic directors noting “serious concerns” about athletes agreeing to NIL deals that hadn’t yet been cleared through NIL Go. The memo reminded ADs that signing players with unapproved deals left them vulnerable to “promises not being kept” and warned of players’ “eligibility being placed at risk.”
“We went from a system where you couldn’t give a student athlete anything to now, when a quarterback throws for 300 yards, they go see the coach to ask for more money.” — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
Richard Southall, a professor of sport management at University of South Carolina who specializes in NIL policy, said Seeley’s assertion of a fairer, more regulated pay-for-play landscape is nothing more than “narrative management.” The reality of the post-House Settlement era, per Southall, has been continued chaos in which schools and agents tamper behind the scenes in endless bidding wars for star athletes’ services.
“It’s very much ‘ignore the man behind the curtain,’ Wizard of Oz kind of practice,” Southall opined. “This new commission sold the idea that they’d clean up the mess, but all that’s happened is boosters, athletes and schools are all finding ways to circumvent these clunky new rules.”
To Southall’s point, reportedly more than half of all NIL deals may have happened under the table this season with no NIL Go approval at all. The longtime professor echoed the concern of many college sports leaders by calling into question the CSC’s structure as a whole. With a team of less than 10 employees, Southall wondered if Seeley’s organization has the structure to actually monitor teams or or enforce its rules.
“The people with power created spontaneous consent with this, hoping everyone would just accept it,” Southall said. “The College Sports Commission appeared overnight and really was never really vetted in any significant way. And honestly, some of the data that CSC and Deloitte have released looks like it could have been done by a student.”
Transformed, Not Tamed
Darren Heinter has represented hundreds of Division I college athletes across the country since NIL’s infancy in July 2021. The Miami-based sports agent-attorney is known for being one of the early agents in the player-empowerment era, having advocated publicly for pay-for-play as far back as 2005.
The House Settlement, according to Heitner, hasn’t done anything to curb spending or impose any type of salary cap as intended. Rather, it’s forced schools and collectives to get more creative in how they pay players.
“The biggest difference is that universities are now directly involved in NIL deals for the first time, but they only have $20.5 million to spend on players this year,” he explained. “There’s money flowing through collectives still and multimedia rights holders and existing businesses that provide goods and services that are getting deliverables from the players.”
“This threatens the future health of sport in our country.” — U.S. Olympic and Paralympic CEO Sarah Hirshland.
Heitner, like Southall, thinks the CSC’s lack of guidance on the NIL Go portal, combined with skepticism over how the commission actually enforces violations is the largest contributor to the ongoing chaos.
“They haven’t provided any real guidance on what the process looks like,” he said. “The mess has only become larger.”
And while the CSC boasts that nearly three-quarters of proposed deals through the NIL portal are either approved or rejected within a week, Heitner claims the other 25 percent land in a weeks-to-months-long purgatory. Instead of waiting for the CSC, groups sponsoring athletes “almost always” just go ahead and pay them. As for NIL’s future, Heitner sees no reason to believe the endless spending and gray-area backroads will be reined in anytime soon.
“Placing controls on spending just isn’t realistic right now,” he said.
Trump’s College Sports Roundtable
President Donald Trump’s ”Saving College Sports” roundtable on March 6 featured some of the biggest names in college and professional athletics, including the likes of coaching legend Nick Saban, NCAA commissioner Charlie Baker, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and the heads of every major college sports conference. One sentiment they all seemed to agree on: heavy NIL price tags for college football athletes are leading to the extinction of less-lucrative sports programs across the country. When college football demands more donor and athletic department resources than ever, sports like tennis, track, swimming and golf often end up on the cutting room floor.
<pullquote>“In these first six months, the focus has been on educating stakeholders and adjusting deals to compliance, rather than punishing offenders.” — Bryan Seeley, College Sports Commission CEO
UTEP and University of Louisiana both cut their women’s tennis programs last year, citing direct cost-cutting tied to revenue sharing from the House Settlement. Same with Cal Poly, which shut down its swimming and diving program shortly after the June 2025 ruling. Mid-major Division I basketball power Grand Canyon University slashed its nationally competitive men’s volleyball program, while another men’s basketball school, Stephen F. Austin State, is attempting to disband its golf and bowling programs in spite of a court-ruled Title IX injunction.
Schools have combined to cut dozens of women’s and Olympic sports teams in the past 10 months alone, and just about all of the roughly 50 panelists at Trump’s roundtable expected that trend to continue unless the federal government steps in. Lawmakers at the event, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, endorsed the Republican-led SCORE Act to create more stringent NIL rules and enact a pseudo salary cap that individual state governments couldn’t manipulate.
“We went from a system where you couldn’t give a student athlete anything to now, when a quarterback throws for 300 yards, they go see the coach to ask for more money,” DeSantis said. “Football has been able to generate so much money over the years that it could subsidize some of these other programs. Now, with the collectives and how much it’s costing football, the expenses are going up dramatically and it is threatening these other sports.”
At the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, current and former NCAA athletes from 231 different schools combined to compete across Team USA and other countries, according to U.S. Olympic and Paralympic CEO Sarah Hirshland. Athletes with ties to 90 different U.S schools won medals that year.
Hirshland warned that while the United States has topped the gold medal table in eight of the past 10 Summer Olympics, the talent gap between the U.S. and other countries is narrowing. Eliminating Olympic sports programs at American universities to keep up with the “unsustainable” cost of football threatens Team USA’s typical dominance at the Olympics.
“Around the world, nations are investing aggressively in sports, building centralized training systems, expanding funding and prioritizing athlete development in new ways,” Hirshland said. “We know what happens when those investments are reduced or disappear. It hinders the future pipeline of Team USA, but frankly, it threatens the future health of sport in our country.”
While Trump pledged an “all-encompassing” executive order within a week of the March 6 roundtable, no such order had come by the time this article was published on April 3.
