College Football is the ONLY sport in the U.S. where pro/rel would work, and makes too much sense for it to be even considered.
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Contract Law has to be the piece that reins this in a bit.
Good on the Huskies and Bulldogs for litigating their cases.
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Relegation!
okay I don’t know crap about Soccer but that’s what it’s called right? I did watch some of that Welcome to Wrexham show 
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Before NIL the NCAA would never allow schools to do things like this. NIL gives players the opportunity. Good for the ladies at Clemson.
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The Jaden Rashada Circus has left town.
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Stewart Mandel’s latest piece at the Athletic is hilarious. He imagines how DJT’s Save College Sports get-together may go. He has the voices of several characters in this drama with made-up quotes that are funny, but still not very far from what the person has actually said. This has the effect of driving home the point how ridiculous college sports is now.
The is a section that is especially impactful which I bring to you below.
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Pro golfer Tiger Woods: “Hello, everyone. I have no idea why I’m here, either, but I did major in economics at Stanford, and I think I’ve identified the underlying problem: See, you’re operating a multibillion-dollar commercial enterprise while still maintaining a monopsonistic labor market. You keep trying to suppress the athletes’ wages to well below MRP, because you say you need the surplus profit to fund the cross country team, but then you turn around and spend most of the delta on your own salaries.
“You took a step toward rebalancing that dynamic with the advent of revenue-sharing, but there’s still a lot of cognitive dissonance in insisting those contracts are merely licensing agreements for their NIL rights, when we all know they’re pay-for-play deals. But of course, when Duke’s quarterback breaks the contract early to transfer to Miami, then you insist that the agreement bound him to the school like a pro player to his franchise.
“You’ve created a hybridized economy where the tension between treating the athletes as commercial assets while still insisting they’re merely ‘student-athletes’ cannot be sustained in a healthy and meaningful way.”
(Blank stares throughout the room.).
Private equity executive Gerry Cardinale: “I think he’s trying to say you need to admit the athletes are employees.”
Every university president and/or chancellor in attendance: “Absolutely not! If athletes are considered employees, then they could be terminated like employees, which of course never, ever happens now. Why would any of them want that?”
1993 Heisman Trophy winner Charlie Ward: “Good question. Maybe we could ask some of them?”
(Rabid laughter throughout the room.)
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Another interesting article about NIL and the College Clearinghouse.
The CEO of the College Sports Commission, the new body charged with approving athletes’ outside name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, said Tuesday that the organization is encountering unexpected challenges due to a surge of school-affiliated deals that may not comply with the rules the schools themselves established.
Bryan Seeley, a former Major League Baseball executive hired to oversee compliance with last year’s House settlement, said the system was not designed to handle so many deals in the recent football portal window that were made by “associated entities” such as schools’ NIL collectives, multimedia partners and apparel providers.
Some of those deals guaranteed players millions of dollars without having yet received approval through NIL Go, the clearinghouse used by the CSC. Yahoo! Sports reported later on Tuesday that 18 Nebraska football players were in the process of challenging the CSC’s rejection of deals totaling more than a million dollars.
“The massive increase in associated deal volume of this kind of manufactured NIL is leading to some increased review times in NIL Go,” Seeley said during a call with reporters. “I don’t think the system was designed with this amount of associated deals in mind.”
The CSC was established to enforce the new college sports revenue-sharing model under the House settlement. Under the terms of the settlement, college athletes are required to submit any NIL deals from third-party entities — those outside of a school’s direct revenue-sharing cap — that are over $600 through the NIL Go platform for review. Those deals do not count toward a school’s annual revenue sharing cap, which is roughly $20.5 million for the 2025-26 academic season.
CSC’s latest data, published Tuesday and including deals submitted in January and February, showed an increase in the number of deals submitted, which Seeley said coincides with the college football transfer portal window. Seeley added that it’s an encouraging sign because it suggests athletes are reporting deals and utilizing the system as intended.
However, he also noted an increase in third-party deals from associated entities, which the CSC considers “subject to increased scrutiny” for approval. That increase has led to longer reviews for many of those deals and has made CSC guidelines more difficult to enforce.
A person working in the NIL space told The Athletic that those deals take at least several weeks to process and, even then, are often returned for more information.
CSC reported that, through the end of February, NIL Go has cleared more than 21,000 deals worth a combined $166.5 million but has not cleared 711 deals worth a combined $29.3 million. Through January and February 2026, more than 3,700 deals worth a combined $39.3 million were cleared, while 187 deals worth a combined $14.4 million were not cleared.
Since the NIL Go platform launched last June, 50 percent of submitted deals have been resolved (either cleared or not cleared) within 24 hours, and 70 percent have been resolved within a week of all required information being submitted, according to the report.
However, the report also stated that the number of third-party deals, specifically those from associated entities, submitted by power-conference athletes over the past two months has increased by 65 percent.
According to Seeley, the CSC defines an associated entity as, essentially, “an entity that’s either controlled by a donor or is working on behalf of the school to help retain and recruit student athletes.”
Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss’ national AT&T commercial or Arch Manning’s Warby Parker ad don’t involve associated entities, but a deal from a booster-led NIL collective does. Many third-party NIL deals also originate from multimedia rights (MMR) partners such as Learfield or Playfly that manage a school’s sponsorships, or apparel partners (such as Nike or Adidas), and the CSC treats those as associated entities. Hence, there is an increase in review times and accompanying challenges.
“What I’ve been told is that there was a belief among many that perhaps up to 90 percent of deals flowing through the system would do so automatically, that would not need any kind of human review,” Seeley said. “So the bottom line is, there are changes we need to make in the system that we are working on making that I think will improve things.”
Third-party NIL deals, which provide over-the-cap dollars, have become crucial to the ongoing financial arms race in college sports, particularly football and basketball, with top programs exerting to spend above their revenue-sharing allotment.
There are those in the industry claiming that some football programs will spend north of $40 million on their rosters for the 2026 season, which is more than double the full revenue share pool for every sport in the entire athletic department, meaning a lot of that money — a majority, for some schools — would be earmarked from third-party, over-the-cap deals.
If a star quarterback or top player is reportedly earning $4 million this season, there’s a high likelihood that some or most of it is budgeted outside of revenue sharing. And a lot of it is reportedly coming in the form of front-end guarantees through MMR and apparel agreements, big-money deals that Seeley says run counter to House settlement rules.
“There’s no question that during the portal, agents were demanding guaranteed NIL for student athletes and schools felt pressure to guarantee those things, even though such guarantees are not within the rules,” Seeley said. “I think any athletic director would tell you that.”
Challenges with NIL Go and third-party deals are just two of the persistent obstacles the CSC has faced since the settlement took effect last summer. Another is the participant agreement, which would require participating schools to cooperate with investigations and enforcement decisions made by the CSC and prevent them from filing lawsuits that challenge those rules, but has not yet been signed.
The CSC’s enforcement arm has quietly conducted investigations into various programs, but there have been no known violations or penalties handed down, sparking some criticism within the industry.
“Until we build a structure to enforce the rules that are in place, we are constantly just putting bandages over issues,” Ohio State football coach Ryan Day said Tuesday. “My concern, more than anything, is that we are raising a young group of college coaches that see it that way, it’s becoming their normal. … Once we get that addressed, we can deal with everything else, but until then we are going to have a situation where people will try to get around the rules.”
Seeley acknowledged Tuesday that the pushback from certain factions against signing the participant agreement has contributed to the lack of enforcement.
“The participant (agreement) is a key tool to giving the CSC the enforcement powers and needs,” Seeley said. “That doesn’t mean without the participant agreement, it’s impossible, but I don’t think you’re going to see enforcement at the speed with which the schools want it.”
He added that there are currently 15 people on staff with the CSC, but that a lack of staff is “not a large contributing factor” to the enforcement challenges.
“I would say a lot of this is problems with the system just not being designed to handle this,” Seeley said.
As the CSC aims to adapt and improve its operations, the tests will continue. Both the men’s and women’s college basketball portal windows open in early April, less than a month away.
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Snip from Stewart Mandel piece in The Athletic today:
Senator Tommy Tuberville has the right strategy to ‘Save College Sports.’ … Really
By Stewart Mandel
March 27, 2026
A familiar-sounding press release hit my inbox Tuesday afternoon: Yet another politician was proposing yet another bill to “save college sports.” This one came from Tommy Tuberville, the esteemed Alabama senator and former Auburn coach who led the Tigers to the 2004 Golf Digest national championship.
But I read the full bill, which, mercifully, was even briefer than his tenure at Texas Tech. And I will now write a sentence I never imagined I’d write about any politician.
The bill is … smart. Really.
Previous “save college sports” proposals — most notably the terminally stalled SCORE Act— have attempted to solve every existential college athletics issue in one fell swoop, with wildly contentious solutions. Prohibit athletes from ever becoming employees. Cap NIL earnings. Give the NCAA blanket authority to set whatever rules it chooses.
Not surprisingly, there is little bipartisan agreement on any of it.
Tuberville’s “Student-Athlete Act,” though, addresses two narrow and fairly noncontroversial issues: the transfer portal and eligibility.
He proposes allowing athletes to transfer and play immediately just once in their careers, as well as a fixed eligibility term of “five consecutive years to play five seasons.”
The latter issue is particularly pressing, given the recent surge of lawsuits by athletes seeking to extend their careersto the point of absurdity. The floodgates first opened in 2024 when Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia successfully convinced a judge that his junior college seasons should not count against his FBS eligibility. More recently, Ole Miss star Trinidad Chambliss earned a sixth year by reclaiming a medical redshirt from his time at Ferris State despite there being no evidence he ever applied for a medical redshirt.
As for the transfer portal, the NCAA originally instituted its own one-time transfer exception in 2021. It lasted barely two years. A coalition of state attorneys general filed a lawsuit in West Virginia claiming that any transfer restrictions whatsoever violated antitrust law. A judge granted their injunction request, the NCAA settled the case and unlimited free agency became law of the land.
Tuberville’s bill would grant the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption for transfer rules.
It’s too early to say whether his proposal will gain any traction among his colleagues. The senator himself tempered expectations Thursday at an unrelated Senate committee hearing about college sports. “Probably won’t get enough support to pass, but we have to start somewhere,” he said.
Regardless, the strategy behind it may well be his smartest game plan since he beat Nick Saban in the 2007 Iron Bowl.
College Sports Inc. (the NCAA, the universities, the conferences) has spent the past five years banking on Congress to save it from the ever-growing mess it created. The problem is, their asks are too divisive to get through to the finish line.
The Establishment’s current Plan A, B and C, the SCORE Act, may eventually land enough votes to pass in the narrowly divided House, where supporters now hope to bring it to the floor sometime next month. But it’s never going to pass the Senate, because its fundamental declaration that no college athlete may be considered an employee of an institution is a non-starter for Democrats. A critical blow came last summer when the players’ associations for the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS went public with their opposition to the bill.
Suppressing name, image and likeness wages is not wildly popular with those folks, either.
“The SCORE Act has many good elements, it’s a very good first step,” Sen. Ted Cruz said at a March 6 White House roundtable, where President Donald Trump convened a panel of random dignitaries to discuss the future of college sports. “But … for this to be passed into law and put on (President Trump’s) desk, we need 60 votes in the Senate, which means we need at least seven Senate Democrats (to support it). Right now, there are zero.”
Even some Republicans are leery of various aspects of the bills. An expected House vote got shelved last December due to concerns about giving the NCAA too much power with a blanket antitrust exemption, or bailing out universities from their own reckless spending. Sources at the time said it was no coincidence the bill got shelved the same week Lane Kiffin bolted Ole Miss before its College Football Playoff run for a $91 million deal from LSU.
No one will say anything publicly, but privately, some key decision-makers have accepted the reality that the bill will not pass as long as the employment ban is in it. They have already begun plotting a more incremental approach.
Tuberville’s bill is essentially that, though it’s probably too narrow to gain widespread support. Which is unfortunate, because it’s such a seemingly simple ask.
If one were to poll the general public, they’d tell you it’s not the multimillion-dollar “NIL” deals that aggravate them; it’s that schools use them to poach other teams’ players. They’ll say it’s impossible to keep up with their teams’ rosters every year because of the mass turnover. A one-time exception wouldn’t eliminate all movement, but it would at least slow the frenetic pace.
Of course, it comes with the significant caveat that a court of law already struck the thing down once. Legal challenges would inevitably pour in again if the one-time rule returns. But federal legislation carries a lot more teeth than the NCAA rulebook.
And unlike attempts to limit athletes’ compensation — which Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh declared to be “flatly illegal” in the 2021 NCAA v. Alston decision — the NCAA has a defensible case for limiting transfers. Which is: changing schools every six months is not conducive to the “student” part of student-athlete.
Meanwhile, I see no reason why putting a kibosh on eighth-year quarterbacks (Joey Aguilar) or professional basketball players (Charles Bediako) would engender a partisan divide. Truly no one wants these things. And they tangibly harm high-school recruits.
Please don’t misconstrue this column as an endorsement of Tuberville’s larger agenda, or that of any other politician in either party. I became a college sports writer hoping to avoid ever covering politics, but politics keeps sticking its nose into college sports.
If passed, Tuberville’s bill would have immediate, positive impacts on at least a couple of the sport’s most pressing issues.
But sadly, like his 2004 Auburn team, it probably doesn’t have the votes.
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