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8 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

No, you misunderstood that in the decade or two leading up to NIL, there were no rules and restrictions and that it wasn't arleady open season. You make it sounds like we had this wonderful system, and NIL shit all over it, and then more rules will come back it a feasible system. 

There were no rules or restrictions being enforced leading up to NIL, except those a school placed on themselves. The FBI having tapes of LSU robbing a fucking charity hospital out front should have told ya'. So yeah, I disagree with your police work making it sounding like there were prosecutions and punishmets for any rules violations by anyone the fucking 10-15 years before NIL. 

I see what you mean. 

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Nahlin insinuating that Texas' penchant for rule-following could hamper their recruiting efforts if it comes to pass: https://www.on3.com/teams/texas-longhorns/news/a-macro-look-at-the-recruiting-landscape-as-it-pertains-to-texas-and-the-2026-cycle/

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Texas has the chance to go back to back with the No. 1 class, however there is a major new variable to account for. Seemingly every cycle comes with a new variable to account for but we don’t always know what that is until it presents itself. Last cycle (2025), a number of kids received bags to simply publicly commit. This was independent of whatever NIL negotiations they had going on. They would accept knowing full well they weren’t going to that school. That has continued in the 2026 cycle in at least a couple of instances. 

In this cycle, the variable is more public — collectives being rolled into athletic departments. I need to further investigate the intended and unintended consequences of this for Texas but we know Texas is much more likely to adhere to the letter of the law than other schools. A lot of schools won’t follow a hard cap. I’m not going to worry about that until I have reason to but it is something to be aware of. NIL has benefitted Texas specifically because of transparency. More transparency always benefits good-faith actors, especially when they’re as resource-rich as Texas.

 

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40 minutes ago, skipmcgee said:

Deleted tweet. Who is it?

Fake UT (Tennessee). From reading the comments, it doesn't sound like there's much there. The Twitter comments make it seem like a former UTN player with an axe to grind more than any real scandal - but I have no way of knowing one way or the other

 

edit: I kept going and it sounds like someone's being accused of skimming off the top of their collective. No idea of the veracity but it does seem like the kind of thing your average CFB parasite (everyone's uncles, Willie Lyles, Loochi and his 15% or whatever, etc.) would get up to

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9 hours ago, campcrunk said:

Fake UT (Tennessee). From reading the comments, it doesn't sound like there's much there. The Twitter comments make it seem like a former UTN player with an axe to grind more than any real scandal - but I have no way of knowing one way or the other

 

edit: I kept going and it sounds like someone's being accused of skimming off the top of their collective. No idea of the veracity but it does seem like the kind of thing your average CFB parasite (everyone's uncles, Willie Lyles, Loochi and his 15% or whatever, etc.) would get up to

It was related to Spyre Sports at Tennessee having shady shit in their NIL contracts.

The athlete said that they were offering NIL deals with fine print that subtracts the value of other NIL deals from the contract (so if they give you a $100k deal and you sign a $25k deal with a car dealership - they will only pay out $75k), and that they regularly brokered deals where Spyre would take 80% or more of the deal, and then they would assess management fees on top of that before calculating the athlete's percentage, so that the athlete was getting even less.

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Troy Aikman on a radio show today had a really interesting comment about NIL. He was approached about providing NIL money to get a top QB to UCLA. He contributed money to get, I think, Dante Moore in 2023 (he didn’t say the players name). 

He was really pissed because the QB didn’t play much in his first year, then transferred. Aikman said he was done giving money for players to UCLA. I wonder if they gave this QB a ton of upfront money.

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1 minute ago, Dbeasy said:

Troy Aikman on a radio show today had a really interesting comment about NIL. He was approached about providing NIL money to get a top QB to UCLA. He contributed money to get, I think, Dante Moore in 2023 (he didn’t say the players name). 

He was really pissed because the QB didn’t play much in his first year, then transferred. Aikman said he was done giving money for players to UCLA. I wonder if they gave this QB a ton of upfront money.

Holy shit what a massive fuck up. 

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Dan Murphy: Texas senator Ted Cruz aims to help NCAA regulate athlete payments

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College sports officials spent the past four years seeking federal legislation to block student-athletes from gaining employee status and letting the NCAA impose limits on how much money schools and boosters may give to their athletes. With Republicans taking control of Capitol Hill this month, the odds of the NCAA getting its wish are better than ever.

The new Republican leader of the influential Senate Commerce Committee told ESPN that one of his "major priorities" this session is to pass a law to help the NCAA regulate the booming market for college athletes without running afoul of federal antitrust restrictions. A bipartisan group of senators is drafting a measure to help prevent a split among NCAA schools.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he's not interested in saving the NCAA. Instead, he said he wants to give college sports the legal runway they need to save themselves. "College sports is in crisis right now," Cruz said. "If Congress doesn't act, we risk seeing devastation." The new Senate majority leader, John Thune, R-South Dakota, previously has introduced legislation addressing how college athletes are paid, and now he is positioned to move a bill forward.

The NCAA turned to Congress after antitrust lawsuits by athletes limited its ability to maneuver. Those lawsuits and other legal challenges convinced lawmakers they needed to take action. Until now, a partisan divide blocked tangible progress. With one political party gaining control of the House, Senate and White House, politicians from both parties are signaling readiness to negotiate and take action.

"The political stars seem to be aligning," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, who has previously worked on bipartisan bills aimed at reforming college sports but does not serve on the Commerce Committee. Blumenthal told ESPN he is working with Cruz as well as Sens. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, and Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, on a bipartisan compromise. He said he is close to finalizing a "very strong discussion draft" of a new bill.

College sports officials fear that the industry's richest schools will soon have an unsustainable competitive advantage if antitrust lawsuits prevent the NCAA from enforcing regulations that create an equal playing field when it comes to recruiting. While the pending $2.8 billion dollar settlement of the House v. NCAA case would free the college sports industry from past alleged antitrust violations, it does not provide protection from future legal challenges to the spending caps and other restrictions included as part of the settlement.

Many in college sports believe that an unregulated market will inevitably push the small group of schools that generate most of the industry's revenue to sever ties with the rest of their Division I peers. A split could create less interesting matchups for fans and jeopardize the ability of smaller schools to keep funding sports at their current levels. Cruz said he wants to give the NCAA the tools it needs to stop that from happening. "Nobody wants to see a handful of super schools with unlimited cash, all the best athletes and nobody else even able to survive," Cruz said.

The Big Ten and SEC each raked in more than $850 million in their most recent fiscal year, leaving even their power conference peers in the ACC ($706 million) and Big 12 ($511 million) significantly behind. Their commissioners, Greg Sankey of the SEC and Tony Petitti of the Big Ten, have floated plans that could help the two leagues continue expanding that gap in coming years.

Several industry sources said they expect the biggest SEC and Big Ten schools, such as Alabama, Texas, Ohio State and Michigan, to demand a bigger proportion of their conferences' television earnings when new broadcast deals are negotiated in the early 2030s -- a move that would drive another wedge between the haves and have-nots.

NCAA president Charlie Baker says he views the House settlement and a possible federal antitrust exemption as the first two steps in a nuclear disarmament of the recruiting arms race that he hopes will keep the NCAA's biggest revenue generators from fully splitting away. He and other NCAA officials are scheduled to meet in Nashville next week for their annual convention. Some athletic directors say they want to talk about steps to give the richest leagues more decision-making power.

TO VARYING DEGREES, college sports has always been an industry that operated on an unequal playing field. The NCAA's attempts to create a more competitive balance ran into an unprecedented challenge in 2021 when the Supreme Court ruled against the association in another antitrust lawsuit: NCAA v. Alston. The court's 9-0 decision wiped out the NCAA's long-held claims that, because college sports are more of an educational endeavor than an entertainment business, the industry deserved special exemption from antitrust law in courtrooms. The Supreme Court said it is up to Congress to outline any such exemption.

The schools that comprise the NCAA have created a long list of rules that effectively limited athletes' market power, which made the association vulnerable to antitrust litigation. After the Alston ruling, federal judges have consistently shot down any NCAA rule that threatened to limit an athlete's potential earnings. Courts struck down transfer restrictions in West Virginia and Ohio. Tennessee and Virginia lost bids to prohibit athletes from negotiating endorsement deals before arriving on campus. Most recently, a court injunction blocked Tennessee's rules limiting the years that junior college athletes can play after transferring to an NCAA school.

Since 2021, university and conference leaders have asked Congress to restore the special status that the Alson ruling wiped away. For most of that time, federal lawmakers have been divided along party lines, with Republicans tending to side with the NCAA's antitrust-exemption efforts and Democrats defending athletes' right to bargain collectively. Despite more than a dozen hearings and even more proposed bills, the parties made no significant progress toward a solution.

Republicans favor restoring the NCAA's ability to make its own rules without the government getting in the way. "No one in their right mind wants Congress deciding what constitutes pass interference," Cruz said. "We don't want politicians in the middle of deciding how sports will be governed."

Democrats have been more skeptical of writing the NCAA a blank check based solely on schools' promise that they would do more to serve athletes. Democrats' proposals included more detailed and player-friendly provisions such as player unions and an athlete's "bill of rights," which demanded the NCAA do more to provide athletes with items such as medical care and educational benefits.

Blumenthal said he believes some of those provisions should still be included in future legislation. He also said he would like to see an oversight agency established in the new law to ensure the NCAA is doing enough to protect athletes physically and from exploitation.

As the threat of a big split in college sports looms, senators from both parties now agree that some imperfect action may be better than doing nothing at all. The House settlement, named after principal class-action plaintiff and former Arizona State swimmer Grant House, significantly increases the number of resources -- money and scholarship packages -- athletic departments will pass on to their students. Those changes have helped push politicians on both sides of the aisle to act.

"For too long the NCAA failed to address issues to protect athletes, but obviously there is new leadership there at the NCAA," Blumenthal said. "There is also a real need to make sure there is a level playing field among schools, or at least as fair as it can be."

On Jan. 3, Cruz took over as Commerce Committee chair, which gives him the authority to bring a bill on college sports to a vote. He said he still needs some bipartisan support to garner the 60 votes in the Senate (for now, the GOP majority is 51 seats) that his bill would need to avoid a filibuster. No longer in the majority, Democrats like Blumenthal express a greater willingness to compromise than before.

OTHER INTERESTED INDIVIDUALS -- athletic directors, sports attorneys and businessmen who operate the booster collectives that help fund their schools' athlete payrolls -- say the House settlement and the proposed help from Congress won't give the NCAA the tools it needs to slow down the race for more revenue. Many believe a collective bargaining agreement with some form of a player association will be required to effectively impose a salary cap.

Professional sports leagues are able to implement salary caps without violating antitrust laws because they negotiate the terms of the arrangement with a players' union. To legally form a union, players need to be deemed employees of their teams or leagues. The NCAA is adamantly opposed to college athletes becoming employees, and Cruz agrees, saying that employee status "would do enormous damage to the collegiate experience to college sports."

A central part of the bill he plans to introduce would declare that athletes are not employees, he added. That provision could be challenged as unconstitutional under the Equal Protections clause, according to attorney Paul McDonald, who argues in an ongoing federal lawsuit that all Division I college athletes are employees.

Blumenthal said lawmakers are discussing a compromise measure to carve out a special status for college athletes to bargain collectively without having to become employees. "That might be an option," Blumenthal said. "Enabling collective bargaining without employment status certainly has to be taken seriously. We're talking about a variety of different possibilities."

Congressional aides familiar with the negotiations said collective bargaining is a red line, no-go for Cruz. Speaking to reporters in Las Vegas last month, Baker avoided answering questions about the NCAA's stance on a potential special carve-out for collective bargaining.

The NCAA and the plaintiff attorneys in the House case designed their settlement in hopes that it would serve as an unofficial collective bargaining agreement, with the plaintiff attorneys essentially negotiating a salary cap on behalf of all Division I athletes. The terms of the settlement allow each school to spend up to roughly $20.5 million per year on direct payments to its athletes starting this summer. That number is slated to rise on a regular basis during the 10-year lifespan of the deal.

However, it will remain difficult for the NCAA to enforce rules that stop third parties -- boosters and collectives -- from spending over the cap to gain a competitive edge. The bargaining agreements in pro sports leagues strictly prohibit such payments, but even before the House settlement details have been finalized, schools and their collectives are putting plans in place to work around its intent of creating a fully equal playing field.

"The real big differentiator right now is, for lack of a better term, the above-the-cap compensation. And I think everybody is hyper-focused on what that looks like, what those amounts need to be," said Walker Jones, a former Under Armour executive who now runs the Grove Collective, which supports Ole Miss teams. "If revenue share is going to even the playing field for the most part, what's going to be our competitive advantage going forward? I really think it's going to be the entities like ours that can get really creative and work within the framework to provide supplemental compensation."

Organizations such as the Grove Collective are not rogue operators. Almost universally, those collectives work closely with athletic department administrators to steer as much money as possible to their athletes. This puts many athletic directors in a position where they are currently aiming to create rules that establish competitive equity when they meet with their NCAA peers, while simultaneously brainstorming ideas to find a competitive advantage when they meet with their collective operators.

"It might be the same meeting," said Russ White, who heads The Collectives Association, a trade group representing more than three dozen collectives at power conference schools. "Topic 1: Putting guardrails in place. Topic 2: Ways around the guard rails. They know they're going to have to find ways around these."

Jones declined to say what Grove Collective's financial target is for the coming football season but said it's evident in this winter's market for transfer players that collectives will need to supplement a school's payments to build a competitive roster. According to multiple industry sources, at programs hoping to fund a roster capable of competing for a spot in the College Football Playoff, collectives will have to generate somewhere between $5 million to $10 million on top of their school's payments.

Jones said he doesn't view collective bargaining as a "silver bullet" for the NCAA's problems but does believe it would go a long way in creating more legal peace.

 

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12 minutes ago, Doc Daneeka said:

Just fucking leave it alone, please. I’ve learned not to expect much, but in the name of all that’s holy, can we please, please not have these clowns “fix” college football. Please. 

If there's one charismatic, unifying personality who has the respect and adoration of his peers and the general public, that has ANY chance of getting shit done, it's Ted Cruz. Him or the dug up, decaying corpse of John Wayne Gacey. It's close. 

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Just now, SydneyCarton said:

If there's one charismatic, unifying personality who has the respect and adoration of his peers and the general public, that has ANY chance of getting shit done, it's Ted Cruz. Him or the dug up, decaying corpse of John Wayne Gacey. It's close. 

In the spirit of bipartisanship, Blumenthal can fuck right off, too. I really don’t want to see how these guys “solve” the “problem.”

 

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1 minute ago, Doc Daneeka said:

In the spirit of bipartisanship, Blumenthal can fuck right off, too. I really don’t want to see how these guys “solve” the “problem.”

 

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Texas currently has a competitive advantage over most other schools in the NCAA. It would be the most Ted Cruz And his Punchable Face thing in the world for that guy to find a way to mitigate the advantages of his home state constituents. Other than showing up to their sporting events. 

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Just now, SydneyCarton said:

Texas currently has a competitive advantage over most other schools in the NCAA. It would be the most Ted Cruz And his Punchable Face thing in the world for that guy to find a way to mitigate the advantages of his home state constituents. Other than showing up to their sporting events. 

Well, yes, it would particularly stupid for him, but I’m fine with the general principle that even if Texas didn’t have a competitive advantage I wouldn’t want these buffoons meddling with one of the dwindling sources of entertainment in my life. 

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I work on commission. I have an average per deal I get. I don’t charge 5X for a 200k loan compared to what I would a 1M loan. This is absurd and stupid. 
now, you could make the argument that there is more work involved in being an ncaa agent because there’s no draft and 130 potential landing spots and I’d listen and probably agree, but that’s not a 4 or 5X proposition in any rational world. 
now- if they are talking about getting them real legit endorsements the number in the pros is much higher than 3 or 4%. When I was looking at trying to be an agent out of law school the going rate was something like 15 or 20% if the guy brought the player an endorsement?  Something like that. Definitely a different scale than working out contract details on a FA deal. 
 

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Ross Dellenger: With NIL era ending, college sports is on verge of seismic change. How will schools adapt with industry in upheaval?

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COLUMBUS, Ohio — On the wall in Ted Carter’s office is a framed picture of two fighter jets in mid-flight against a blue sky. “I’m in one of those,” he says. No university president in the country can claim the exploits of Ohio State’s leader. In 38 years of active military service, Carter, 65, logged more than 6,300 flying hours, flew 125 combat missions, received more than two dozen awards and retired in 2019 as vice admiral, the third-highest rank of the 25 positions in the U.S. Navy.

Given the life-saving missions and life-risking aerial shows of his military career, his next great assignment seems to pale in comparison. But, in certain circles, it may be the most important mission yet: keep Ohio State football relevant in the age of athlete revenue sharing.

“I’ve been thinking about it since the day they hired me,” Carter said from his office during an interview with Yahoo Sports in late November, his 15th month on the job. “The landscape was obviously changing already and now we’re at the doorstep.” This murky, three-plus year period of college athletics — the “NIL Era,” as it’s known — comes to an end, fittingly, with some of the sport’s most valuable programs battling for the national championship.

On Friday night in Dallas, Ohio State (12-2) meets Texas (13-2) in a collision of, arguably, college football’s two biggest brands with a trip to the national title game on the line. The meeting is a clash between two schools spending more on their football programs and football rosters than, perhaps, any others in America, a pair of blue-blood powers whose investments within the NIL Era have vaulted them to this position.

But can they stay there? By next season, when college football’s more professionalized era arrives, the historic powerhouses like Ohio State and Texas stand to lose both their decades-long inherent recruiting advantage (their historical brand) and the financial edge they used in this unruly, booster-fueled NIL Era: Donor cash.

The new athlete-revenue sharing world, at least at the highest levels, will be built on transactional recruiting relationships within a system that permits universities to use direct school funds in a more regulated structure featuring a compensation cap and new enforcement arm. In a world where more parity is expected, where does that leave the big boys?

As it turns out, keeping their advantage is quite simple, experts contend. They use their big brand, sprawling metro areas, massive alumni bases, wealthy donors and rich relationships to exceed college football’s new cap. “That’s going to be the new frontier: the above-the-cap, supplemental NIL,” says Walker Jones, the head of the Ole Miss collective and a leading member of The Collective Association. “That’s the new battlefield. The question is, can it really be regulated?”

How will schools navigate new system?

While their teams battle on the field this week, executives from these blue-blood powerhouse programs work behind the scenes to assure that they remain atop the sport in the new era. As part of the NCAA and power conferences’ landmark settlement of antitrust lawsuits, schools can distribute at least $20.5 million to their athletes starting next school year and can expand scholarships to entire rosters as long as they stay within new roster limits.

How to distribute the revenue and how to expand upon scholarships are issues with which administrators are wrangling over. Many eyes are focused on Columbus. Ohio State operates the richest athletic budget in the country ($275 million) and has one of the biggest student-athlete populations and sports sponsorships of any major conference school (about 1,000 athletes competing in 36 sports).

How will Ohio State do it? In a sitdown with Yahoo Sports, the school’s president, Carter, and athletic director, Ross Bjork, detail their plan. Ohio State will offer 91 new scholarships (58 to women for Title IX purposes) at an additional cost of $4.5 million (roughly $2 million in Alston payments will be eliminated). The school plans to “stratify” its sports, Carter says, presumably tiering them based on their revenue generation as a way to determine for each the allocation of resources, including the portion of athlete-revenue distribution.

Football, naturally at the top of the tiered system, will have at its disposal “right around” 90 scholarships, Bjork says, only a five-scholarship increase from the current limit. However, the sport will see the most significant distribution of revenue to athletes. Ohio State plans to distribute their $20.5 million pool in two ways, Bjork says, “proportionally” based on male-female split and a “market-based approach” determined through valid market factors such as a sport’s television viewership, social media impressions, etc.

Though Bjork declined to reveal specific percentages by sport, many of the football-generating giants of FBS plan to disburse the vast majority of their revenue, as much as or more than 90%, to football and men’s basketball — the only two profit-turning sports at many universities. For schools offering the maximum $20.5 million of rev-share pool money, the formula means that football rosters would receive $13-$16 million and men’s basketball rosters $2-$4 million, according to estimates.

For a small number of big-spending schools, these figures are problematic: They are lower than what is already being spent on rosters. For example, in athlete endorsement deals through its collective and brands, Ohio State’s football roster is receiving roughly $20 million in compensation, Bjork told Yahoo Sports in July. How does that get rectified?

The answer, though not easy, is that athletes land true endorsement and commercial deals from outside the school with third-party brands and companies. Third-party deals do not count against a school’s salary cap. However, in an effort to limit booster involvement, the settlement orders all third-party deals of $600 or more from school-affiliated boosters, or collections of them, to gain approval from a new NIL clearinghouse.

The clearinghouse, operated by Deloitte, is charged with verifying the authenticity of these deals using “fair market value” rates, poised to eliminate phony booster-backed compensation agreements so prevalent in the industry over the previous three years.

While many question the legality of this, power league executives, holding authority over many settlement-related decisions (not the NCAA), contend that the settlement grants them protections to enforce long-standing NCAA rules against booster payments. In fact, they are creating a separate enforcement entity — not the NCAA — to police the cap and levy penalties on those attempting to manipulate it, such as player ineligibility and school fines.

The power conferences have created a “transition team” of athletic directors from the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC to explore issues and create a framework related to the cap, clearinghouse and new enforcement arm. Members of the seven-person Deloitte clearinghouse team have met with college administrators over the last several weeks in an effort to educate them on the process — one that remains murky.

At Ohio State, Carter supports “strong penalties” for those violators, but so many questions remain unanswered, he and Bjork say. “How are rules written? What is the fair market value analysis? What is the database going to look like?” Bjork says. “What does fair market value mean in Columbus, Ohio, compared to, maybe, a small college town? There has to be some kind of differential there.

“We want to be aggressive, use our corporate partners and donors who own companies. They have marketing funds. How do we turn that into agreements with athletes? We think we have the city, alumni base and the population and the sponsors in our existing environment to be aggressive.”

'There will be some big paydays'

Despite the expanded College Football Playoff paving the way for feisty underdogs, Cinderella stories and low-budget programs — see SMU, Indiana and Boise State — the national semifinalists are all rich blue-blood football powers. After all, the Buckeyes and Longhorns are No. 1 and No. 2 in athletic budget. In the other semifinal in Miami on Thursday night, Penn State, with the fifth-richest athletic budget, meets Notre Dame, a private school whose budget figures, while undisclosed, are believed to rank in the top 10 in the country.

These are programs that possess enough resources — donor base and community connections — to find creative ways to exceed the cap, experts believe. In fact, it’s already happening. Many schools and their affiliated collectives are poised to spend over the cap, some even having already determined over-the-cap budgets. To remain competitive, an over-the-cap budget of $3-$7 million is necessary, some believe.

“If you’re not spending close to $20 million all-in on your football roster, you’re not going to be in the top 20 of schools. That’s where we are trending,” said one school-affiliated collective official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The trick is, what’s that regulatory body going to look like to justify the $7 million for your football roster?”

That’s the real catch: Can schools devise ways to create booster-backed third-party endorsement agreements or brand deals that can be deemed authentic? Perhaps it depends on how the contracts are written, said Blake Lawrence, the founder of Opendorse, one of the country’s leading NIL platforms that assists more than two dozen collectives.

Unearthing defensible, data-driven deals is key. “The big question will be the clearinghouse and the role in determining fair market value,” he said. “Is it on a per-activity basis or per-contract basis? If a collective is going to pay an athlete $100,000 over the course of a year, it may raise a red flag, but what if they break it down: 20 appearances at $5,000 a pop?”

Lawrence estimates that five collectives or fewer are paying more than $15 million to their rosters right now. But the numbers are skyrocketing as college sports find itself in a murky transition period.

In preparation for a more regulated system starting in July, schools are spending significant amounts in the recruiting process, front-loading player contracts before those new deals are subject to the clearinghouse. Deals that are struck now or later this spring are not subject to the clearinghouse if compensation is paid to the athlete before the settlement’s scheduled implementation on July 1.

“Schools are getting as much money off the books as they can,” said Russ White, the president of The Collective Association. “There will be some big paydays.” Right now, the market is inflated by 40%, said Jason Belzer, the co-founder of SANIL (Student Athlete NIL), an organization that manages more than 50 collectives across the nation. The transfer-inducing salary offers led one sitting school president to refer to the current landscape as “bedlam” in a story last month.

In fact, prices are escalating so much that, in the new rev-share era, Belzer anticipates the number of quarterbacks making at least $1 million (currently around 10, he says) to at least double if not triple. He projects the average power conference starting quarterback annual salary to be $700,000 — a 100% jump year-over-year, he says.

“It’s the definition of what happens when you give somebody a blank check,” Belzer said. “It’s like how lottery winners go bankrupt. ‘Here’s a $20 million budget that we’re going to pay! Go spend it!’” However, Belzer believes that any competently run collective at a major conference program won’t have problems supplementing a football roster for an additional $2-$4 million. Anything beyond that, one collective official says, it gets more difficult.

“We already do $2 million in real deals,” said one SEC collective executive. “We can maybe push it to $4 million.” Schools are already creating relationships with marketing agencies, or their collectives are transforming into such agencies — all in an effort to build a system of “true” NIL opportunities for athletes that can be considered off the books and over the cap.

Last month, Kansas announced a marketing partnership with Kansas City-based Walz Tetrick Advertising under a corporate NIL program dubbed “FLIGHT.” Earlier this fall, Clemson announced the formation of “Clemson Ventures,” a revenue-generating entity designed to, among other things, “find and manage meaningful and sustainable NIL opportunities for student-athletes,” according to the school’s statement.

Kirby Hocutt, the Texas Tech athletic director, sent a subtle message to his community last month. The school became the first to publicly announce specific distribution amounts under the new revenue-sharing concept. In Year 1, the Red Raiders will allocate $15.1 million to its football roster (74%), $3.6 million to men’s basketball (17.5%), $410,000 to women’s basketball (2%), $390,000 to baseball (1.9%) and about $920,000 to all other sports.

For a southern program situated in a competitive baseball recruiting environment, is $390,000 of revenue share enough for a baseball roster of 34 players? The school plans to offer no new scholarships.

Hocutt’s answer points to a pathway to exceed the cap. “I would believe that as popular as baseball is in West Texas, as important a program as it is for us, there would be additional — and I would think numerous — true NIL opportunities for those young men in our region if they choose to explore those,” he told The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

New structure ripe for more legal action

No single person has been more publicly critical of the NCAA and its power conferences than Tom Mars. Mars, an Arkansas-based attorney who has for years represented coaches and players against the NCAA, is one of many who does not believe the post-settlement NIL clearinghouse passes the legal smell test. For one, Mars says, it remains unclear how the clearinghouse does not violate the injunction from the Eastern District of Tennessee that permits athletes from negotiating with boosters before they enroll.

In addition to that, Mars uncovered a 2020 study published by Deloitte that, perhaps, calls into question any future judgment on fair market value. The study expressly acknowledges that return on invested talent metrics are not a “silver bullet” and do “not mean that the value proposition of people can simply be reduced to numbers.”

“I don’t think the clearinghouse is going to be able to last very long,” Belzer says. “It’s just the reality. There are a lot of ways around the clearinghouse. Who is to say what fair market value is? They are crazy to think that guys are going to sit around while a third party is going to judge whether these deals are real. Are you kidding me?”

The structure is ripe for legal action — even the two leading plaintiff attorneys who struck the House settlement have publicly expressed doubt in its legality. “If the NCAA [and power conferences] tries to punish a student or school, if they try to take action against an NIL [collective], I think they’ll probably see that NIL organization in court,” attorney Jeffrey Kessler told Yahoo Sports last fall.

Will the clearinghouse stand in the way not just of booster collective deals but those from booster-owned businesses? In Columbus, for instance, the Schottenstein family is one of the school’s biggest donors. Jay Schottenstein is the executive chairman of Designer Brands and CEO of American Eagle Outfitters. What about apparel giant Nike, whose founder is none other than Oregon donor Phil Knight?

In Tennessee, perhaps the school’s largest athletic donor, Jimmy Haslam, is the chairman of the board of the Pilot Flying J truck stop chain (the school last year struck a sponsorship deal with Pilot for its football stadium). At Arkansas, the school has long-time donor and sponsorship partnerships with Walmart and Tyson Foods, and at Michigan, the Wolverines have reaped the benefits of their relationship with alum Jolin Ellison, the wife of the second-richest man in the world, Larry Ellison, the co-founder of the software corporation Oracle. How do you reject any athlete deal struck with these businesses not deemed to be fair market value?

And what about multimedia rights partners like Learfield and Playfly Sports? These companies earn millions from schools by generating revenue through the licensing of the school’s intellectual properties, such as the brand, logo and color scheme. Already dabbling in the NIL world, these businesses are expected to increase their role by pairing a school’s branding with an athlete in NIL activations worth millions — a potential roundabout way for schools to stay clear of the clearinghouse.

Brian Davis, an attorney in California who represents more than 100 football players in the NIL space, plans to file a legal objection to the settlement over the issue. “I don’t think there is any world where you can require a submission of an NIL contract to some third-party clearinghouse to determine fair market,” said Davis, who heads the Forward Counsel law firm. “I don’t see that ever surviving a challenge in the courts without collective bargaining.”

The clearinghouse is expected to render decisions on individual deals within a matter of days if not hours. If the clearinghouse rejects a deal because it is deemed above fair market value, a school and/or athlete can submit an appeal through a court-overseen arbitration system, according to the settlement agreement. The parties — NCAA/power conferences vs. the school and/or athlete — will appear before a neutral arbitrator to argue their case. How an arbitrator rules may “depend on what evidence” each side produces during a trial-like set of hearings, Kessler said.

Either way, the power leagues may have another brewing legal fight on their hands. But without proper enforcement, one of the settlement’s primary purposes — to level the playing field by providing regulation and limiting booster involvement — is in doubt. “It’s going to come down to enforcement,” said Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua. “You get dinged, so what happens? Are there any repercussions?”

Back at Ohio State, Carter has plenty of questions himself. “What are going to be the safeguards for NIL? How does that look?” he said. “No one questions that we have the ability to raise money better than most other places, but there’s probably going to have more checks and balances on it, which we support.”

One thing Carter wants to make clear: No taxpayer money will be used to pay Ohio State athletes. The athletic department will remain “self-sustaining,” needing no financial support from the university.

That means finding ways to generate additional revenue, such as new sponsorship deals. The athletic department is in the midst of an “inventory assessment of the football stadium,” Bjork says. The NCAA’s expected and eventual approval of commercial jersey patches looms large, he says. For a valuable brand like Ohio State, jersey patches can fetch eight figures annually.

But the most important aspect is home game attendance. Ohio State, like many major universities, leans financially on its football season ticket sales at 102,780-seat Ohio Stadium, dubbed the Horseshoe (or Shoe). Last year, for instance, Ohio State football generated nearly $65 million in ticket sales and another $57 million in donations, many of which were tied to football season ticket-holders’ seats.

“Got to make sure we fill the Shoe every home game,” Carter says. “That’s our biggest revenue. We must make sure fans are proud of the brand.” How do you do that? Nothing secures consistent attendance numbers and season ticket sales more than winning football games. On Friday night, the Buckeyes get another chance.

 

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Klatt has an interesting podcast on how he would “fix” college football: 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-joel-klatt-show-a-college-football-podcast/id1037085984?i=1000683760618

He has some really good ideas about the CFP and scheduling, but then he gets into NIL. He argues that there must be collective bargaining and salary caps, and the only NIL being “real” NIL. 
 
He admits that it would only work with strong rules enforcement. How does he propose to do that? 
 
It’s funny- all the OU and Bama partisans arguing, “Something must be done! This is ruining the game!” never felt that way about Switzer’s recruits getting $50k in a bag or Saban’s players gifted a new Dodge Charger. That was just “what are you going to do, everyone does it (they don’t) and don’t you want to help a poor kid trying to get by?”

If something like that were to happen, I would hope that programs like Texas would split away into a new “no cap” league. Who might it be? Texas, UGA, Florida, Michigan, Ohio State, TAMU (I know), SMU,…

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 Dennis Dodd:  The Big Ten's weaponization of clean cash -- and lots of it -- is shifting NIL power dynamics from South to North

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Jim Harbaugh strongly believed that if and when it became legal to pay college football players, Michigan would benefit. Knowing the significant wealth emotionally invested in seeing Michigan football succeed, the then-Michigan head coach believed the Wolverines would have an advantage over the SEC schools he loved to poke at over the years, from his barn-storming satellite camps tour to comments that all but accused the southern schools of cheating.

Michigan had a long list of wealthy benefactors to choose from including Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and former Mets owner Fred Wilpon. "He reasoned it could only benefit Michigan if it became legal to share some of the spoils with the athletes," said Todd Anson, long a Harbaugh consigliere and a Central Michigan University trustee. "That was the impetus for him asking me to form a collective, which I did. Jim even named it for me TWT -- 'The Winningest Team.'"

The goal was to build a privately funded $250 million war chest that would, in Harbaugh's words, wake the sleeping giant that is Michigan athletics. Anson says he even approached Google co-founder Larry Page, a Michigan graduate, about funding TWT. The world's sixth richest man ($155.7 billion per Forbes) wasn't interested in sports and it never gained much traction.

Harbaugh's dream never came to fruition during his time at Michigan, though he did of course ride off into the sunset with a national championship after the 2023 season, but his belief in the advantages his alma mater would have in this new world have begun to take place. Page may not have been interested but Michigan reeled in an even bigger fish: Larry Ellison, the fourth-richest man in the world with a net worth north of $200 billion, according to Forbes.

The Oracle co-founder had no obvious ties to Michigan and even attended a different Big Ten school (Illinois). It's why so many were caught off-guard when the Champions Circle, a Michigan-related NIL collective, thanked Ellison and his wife Jolin for their help in Michigan landing No. 1 overall 2025 recruit Bryce Underwood, who had been committed to LSU.

Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, a Michigan graduate who previously proclaimed he'd pay $3 million for a top quarterback, later said he was involved in the process and that Jolin, who attended Michigan during the Brady Hoke era, refused to suffer through mediocrity again less than a year removed from the Wolverines winning a national championship. Portnoy has said Jolin told him she couldn't "stomach waking up on a Saturday knowing that we're not the best team on the field" and wanted to "stack" national championships.

Michigan will have to wait at least a year to stack championships, as Jolin hopes, but the Big Ten as a whole has a chance to do so Monday night when Ohio State takes on Notre Dame in Atlanta, the heart of SEC country. If Ohio State wins, it will be back-to-back titles for the conference with considerable reason to be bullish about the Big Ten's future prospects.

Conversely, it marks the first time since 2004-05 that the SEC won't play for  a national championship in back-to-back seasons, a bookend to a dominant run of 13 national championships over the last 18 seasons. Is this a new, or at least more balanced, era? The SEC isn't exactly floundering. But by any reasonable measure – a standard the conference has set – the SEC has been down the last two years.

By early November, 13 of the league's 16 teams had at least two losses. The Big Ten stepped up, leading the country with four teams in the first 12-team playoff. Indiana became a national story. Oregon earned the No. 1 seed. Ohio State and Penn State both made the semifinals, with the Buckeyes having a chance to reign supreme over the sport next week. "I don't see any trophies in their [Big Ten] trophy case with dollar signs for being the wealthiest conference," said one sports media analyst.

There may not be banners for generating the most revenue but in this current era of college football, financial resources are paramount and no one has more of them than the Big Ten. In the current media rights deal with NBC, CBS and Fox, Big Ten schools will be making an average of $100 million annually in media rights alone when the current deal expires in 2030. The SEC is expected to top out at $75 million.

"We're now moving in an era of deregulation and House settlement where your ability to perform and compete at the highest level is largely predicated on resources," Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens told CBS Sports. "We're all doing everything we can to identify additional resources and when you're in a league that has an outstanding media rights deal with incredible distribution and you can play – I think we played seven straight weeks on network TV and had outstanding ratings.

"When you're a national brand, people can connect to it that way and it allows you to have an audience of more interested people. As we're trying to create additional resources, that's extremely helpful."

The rivalry between the Big Ten and SEC began long ago. Those two conferences are physically, financially and in a recruiting sense, dominant. In 2007, former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany posted what was called an "open letter" on the conference's website. The letter laid bare what stereotypes had been established over the years -- that the Big Ten was a high-brow, academic league that did it the right way and the SEC was a bunch of renegades.

"I love speed and the SEC has great speed, especially on the defensive line, but there are appropriate balances when mixing academics and athletics," Delany wrote. He added: "Not every athlete fits athletically, academically or socially at every university. Fortunately, we have been able to balance our athletic and academic mission so that we can compete successfully and keep faith with our academic standards."

Then-SEC commissioner Mike Slive was incensed. There weren't any innocent parties. Delany oversaw the conference during the Fab Five scandal at Michigan. Academic giant Northwestern had been caught in two point-shaving scandals. Meanwhile, Slive was in the process of polishing the conference, seeking to have every school off probation. It worked. For a while.

A large part of the Big Ten success in the middle of the 20th century had to do with demographics. SEC schools didn't fully integrate until the 1970s. Meanwhile, there was significant migration of African-Americans from the Deep South to the Rust Belt. From 1952-1968 the league won six national championships, three of them unanimously. Michigan State in 1952, Minnesota in 1960 and Ohio State in 1968 swept both the AP (media) and UPI (coaches) polls.

Twelve times in those 16 years, Big Ten squads finished in the top two of one or both of the major polls. Compare that to the current run by the SEC, which has won 13 out of the last 18 championships. Beginning in 2006, the SEC won an unprecedented seven consecutive national championships.

That run planted in the minds of voters, fans, computers and media – rightly so – that the SEC was the dominant conference. "The Big Ten has not been as good with the narrative,"  Tony Altimore, a strategy consultant with Altimore Collins & Company told CBS Sports. "They've [SEC] really done a great job with conference support. They really pioneered the recruiting end better than anybody."

The population shift that helped the Big Ten in the middle of the century reversed. The SEC's run has coincided with a national trend of a population shift from northern states to the Sun Belt. Tech growth, favorable climate and a business-friendly environment all contributed to the shift. Over the past decade, the Sun Belt region accounted for 80 percent of the nation's population growth, according to Moody's.

When the Atlantic Coast Conference considered expansion in 2003, one of its TV advisors commissioned a study showing how the population in southern conference states was growing. "People are not moving into Michigan. They're not moving into Wisconsin. They're leaving. They're moving South," said former Big 12 commissioner Chuck Neinas.

The population boom gave southern schools a recruiting advantage as Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Texas annually produced a considerable amount of high-level talent. Prestige and tradition has always had a place in college football but it became easier to win at a place like LSU, once Nick Saban got everyone pulling in the right direction, than Nebraska, which dominated the sport under Tom Osborne in the 1990s but had a limited natural recruiting base.

Those recruiting advantages haven't gone away but this era has offered the cold-state schools up north an opportunity to minimize them with cold, hard cash. Ryan Day generated huge headlines across the sport two-and-a-half years ago when he said at a booster event it'd take $13 million to retain the talent on Ohio State's roster.

It wasn't quite the shot across the bow of Nick Saban accusing Jimbo Fisher of buying his entire team a year earlier but it signaled to the rest of the sport it'd take considerable financial investment to win at the highest levels. Fellow Big Ten coaches like Iowa's Kirk Ferentz said their schools would be in trouble if that's the financial commitment it'd take. Maryland's Mike Locksley said he'd be OK with half that number.

A lot has changed in the last two years. "Right now look at the numbers, it's $20, $23, $25 million rosters," said Cardale Jones, the co-founder and general manager of THE Foundation, a NIL collective supporting Ohio State. Jones won a national championship with Ohio State in 2014, emerging from third on the depth chart to national stardom. Jones is currently a CBS Sports HQ college football analyst.

Ohio State spent at least $20 million on this year's roster, according to athletic director Ross Bjork, which is one win away from winning it all after a stupendous run of blowouts against Tennessee and Oregon and a win over Texas in the Cotton Bowl. Ohio State focused on retaining elite talent like Jack Sawyer and Emeka Egbuka for another year rather than head to the NFL while supplementing the roster with targeted needs. The Buckeyes went out and got a starting quarterback (Will Howard), starting center (Seth McLaughlin), starting safety (Caleb Downs) and a two-time all-SEC first-team running back (Quinshon Judkins).

"I think it was a situation where the coaching staff kind of foresaw a 12 months, 13 months from when they lost the Cotton Bowl to how special something could be and I think we're all seeing it unfold before our eyes," Jones said. The numbers keep going up as a convergence of NIL money and future revenue share money has flooded the market and driven player compensation prices way up. Blake Lawrence, co-founder of Opendorse, recently told CBS Sports the numbers have essentially doubled during this most recent transfer portal window.

Pay-for-play is technically against the NCAA rules but they have not been enforced for nearly a year since Judge Clifton Corker granted a preliminary injunction against the NCAA saying it likely violated federal antitrust law and that athletes prevented from knowing potential compensation before choosing a school would be hurt.

After that ruling, the NCAA announced it would pause all enforcement-led investigations into NIL. There has still been no final outcome with the case – the NCAA recently filed its sixth extension request – allowing for schools, collectives, players and their representatives to be much more open in discussing NIL-related compensation without the fear of NCAA repercussions.

It has allowed for programs willing to aggressively spend to capitalize on the opportunity. It has also exposed an interesting wrinkle: In a pure money battle, the Big Ten is better positioned than the SEC and other conferences. A super booster like Ellison or Nike co-founder and Oregon alumnus Phil Knight, the world's 52nd richest man with a net worth of $33 billion, is a massive advantage in this current unregulated recruiting world.

Stephen Ross, whose name adorns the Michigan business school and is worth $17 billion, is still "the first call everybody makes" when Michigan needs money, according to Anson. Ohio State has Bath & Body Works, Inc. co-founder Les Wexner ($7.9 billion) while Rocket Morgan co-founder and Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert ($23.3 billion) is a Michigan State graduate.

Meanwhile, the state of Alabama, which has dominated the sport in many ways, doesn't have anyone on the Forbes 400 list. Auburn trustee and avid fan Jimmy Rane is the richest Alabama resident with a net worth of $1.5 billion, according to Forbes. When compared to the SEC, the Big Ten dominated the 2025 US News Best National University Rankings, with 16 of its 18 schools placing in the top 100, while the SEC had five.

Seven of the top 10 schools with the most living alumni are in the Big Ten including Ohio State (No. 8). With those big alumni bases come the accompanying huge stadiums to fit them all in. The Big Ten has the three largest football stadiums in the country – Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State. Meanwhile the SEC owns spots No. 4 through 13.

Through expansion, the Big Ten has cornered big markets like Los Angeles (USC and UCLA), New York (Rutgers), Washington, D.C. (Maryland) and Seattle (Washington). Those big markets plus the long-standing ones like Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis give Big Ten schools fertile financial grounds to solicit donations, NIL deals and partnerships.

Of course, having the money is only half the battle. Those wealthy alums have to feel compelled to spend money on their alma mater's sports teams. For instance, Google co-founder Sergey Brin is the world's seventh-richest man at $152 billion. Brin got his undergraduate degree at Maryland as his father, Michael, was a mathematics professor at the school. Like his Google cohort Page, Brin hasn't shown much affinity for college athletics but he has the kind of wealth that could transform his alma mater's prospects. Last year, Brin's parents, Michael and Eugenia, donated $27.2 million to the University of Maryland to endow the Brin Mathematics Research Center and Brin Endowed Chair in mathematics.

Maryland coach Mike Locksley said it was above his pay grade to reach out to Brin directly and fully trusted athletic director Damon Evans' fundraising efforts, but that he'd love to have a 30-minute conversation with him one day. He brings up Under Armour founder Kevin Plank and Barry Gossett, former chairman of Acton Mobile Industries, as two long-time generous supporters of Maryland athletics who have gone above and beyond to support the Terrapins. He hopes other wealthy alumni who benefitted from going to the school follow the lead of Plank and Gossett and feel compelled to give in this new era.

"We've got some (billions) behind our people that have come out of here," Locksley said in an interview last year. "It's just whether or not it's important to see the brand of Maryland do well."

That last part has always been an area SEC schools have excelled in. In college towns like Tuscaloosa, Oxford and College Station, nothing is more important than the local football team. Fans build their social calendars around it – no fall weddings is a common refrain – while gameday visitors juice the local economy. As cliche as the SEC's slogan may be, it rings true: "It Just Means More."

That passion will be critical moving forward in a House settlement world where ticket revenue, jersey sales, donations and other financial contributions will pay for the annual $20.5 million revenue share payment with that number going up each year moving forward.

The House settlement, if approved in April, would come with a component that would require NIL deals from boosters or collectives of more than $600 to be subjected to a fair market value analysis. In theory it could limit the big money NIL advantages of certain schools and is intended to return NIL to its original intentions of allowing athletes to capitalize on their likeness rather than a guise of pay for play compensation, but there is considerable skepticism within the college athletics ecosystem that it'll survive legal scrutiny.

"There's so many things that are wrong with it," said Brian Davis, founding partner of Forward Counsel. "Just in general a restraint on free trade needs to pass certain analysis and it doesn't come close. Who's to say what's fair market value and what isn't?" Davis, who has represented numerous prominent college players during the NIL era, specifically points out the idea of a third-party clearinghouse rejecting an Oregon NIL deal from Nike co-founder Phil Knight, one of the greatest sports marketers in American history.

"Who are we to say he isn't spending his money wisely on a fair market value basis?" Davis said. "That's up to him to determine and he's done a damn good job in his career determining how to build a market."

Legal battles aside, the Big Ten is well-positioned to succeed in this version of college football. It will be difficult, if not downright impossible, for any conference to go on the run the SEC did over the last two decades with the way NIL and the transfer portal has dispersed talent around the country. There will be plenty of back-and-forths in the years to come on whether the Big Ten or the SEC is college football's best conference.

But on Monday night in Atlanta, with an SEC officiating crew on the field, the Big Ten has a chance to cap an incredible season with its second consecutive national championship. It could be just the start of a new world where the defining slogan could be "It Just Means More Money."

"When you look at the depth, the passionate fan bases, the media deals, all the outstanding leadership, all the elements that will enable you to remain as a premier conference in all of college athletics are there," Mullens said. "Now we just have to  continue to collaborate, continue to have some foresight and make sure that we keep working our tails off."

 

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1 hour ago, satyanash said:

 Dennis Dodd:  The Big Ten's weaponization of clean cash -- and lots of it -- is shifting NIL power dynamics from South to North

 

Thanks for the article. 
 
On the main board’s “Left Behind” thread, there are a lot of B12 fans arguing that the B1G has dull football, that it’s not so special. They don’t get that B1G schools get more revenue from media than any other conference for a reason. 
 
This trend will be very interesting to follow. 

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16 hours ago, statsman said:

Thanks for the article. 
 
On the main board’s “Left Behind” thread, there are a lot of B12 fans arguing that the B1G has dull football, that it’s not so special. They don’t get that B1G schools get more revenue from media than any other conference for a reason. 
 
This trend will be very interesting to follow. 

If you're saying the Big 10 is a revenue leader because they play exciting football, I think that's an.....interesting opinion.

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1 hour ago, gernblansten said:

If you're saying the Big 10 is a revenue leader because they play exciting football, I think that's an.....interesting opinion.

No, I’m saying the B1G gets more media revenue because they deserve it- ratings, fanbase size, etc. it’s not some chance fortunate outcome 

There won’t be some point where the networks say, “What the hell are we doing, giving the B1G so much money? We should give some of it to the B12, because they’re so scrappy and exciting!”

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Dan Murphy: Dept. of Education says Title IX applies to payments to athletes

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The plans that many major college athletic departments are making for how they will distribute new direct payments to their athletes would violate Title IX law, according to a memo published by the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday.

The memo provides some long-awaited guidance about how gender equity laws will apply to a new era of college sports that is on track to begin this summer. It's not clear if the Department of Education will interpret Title IX law the same way when incoming President Donald Trump's administration installs new officials in the near future.

The NCAA and its power conferences have agreed to allow each school to share up to $20.5 million in direct payments to its athletes via name, image and likeness deals as one of the terms of a pending antitrust settlement. Many schools from those power conferences have developed plans to distribute the majority of that money to athletes in sports that generate the most revenue -- mostly football and men's basketball players.

In some cases, athletic directors have publicly shared that they intend to provide upward of 75% of that money to their football players. However, the Office for Civil Rights -- the division of the Department of Education that enforces Title IX law -- said in its memo Thursday that those future payments should be considered "athletic financial assistance" and therefore must be shared proportionally between men and women athletes.

"When a school provides athletic financial assistance in forms other than scholarships or grants, including compensation for the use of a student-athlete's NIL, such assistance also must be made proportionately available to male and female athletes," the memo said.

Title IX is a federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs. The law requires that schools provide opportunities to play a varsity sport that are proportional to the student body's overall gender makeup. It also requires schools to provide financial assistance that is in proportion to the number of students of each sex who play sports on campus. If 50% of a school's athletes are women, then 50% of the school's financial aid for athletes must be allotted to women.

The memo is not as clear in providing guidance on how payments from booster collectives closely associated with their schools are impacted by Title IX law. It states that the department does not consider money provided by a third party in an NIL deal as athletic financial assistance like the future revenue sharing payments or scholarship dollars. But if money from private sources ends up creating a disparity in an athletic program, it is possible that NIL agreements could "trigger a school's Title IX obligations."

Male and female athletes also deserve equivalent publicity, including in sports information personnel, the amount and quality of promotion, and even in social media postings. If a school fails to provide equitable publicity, those students risk losing out on NIL opportunities, the memo states. ESPN reported a little over a year ago that 55 athletic departments -- or 84% of the then-Power 5 -- mentioned men's teams more often than women's teams on their main accounts on what was then Twitter, and women's teams were more likely to have to share social media managers with other teams.

While the Department of Education has the authority to punish schools for failing to meet Title IX requirements, historically all cases regarding how the law applies to college sports have come from athletes who sue their school and allege unequal treatment. There are multiple pending Title IX lawsuits related to NIL compensation from third parties. The memo published during the final two days of this department's time in power could provide some fodder for future potential lawsuits if any athletes sue their school over the way future direct payments are made to athletes.

"I'd be astonished if schools that have announced they are planning something other than proportional distribution continue with those plans," said attorney Arthur Bryant, who is the midst of a Title IX lawsuit against the University of Oregon. "They would be knowingly and intentionally planning to violate the law." Bryant said he thinks the clarifying language laid out by the department also has the potential to derail the pending antitrust settlement. A hearing to finalize that settlement is scheduled for April.

 

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38 minutes ago, immamac said:

Yeah, this is the worst ruling ever. The NCAA may actually fail because of this. 

This was always going to be the case.  It’s part of why people have been saying they’ll have to be considered employees instead of students and there will need to be collective bargaining in order for a salary cap from the schools to apply.  

36 minutes ago, satyanash said:

So what of third-party, external NIL funds? The DoE's letter is pretty vague.

Untitled3.thumb.png.a9cec3384eadeb79594514d94cf5045e.png

 Title IX doesn’t apply to third-party-funds for now, but they’re leaving the door open just in case. I don’t think they’ll ever say third-party funds have to be equal under Title IX, nor would that be likely to hold up in court. 

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4 minutes ago, Burt Macklin said:

 Title IX doesn’t apply to third-party-funds for now, but they’re leaving the door open just in case. I don’t think they’ll ever say third-party funds have to be equal under Title IX, nor would that be likely to hold up in court. 

Putting limitations like that on 3rd party NIL wouldn't be any more legal than completely restricting as they did before.  

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