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In the months before the new House settlement spending limits took effect, Power 4 programs signed players to “front-loaded” deals, which paid large sums from January through June, reducing the amount that officially went on the books and counted against the cap starting last July.
In that inflated market, quarterbacks and players at premium positions such as edge rusher and offensive tackle secured more $1 million deals than ever before. And now that players have agents working to maximize their value, the price to retain or add proven talent keeps rising at every position.
The pressure to keep up put front offices in a challenging position, especially without the option to front-load deals as they did for their 2025 rosters. Several GMs told ESPN in December they had donors ready to help fund their 2026 teams but were struggling to determine how to get that money through the NIL Go system.
Schools sought help from their multimedia rights partners such as Playfly and Learfield as well as apparel partners such as Adidas and Under Armour. They signed newcomers and returning players to contracts funded by a combination of direct payments from the school and third-party NIL money.
Now that the frenzied months of dealmaking are done, schools must figure out how, or if, they can make good on their third-party promises.
“Everyone operated under the premise that everyone knows the kids are going to get paid somehow,” a Big Ten GM said. “It’s not going to be good for college football if every team operating over the cap all of a sudden has a bunch of players who are pissed and don’t want to play this fall.”
‘Manufacturing’ a market
Some leaders in college sports view the House settlement as a stand-in for the types of collective bargaining agreements that can effectively impose salary caps in pro sports leagues. The money now available to football players at big-brand schools, however, falls dramatically short of the percentage of revenue that pro athletes negotiate through their unions.
Nebraska’s football team generated $124.2 million in revenue a year ago, according to the athletic department’s most recent public accounting documents. Add up the compensation the players receive ($3.8 million in scholarships, $825,000 in academic stipends and an estimated $15 million in direct payments), include other benefits such as free meals ($4.2 million) and miscellaneous support, and the total reaches roughly $25 million. That’s a 20% share of the money the team makes. Professional athletes typically receive about 50% of the money their leagues generate.
It’s no surprise then that the market rate for a playoff-contending football roster is closer to $40 million than $20 million. Nor is it surprising with a spending cap set at roughly $20 million that schools almost immediately found loopholes to use third-party NIL deals to meet market demand.
“It’s a market in which schools are manufacturing NIL for their student-athletes,” Seeley told reporters earlier this month.
He said his team has been overwhelmed with deals in need of extra scrutiny since the transfer season in early January because the people who designed the vetting system assumed the vast majority of contracts being reviewed would be genuine endorsement deals that would take very little time to approve. Nearly four out of every five deals that Power 4 schools have submitted for review since January have been from groups looking to pad a team’s payroll rather than a traditional endorsement opportunity, according to data shared by the CSC earlier this month.
“I don’t think the system was designed with this amount of associated deals in mind,” Seeley said.
Put another way, the architects of the current system assumed the $20 million cap with annual 4% increases would largely satisfy the market demand for building a competitive roster. Why? Lawyers on both sides of the negotiation defended the cap at settlement hearings by saying the direct payments, when added to the other benefits such as tuition and stipends that athletes already receive, get very close to 50% of an average athletic department’s annual revenue.
Their math lumps all athletes on campus together rather than acknowledging that football players and most of their peers exist in a different market. The men’s tennis team at Nebraska, for example, generated $87,570 in 2025. Counting only their scholarships and academic stipends, the tennis team was already receiving about 400% of the revenue they created prior to the House settlement. Yet, tennis players and football players fall under the same category as far as the settlement is concerned.
More importantly, schools such as Nebraska bring in about twice as much annual revenue as the average FBS athletic program. That disparity makes it difficult to set spending rules that keep everyone happy. Set the cap too high and average schools lose any hope of competing. Set the cap too low and rich teams feel unfairly restrained from putting their deep pockets to work, which provides a clear incentive for them to search for loopholes to spend more.
A ‘messy’ crossroads
So, how does college sports get from what Sankey called the “messy middle” to a clean finish? Multiple coaches and athletic directors view the Nebraska case — and a potential flurry of additional arbitration requests that could be coming soon — as a crossroads for the enterprise’s future.
“In my opinion, if the CSC loses arbitration in Nebraska, then the whole system collapses,” one power conference coach said, stressing this was his sentiment. “I believe that. They have a state law that says the NCAA can’t punish them. Anyone who has that state law, that means there’s no more NIL Go there. They don’t have to follow the guidelines.”
Many coaches and GMs at top schools are rooting for the current system to fail. They see that failure as the quickest way to a more tenable system, which would eventually involve collective bargaining and, in theory, bring more stability to a marketplace currently unmoored by skyrocketing spending and perpetual free agency in the transfer portal.
“I think it’d finally be an acknowledgment from the decision-makers how messed up this all is, and they’d realize that the long-term fix is collective bargaining,” a GM at a power conference school said. “As much as the presidents don’t want students to be employees, you have 18-year-old kids who aren’t even playing making more money than brain surgeons.”
There are major legal and organizational hurdles that make collective bargaining a difficult solution. Some college sports leaders predict that a collective bargaining agreement would take years to integrate, and they point out that players would first need to organize themselves and make demands. The NCAA and commissioners’ preferred solution for stability — an antitrust exemption from Congress — also has shown little substantial progress despite years of effort on Capitol Hill.
The CSC’s crossroads eight months into its existence is a sped-up version of a long-standing problem in college sports. The collective group has seemingly always struggled to create an enforcement arm that is strong enough to keep individual schools from finding ways around the rules. The current attempts for schools to use their marketing partners and “warehousing” NIL rights are the latest iterations of a decades-long pattern of the industry clamoring for new rules and guardrails only to quickly find ways to exploit them.
“We all say one thing and actually do another,” a power conference athletic director said. “Or say one thing until it affects us. It makes it so damn hard, as we are seven or eight months in. In March of last year, as we were figuring this out, it was clear that warehousing was something you can’t do. Now, here we are, arbitrating a case to figure out whether you can warehouse or not.”
Without a clear path to a stable national set of rules, the SEC and the Big Ten might move to create some of their own standards — and give other leagues the option to follow suit. One athletic director pointed to eligibility, transfers and tampering as issues tied to the sport’s big picture that could be figured out on the conference level.
Sankey told ESPN at the SEC men’s basketball tournament earlier this month that “the frustration can’t persist.” And while no overt breakaway is coming, Sankey did mention the league crafting its own rules “if the NCAA is unable to find its way to a conclusion, which is something the league has done on some issues in the past.”
“We’ve had different rules before on eligibility, on transfers, on two-year college transfers,” Sankey said. “We may go back to more of that type of decision-making.”
Without any immediate decisions on the horizon, frustration and impatience with the industry’s latest attempt to govern itself are growing. As the men’s basketball portal opens on April 7, a familiar feeling of dread is building on campuses across the country.
“We’re about to have another portal, and it’s going to be the worst one ever,” the power conference athletic director said. “Each subsequent portal, every year, each one has been the worst one ever. We can’t keep having the worst one ever.”
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