RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. — On the cliffs of the Pacific Ocean, some 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, administrators and coaches from college football’s new king — the Big Ten — gather at a Mediterranean style resort for their annual spring meetings during the most transformational time in college athletics history.
As the NCAA’s seven-year congressional lobbying effort reaches its climax — a vote on legislation is scheduled for this week in the House with momentum building for a bipartisan bill in the Senate, too — college sports is on the brink of more revolutionary decisions.
At the center of it all is the landmark, multi-billion dollar legal settlement of three antitrust cases (House) that, while moving the enterprise into the age of direct athlete compensation, has failed to deliver the stability that many leaders sought — and now it poses a risk to roster stability.
The new enforcement entity’s scrutiny of third-party NIL deals from the biggest above-the-cap spenders — many of them here (Ohio State, Oregon, USC, Michigan, etc.) — threatens to cripple the league’s wealthy behemoths by putting at risk tens of millions of dollars they guaranteed to their players.
“Everyone is frustrated,” said one league executive here.
In this era of athlete compensation, the Big Ten has turned back the clock. The league is thriving. Among the four power conferences, the Big Ten boasts the biggest alumni and donor bases, largest enrollments, richest endowments and the most populated urban areas across 14 states and three time zones.
The conference claimed in January a third consecutive football national championship for the first time in 73 years (Michigan-Ohio State-Indiana), won the men’s and women’s basketball titles months later (Michigan-UCLA), and currently has the No. 1-ranked college baseball team (UCLA).
However, Tony Petitti’s league — and the SEC, too, for that matter — is at the center of the latest and most pressing issue.
Millions of dollars promised to college athletes are trapped in purgatory. And leaders here aren’t alone in their disdain for a settlement and enforcement entity that some believe have already run their course.
“We need to get with the plaintiff attorneys and rethink the House settlement,” outgoing North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham said just last week from the ACC’s annual spring meeting in Florida. “Should there be one, same cap for everybody? Should your budget be taken into account? Now that we have a year’s worth of experience, is it working?”
Some already have their answers.
“The House settlement has been nothing short of a disaster,” Georgia president Jere Morehead told Yahoo Sports earlier this month — a stirring comment from a respected university executive and former Division I board chair. “All the assurances from conference lawyers about this settlement solving any of our key issues have not materialized because of the loopholes around so-called third-party NIL deals.”
What to do next is a complicated question and one expected to be explored this month as the four power leagues separately hold their annual spring meetings (ACC last week; Big Ten this week; and SEC and Big 12 next week).
Questions linger.
Can the settlement be dissolved or rewritten? Can the new enforcement arm, the College Sports Commission, be reformed? And are the SEC and Big Ten really considering an NCAA breakaway?
‘I’m rooting for us to lose’
The financial gaps between two of the power leagues, the SEC and Big Ten, and the others, the ACC and Big 12, are at the heart of a division on how exactly to move forward in regulating athlete compensation.
For now, in the current system, millions of dollars worth of school-guaranteed player payments are under review by the College Sports Commission, whose victory in the Nebraska arbitration case last week further empowers the entity to continue operating as originally intended: that is to reject third-party NIL payments that fail to meet benchmarks proving their legitimacy.
While the NCAA’s landmark House settlement opened a path for schools to directly pay athletes up to a per-school, annual revenue-share cap ($21.3M in 2026-27), certain high-value third-party pay to athletes from boosters and those affiliated closely with a university is prohibited.
That policy is now in direct conflict with the commission’s own founders and operators: the power conference schools themselves, who, during a hotly competitive football portal, promised to athletes millions in NIL from multimedia rights partners, corporate sponsors and apparel brands — some of which do not meet legitimacy standards.
In a public example of this unearthed in the Nebraska arbitration case, the school’s multimedia rights partner, Playfly, guaranteed $7.5 million in NIL cash to 18 football players.
But the Huskers aren’t alone.
The 68 power league schools submitted more than $250 million worth of deals since Jan. 1, according to those with knowledge of the data. In a striking statistic that illustrates the financial gaps among the four conferences, the SEC and Big Ten accounted for more than 75% of those submitted deals, according to figures shared with university presidents.
And while many of those have been cleared through the system since January — $115 million, according to the CSC’s own released data — roughly $125 million or more remain under review or have been rejected.
A CSC spokesperson declined to verify or comment on those figures.
“The NCAA and conferences got sued for violating antitrust by creating rules that limit athlete pay,” said Brandon Copeland, the co-founder and executive director of Athletes.org, a college players association. “The CSC is now doing that. What do you think is going to happen to the CSC?”
Charged with overseeing the House settlement agreement, the plaintiff attorneys, Jefrrey Kessler and Steve Berman, are challenging the CSC’s strict enforcement, arguing that publicly traded companies should not be under the same scrutiny as boosters. A hearing on that motion is scheduled for June 10.
The hearing has individual schools and conferences at a crossroads.
Many administrators — even those outside the big-spending Big Ten and SEC — are actively hoping plaintiff attorneys win so that millions of third-party NIL dollars that they guaranteed to athletes can pass through the system.
“I’m rooting for us to lose,” quipped one ACC athletic director last week.
‘We can no longer govern the money’
In the meantime, college sports executives are discussing ideas on reforming the College Sports Commission, including granting amnesty to all or a portion of NIL deals currently in the system, increasing the cap, adding a luxury tax or some other version of a financial penalty.
Such changes mean rewriting and significantly amending a binding, 10-year settlement agreement struck between plaintiff attorneys and the six defendants: the NCAA, ACC, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12.
Unanimity is necessary in any structural alterations to the settlement, including the cap, attorneys with knowledge of the agreement believe. If they want to make cap changes, the Big Ten and SEC may be at the mercy of the others.
“I am against any immediate changes without a sustainable, long-term plan for the College Sports Commission,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark told Yahoo Sports. “I look forward to discussing this with my commissioner colleagues.”
During his annual spring meetings last week, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told reporters from Yahoo Sports and Sports Business Journal that he and his league are opposed to changes as well.
The ideas being contemplated mostly benefit two conferences, the Big Ten and SEC, and in particular their bigger budget football brands. In 2024-25, the top 10 richest public school budgets, in order, belonged to Texas, Ohio State, Tennessee, Michigan, Alabama, Penn State, Texas A&M, Georgia, LSU and Nebraska. Twenty-one of the top 23 wealthiest schools hail from the SEC or Big Ten (the outliers are Nos. 11 Florida State and 15 Clemson).
The financial gaps have sitting power conference administrators frustrated to a point where one recently espoused, “The Big Ten and SEC should break away and do their own deal. That makes sense to me.”
To some of them here, the cap is still not big enough. Plenty high-level college leaders have publicly supported increasing the cap or lifting it completely, including Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork, who said recently, “We cannot govern the money any longer.”
As part of the settlement, attorneys determined the cap through an average — that’s important — of the 68 power conference school athletic department revenues (the cap is 22% of the average). But budgets, even in the power leagues, vary widely.
Texas and Ohio State’s $350 million in revenue last year, for instance, is twice the amount of more than two dozen fellow power conference schools. If the cap were set on an individual school basis, the Longhorns and Buckeyes would have a cap in excess of $150 million (this doesn’t account for scholarships and other athlete benefits, which at most power schools eclipses $20 million annually).
Kessler and Berman, the two men who must approve any changes to the agreement, “would not stand in the way” if schools wanted to increase or even eliminate the cap, Berman told Yahoo Sports.
But dissolving the settlement is not an option.
“Defendants in the House settlement cannot withdraw,” Kessler said flatly in a recent interview.
Change to the CSC, though, feels necessary or even inevitable.
If the commission wins its challenge on June 10 and can continue to scrutinize third-party deals, school administrators will find it more and more difficult to pass NIL compensation through the system as roster values skyrocket. More than two dozen schools are believed to have football rosters of at least $30 million and another dozen or more are thought to be at $20 million in men’s basketball.
One national agency representing football coaches recently showed their clients a presentation where they projected that football rosters at the biggest brands will climb to $60 million next year.
The high-dollar figures cast more doubt that these revenue-share and third-party contracts are truly built around purchasing an athlete’s NIL rights for endorsement and marketing campaigns — a way schools are avoiding the appearance of employment.
“These aren’t marketing deals,” Tennessee athletic director Danny White has said in the past. “We have to stop pretending that they are not getting compensated for playing for us.”
A breakaway
Now staffed at 20 people, the College Sports Commission and its CEO, Bryan Seeley, have opened plenty of inquiries into unsubmitted deals and those related to high school NIL compensation.
Many remain active. Others have been resolved. None have ended in sanctions, at least none made public.
Behind closed doors, Seeley has told school and conference officials that their resistance to sign away their legal rights in what is termed a “participant agreement” is limiting enforcement — his commission presumably handcuffed by legal threat. He often describes the CSC’s NIL clearinghouse as the operation’s enforcement mechanism.
Athletes found to have accepted compensation from rejected NIL deals are deemed ineligible.
“What, are we not going to have a football season?” asked one power conference athletic director.
Many administrators claim that the money will “find its way to players eventually no matter what,” said one recently — a nod, perhaps, toward the absence of penalties from the CSC.
One agent representing many of the top college football athletes predicts something else if promised compensation isn’t paid: a group of players strike.
“We’ll have a year without college sports,” the agent said, “then there’s a negotiation towards the leagues separating from the NCAA and having a CBA, which should happen.”
As it turns out, SEC and Big Ten leaders have been exploring a separation from the NCAA to operate their own governance system, enforcement arm and perhaps even only holding intraconference competition only. It’s a way to set and enforce their own rules and potentially evade antitrust challenges considering their membership size. The group’s size (16 schools) may make it more efficient to bargain with players, too — a concept with growing support, as detailed last summer.
None of this is easy.
The SEC, like all defendants in the House settlement, remains obligated for a portion of the $2.4 billion in backpay as well as attorney fees. That’s not the half of it. A breakaway may include increasing conference staff, hiring out or operating an enforcement arm and, potentially, committing political suicide: ending participation in national competition and championships.
In fact, in addressing the breakaway topic in January, NCAA president Charlie Baker pointed to the potential impact of national competition and championships such as the NCAA tournament and College Football Playoff.
“The big question mark on some of this is, ‘Can you create a national championship if you don’t have some framework on how people are engaged?’” he asked then.
In an interview earlier this spring, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey stressed that the long-discussed breakaway would not solve all the problems and that his league remains committed to a “national organization.” However, “there are limits to that,” he said then. “The frustration level is building.”
According to multiple school officials, a leading agenda item at SEC spring meetings next week near Destin, Florida, is none other than the conference’s future within the NCAA.
The topic is expected to arise here in California, too.
“Lots of people in this league are saying, ‘What is Plan B?’” Texas A&M athletic director Trev Alberts told Yahoo Sports earlier this spring.
Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin feels the league may not have a choice.
“Federal law prevents us from setting unilaterally national standards,” he said. “It seems like the only chance you have at setting a standard is a smaller subset of schools.”
A ruling in a recent court case, Choh v. Brown University, may pave the way for the self-governance model. A U.S. federal appeals court upheld the Ivy League’s policy of prohibiting athletic scholarships, affirming the dismissal of an antitrust lawsuit brought by former athletes. The athletes, the court wrote, failed to define the relevant market to prove that the scholarship policy violated antitrust laws.
But the SEC and Big Ten separately cover more states and include the biggest brands in the sport. Don’t they have market power?
“Choh does give us some guidance that narrower conference governance could survive antitrust scrutiny given that conferences compete with each other and do not capture an entire market,” said Sam Ehrlich, a professor at Boise State and an expert on college sports law and litigation matters. “But it’s still something of a novel question. I can definitely see a world where a sophisticated plaintiff like an attorney general or another conference can claim that there’s a separate market for elite college sports versus college sports as a whole.”
Kessler confirmed that conferences can make their own rules under the settlement, as long as policies do not conflict with the agreement itself. One conference could propose to plaintiff attorneys Kessler and Berman a higher cap. If they deem the change benefits the class of athletes, the lawyers can propose the change to the magistrate judge overseeing the agreement.
But, Kessler warns, “the NCAA and other conferences could oppose it if it’s not in the interest of the class, but raising the cap would seem logical to be in the interest of the class.”
Meanwhile, as divisiveness over the CSC’s future rages and breakaway talk intensifies, congressional action looms in Washington.
A seven-year lobbying effort from the NCAA and conferences is coming to a head. While a House bill, the SCORE Act, is scheduled for a vote this week, more meaningful legislation in the Senate may be days away from introduction — a landmark, bipartisan effort from Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell.
Both bills are expected to grant at least a limited antitrust protection for the NCAA and conferences to enforce rules around eligibility, transfers and potentially even the cap itself, as well as offer a national NIL standard by preempting state laws.
Will this solve all the issues? Unlikely. And the slow pace of congressional legislation means weeks or months before any kind of bill passage — if it happens at all.
In the immediate future — with millions of roster compensation at risk — college sports must solve its own problems.
The biggest of them: They cannot agree on a solution.