RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. (AP) — While frustration mounts across college sports and talk of breakaway conferences hits the hallways at conference's spring meetings, the leader of the agency formed to police name, image and likeness payments has a simple reminder: These are the rules you wrote.
In an interview with The Associated Press this week at the Big Ten meetings, Bryan Seeley, the CEO of the 11-month-old College Sports Commission, said he has
actually heard more good feedback than bad as he's started making the rounds at league meetings.
The problem is that the bad stuff mostly revolves around issues that could break everything apart — notably, the third-party NIL deals that have blown budgets sky high and become the fulcrum of the frustration for schools trying to figure out how to survive in an era where they pay players.
“I was hired to launch the CSC and enforce the rules as written,” Seeley said. “It is totally fine with us if the rules end up changing if there is consensus to change those rules. But until that happens, we’re going to enforce the rules as written and that’s what we were told to do.”
Michigan State atheltic director J. Batt summed up the feelings of some administrators in California this week when he called the college system as it currently stands “unsustainable.”
“We've got to evolve the system,” Batt said. “That (has) potential for a lot of different tracks. Primarily, evolving the CSC to meet what has become an evolving landscape is important. The current state isn't working.”
Batt's comments came less than 24 hours after Ohio State AD Ross Bjork openly wondered to cbssports.com about the Big Ten potentially breaking away from the pack and writing its own rules. Washington AD Pat Chun told the website “we created this fraudulent market to be able to compensate our athletes.”
The comments came in the same week that saw hopes scuttled again for federal legislation to resolve some of these problems.
The Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP leveraged the recent Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for Southern states to redraw Black-majority districts into a call for Southern sports leaders, especially in the SEC and ACC, to speak up. House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “If the SEC schools are for it, we are against it.”
Seeley flew to California a week after from what the CSC would term a win. In the first challenge to the CSC rejecting an NIL deal — one involving contracts for Nebraska football players — an arbitrator ruled in favor of the commission.
Seeley said “a lot of foundational issues were addressed in that one.” Namely, the arbitrator ruled that a multimedia rights group — in Nebraska's case, Playfly — could be deemed an “associated entity,” which is key because the CSC is asked to evaluate all NIL deals that come via associated entities. Attorneys for athletes in the $2.8 billion House settlement responded by asking the judge now overseeing the landmark case to clarify whether the CSC is properly classifying thir parties like Playfly as “associated entities.”
The arbitrator also dinged Nebraska and Playfly for “warehousing” the players' NIL rights — essentially securing them for a purpose to be named later instead of having an actual deal to use them right away.
Seeley said potentially a more serious problem is schools making guarantees about third-party NIL payments to players while recruiting them from the transfer portal, which is not allowed under NCAA rules. Deals aren't supposed to be signed until after the athletes are enrolled.
“And they are now finding it quite difficult to submit compliant NIL deals to meet those obligations,” Seeley said. "Assuming that is true, that is clearly a problem. The question is, how should the industry attack that problem? You're seeing differences of opinion, in some ways based on whether you're a school who made those commitments or didn't.”
The CSC says it has cleared more than 26,000 NIL deals worth some $242.3 million through May 1 since its launch.
Seeley said he hears criticism about a slow timeline to clear deals, which can leave schools in limbo, unsure if certain players are eligibile. But the CEO calls that a “false narrative.”
“Deals are being held up because they don’t comply with the rules,” Seeley said. “And many times when we ask for information about the deals, we get no response, a partial response that doesn’t answer our question, or, increasingly, false responses, which causes delays.”
Four months ago, at the NCAA Convention in Washington, Seeley made an impassioned plea for each 68 Power Four school to sign a so-called “participation agreement” that would lock in the CSC's authority.
It will not go into effect until all the schools sign it but many have refused. Some have cited guidance from state attorneys general who say it's illegal for a public university to sign away its right to take legal action, the likes of which could still take place in the Nebraska case.
Seeley now views the agreement, along with federal legislation, as not being completely necessary for the CSC to function.
Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti agrees that the real drivers of change won't come from Washington but from conferences themselves.
"Can we get to make adjustments that we think we need, based on the real-time experiences of what’s happened?” Petitti said. “And what’s sustainable about that? How does it impact what we’re doing going forward? Because we’re going to still face that with or without Washington. So we’ve got to be willing to come up with some sustainable model.”
Seeley said the CSC wants to work with whatever model the schools develop. What he refuses to do is accept blame for enforcing the rules.
“We didn’t write the rules,” he said. “But the issue now is not, is the CSC broken or not working? The issue is a lot of schools apparently didn’t follow the rules.”
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AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football
