NIL Deal Updates

How the College Sports Commission is managing the ongoing demand for NIL deal approval.

With most everyone frontloading player payments by June 30, 2025 to beat the rev-share caps imposed from July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026, the College Sports Commission (CSC) knew there was an impending cliff to manage. The problem of player payments for 2025 was solved, temporarily, but the can was proverbially kicked on 2026. And now, it's time to pay the piper… and the players.

Schools already had their ducks in a row with "associated entities" such as in-house collectives, MMR partner agencies, or external companies designed specifically to service a school's NIL needs. They had the perfect workaround with trusted brands supporting university-led NIL initiatives.

The associated-entity surge

But that reliance on outside entities is growing too quickly. In the first two months of 2026 alone, the share of NIL deals attributed to associated entities rose from 54% to 78%. In other words, schools are desperate to pay players, and they are choosing to do so through apparel companies, multimedia rights companies, and NIL agencies who are basically an informal extension of the athletic department.

The CSC Deal Flow Report released earlier this week provided some insight into how things are unfolding. For deals submitted in January and February of 2026, 26.7% of the proposed funds tied to deals were "not cleared" — nearly double the rate of denied deal value from July through December of last year.

Not a great trajectory.

Nebraska pushes back

That may help explain why Nebraska football players are now challenging the CSC's rejection of their deals. At its core, the dispute returns to a basic market principle: something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

In this case, 18 players collectively slated to receive more than $1 million want their money. The average value of denied deals this year sits around $70,000 per deal, while approved deals average closer to $10,000. To complicate matters for the CSC, Nebraska state law explicitly states that athlete earnings cannot be restricted.

Earlier in the NIL era, schools were primarily submitting deals in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. Those deals effectively established a perceived market rate. As schools increased their player compensation budgets, larger deals were bound to follow.

The math doesn't line up

Player revenue-share payments across college athletics are projected to total roughly $1.8 billion between 2025 and 2026. More than 75% of those deals are projected to occur at the Power Four level, and many of those programs are already pushing well beyond the $20.5 million revenue-share cap.

Put simply, the total compensation packages at some Power Four schools exceed what institutions can distribute directly. That gap has to be filled somehow.

Revenue-share deals are essentially pay-for-play contracts, even if they're labeled differently. But the math often doesn't line up neatly. A football program might need $30 million for player compensation while only having roughly $15 million allocated from the revenue-share pool. A men's basketball program might have roughly $3 million allocated but need closer to $10 million to compete.

That's where NIL deals come in. In many cases, those deals are not truly monetizing the name, image, and likeness of athletes. They are simply mechanisms to move additional money to players. Most athletes are not interested in NIL-only deals without a revenue-share component attached — yet NIL deals tied to associated entities cannot be fully guaranteed, and international athletes cannot sign with associated entities at all.

Many issues. Few solutions.

A chess match the NCAA is losing

Originally, NIL Go and the CSC expected roughly 10% of deals to come from associated entities. Like many projections in the NIL era, that estimate missed the mark. This year, 63% of total deal volume and 78% of total deal value are tied to those entities.

It's a bit like a chess match. When you make bad move after bad move, eventually you lose pieces. Then you find yourself — like the NCAA and CSC today — in a Gary Kasparov chokehold, where defeat becomes less about if and more about when.

And if administrators think deal flow is difficult to manage now, just wait. Most NIL contracts are structured with monthly or quarterly payments. If people are frustrated today, imagine the reaction when schools begin owing players money while having no permissible mechanism through which to transact.

That moment is coming.