Last week, a federal judge made a landmark decision that transformed the world of college athletics. Schools were granted the authority to compensate athletes directly.

The court decision also regulated rules concerning name, image and likeness (NIL) payments, a ruling that came as Michigan’s NIL collective, Champions Circle, continues to thrive.

Before the ruling, many payments mirrored a “pay-for-play” model, where boosters and non-profit collectives would pay athletes significant amounts of money for minor services with the intention of bringing them to a certain school. Now, all NIL deals must pass through a clearinghouse to ensure athletes are receiving compensation for no more than their “fair market value.” Deals that don’t meet this criteria will be denied by the NCAA.

Like collectives around the country, Champions Circle is looking to adapt to the new NIL world. The Michigan Daily’s Jordan Klein sat down with Champions Circle co-founder Jared Wangler to discuss the collective’s strategy in the revenue-sharing era.

Responses have been edited for clarity.

Jordan Klein (JK): Players now have to be compensated for their “fair market value,” as approved by a Deloitte clearinghouse. How does that change the deals and other things Champions Circle does to get athletes to the University of Michigan?

Jared Wangler (JW): It’s a great question. I think everything you’re looking for is tailored around athlete compensation in this new revenue-sharing world, with increased oversight from the clearinghouse, and a little bit more regulation around athlete compensation outside of what the university can offer. With the new House settlement, universities are now permitted to share up to $20.5 million worth of benefits in Year 1 one. That will increase by 4% year over year, all the way to Year 3. Then, it will reset based on the equation that they came to, which is 22% of the average annualized revenues of the Power Four schools. That’s what the schools are now permitted to share.

What’s difficult is that the market for athlete compensation currently outweighs what the universities are able to bear. If you look across college football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, softball, wrestling … If you want to be competitive at a national-title level or a conference-title level, you need to have adequate funding for what the talent costs.

I could walk you back four years when schools couldn’t provide anything, and the only money that could be provided was from brands and collectives. Most of the major markets created these collectives as a way to aggregate capital to pay the student athletes. The cap at that point was zero dollars, and there wasn’t regulation around how much money you could pay the student athlete, and what the exchange of services for. It was very laissez-faire. Now, the cap is $20.5 million, and any dollars above the cap that are being used for talent acquisition and talent retention. Those are going to be more regulated by the Deloitte clearinghouse, as you reference. 

The Deloitte clearinghouse will be reviewing any deals that come from associated entities at the universities. Associated entities can mean a lot of things, but primarily they’re going to start with collectives and the multimedia rights holders. The multimedia rights holders, those are the Learfields of the world, the Playflys of the world. Think of it as the corporate sponsorship arm of these athletic departments. 

In this current state, I’m bringing it back to where talent costs have gotten. You might have seen Texas Tech pay over $55 million worth of contracts to its student athletes. That’s football, that’s men’s basketball, it’s women’s basketball, baseball, softball … that’s their pool. That’s $20.5 million of revenue share from the university, and about $35 million coming from affiliated entities. It might be their collective, it might be Learfield, Playfly, whatever their MMR holder is, or a combination of the two. In this world, where there’s a clearinghouse to decide whether the deals are fair market value or not, it is the job of these collectives and associated entities, to have enough deal flow for the athletes that will pass through the ‘sniff test.’ That can be used in conjunction with the revenue sharing to come to a total compensation package that is agreeable to.

It’s probably not a secret like right now that most college football budgets, if you’re trying to compete at the top level, are between $20 and $30 to $35 million. That’s just football. And then basketball. Men’s basketball is anywhere between $10 million, and in some markets, up to $20 million. When you’re adding all these budgets together across multiple sports, you need more than just $20.5 million if you’re at a place like Michigan, Ohio State, Auburn, Alabama, Southern California, Texas. 

That’s where you’re seeing these collectives and multimedia rights holders work together to get as much capital as they can, to then use and underwrite contracts for the athletes that will be above the cap. They have to be done in a way that can pass the clearinghouse standards for fair market value. 

In practice, let’s say it’s a women’s basketball player, starting point guard, making $1 million. Let’s say $500,000 of it was going to come from revenue sharing, and $500,000 of it was going to come from the collective. The payment can’t just be a lump sum payment of $500,000 — show up to an event and then be on your merry way. There has to be actual work done and actual services rendered for the $500,000. That might be spread out over 12 months. It might look like 20 different commercial activations. They might do signing events, they might have merchandising promotions, they might work with brands that are affiliated with the collective or the multimedia rights holder, there might be media appearances. 

There’s a whole host of services that groups like us have the athletes do to justify their NIL payments. That becomes even more critical if you want to be one of the schools ‘above the cap’ space, because that’s really the new name of the game. How much capital can you put together, and how many deals can you get to the student athletes that can make their way through the clearinghouse and be used in a way that helps underwrite competitive teams? That’s where a lot of this is moving.

JK: Deloitte estimated that roughly 70% of deals would not have passed through their clearinghouse standards. Where would that number sit for Champions Circle deals? How is the Champions Circle changing its approach so 100% of your deals meet the clearinghouse standards but also keep athletes at the compensation levels they were looking to get before these new rules?

JW: It’s hard to know for sure how much of our total deal volume would have gotten through the clearinghouse. I’d say with high confidence that we would bat at a significantly better percentage than only 30% of our deals getting through. That’s because our business was set up as a sports marketing agency before we built the collective. Valiant Management Group, which is the holding company to Champions Circle, was built as a group licensing agency, a talent rep agency and a merchandising company. It all spun up in 2021 around real commercial activity. It wasn’t until 2022 that we set up Champions Circle as a fund that dollars would come in, and then we would use that to help underwrite payments for the student athletes. All of our agreements with our athletes read as real commercial services agreements. 

For the amount of money we’re paying the student athletes, are we getting that much in return for the work that they’re doing? If you took a peek behind the curtain of our event calendar, our brand activations and our merchandising, we’ve generated significant revenue of commercial dollars based on the services of the athletes. We’ve had over $7 million worth of NIL merchandise sold over the last four years. Over $3 million generated around fan events. So think golf outings, think signing events, think private meet and greets. We’ve brought in over $4 million worth of brand deals. When you look at these different parts of our business, we’re one of the few collectives, marketing agencies, that you could point to to be like, ‘Oh, they were actually using the athletes’ NIL to generate real commercial revenue.’ 

(Other groups) tried to capture as much money as possible and get it out the door before there’d be more regulation. Those groups are now either folding or trying to restructure as a marketing agency.

That’s really where most of this moves — putting more infrastructure and bones behind the athlete marketing agency component of what you do. There is real commercial value that the athletes’ marketing services bring, if done correctly. Not everyone is Bryce Underwood and can demand a large sum of money for an appearance or a post around the brand, but the athletes collectively can drive revenue, if done in a way that is capturing everybody’s rights together to promote a good or a service. 

An example would be the starting point guard for the women’s basketball team.  On her own, she couldn’t demand a $1 million budget for a brand activation. But that starting point guard in conjunction with seven of her teammates, and then becoming a Michigan women’s basketball partnership, the sum of the parts are greater than than the whole. It’s more of a collective mentality around utilizing all of their NIL together to promote a good or service, using all of their social media handles to distribute that content, using their voice to elevate whatever product or service we’re working with. It’s a different type of marketing. It’s more viewed around the property itself and aggregating all the talent together. 

The really strong groups are going to separate themselves if they understand how to do this specific type of marketing. That is where you will be able to make a justifiable case to move significant sums of money through a clearinghouse, because you are a legitimate exchange of services.

JK: It seems like in the last year or so, Michigan’s NIL really took off. With the new regulation, is Michigan more uniquely positioned to succeed in the NIL space?

JW: I believe that Michigan’s always been primed to succeed in a world where it can level the playing field and start compensating its athletes. I long felt like we were fighting with one arm tied behind our back, because that’s an area where we were never active compared to some of the teams we were competing against. I do feel like we have had a leg up for quite some time. 

The bad rap we got early on wasn’t because we were not doing NIL, we just weren’t using it in recruiting the way most other schools were. Almost all of our NIL money was predominantly used for the current student athletes, and not used in recruiting for prospective student athletes. That’s changed as rules and regulations have adjusted over time. Now, we do communicate NIL opportunities, and we do have those compensation conversations on the front end in recruiting, whereas we wouldn’t before. But the resources have been there. There’s been greater alignment with the athletic department over the last two years that’s really elevated the fundraising efforts. 

Michigan has always been a place that demands brand attraction, and fan and donor engagement. We’ve had a competitive advantage over the last four years now that we can pay student athletes, and I believe that will only continue to grow that competitive advantage over time, because we are at a place like Michigan. It has the largest living alumni base. We have more brands that want to partner with the ‘block M’ and partner with the athletes in conjunction with the ‘block M’ more than any other school in the country. We sit in a robust business market in metro Detroit, but have national ties into different markets because we have alumni in New York and alumni in California. 

We’re able to make a compelling pitch to brands when they want to do real NIL activations with our student athletes. Our friends down the street, in Michigan State and Columbus, don’t quite have that same competitive advantage because they’re so much more of a regional, localized brand than Michigan, which is more national. I do think that Michigan only stands to benefit from that. 

You can’t discount the educational piece of it, and the relationship value of it. When the sum of money for these student athletes has gotten so significant, then you really have to start peeling back. What the advantage is now, if you have money, then how can you multiply that? Some of the best multipliers of compensation are relationships and education. How are you going to take those earnings in that window while you’re in college, and multiply that year over year. That’s our goal with what we’re trying to do, and I know that’s the goal with Michigan athletics — create great infrastructure, develop relationships. 

As they’re earning that money, it’s not about how much you make. It’s about how much you can keep and how you can multiply that over time. There’s no better market in college sports than Michigan for that. You might be able to look at Stanford or Notre Dame. I’d say those are up to par, but Michigan is just so much bigger, and the engagement is so much more significant than those two other schools. I really do believe we check all the boxes, if you’re a prospective student athlete. … There’s a whole host of reasons, and we’re at the level now where we can compete from a compensation standpoint. It’s not like it was five years ago, six years ago and all the years before that, where some schools might have something under the table, and we had nothing. Now there’s an equalizer there. Michigan is very well positioned for the future of college athletics.

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CLEMSON — Early Thursday morning, a new bill in Michigan was introduced that will ban schools from complying with NIL investigations and prohibit required reporting of NIL deals to the NCAA, the College Sports Commission and Deloitte.  

This bill will contradict new enforcement rules and will require schools to break the affiliation agreement they plan to sign. The state of Tennessee introduced a similar bill to its legislative body last month, which is known as Bill No. 536.

What does all of this mean?

It means these two states have started an attack where they hope to blow up plans from the NCAA and the four power conferences to police revenue-sharing in college sports, while taking aim at the athlete compensation cap, the severe penalties for rule-breakers and the policies that prevent phony booster-backed NIL deals to players.

In other words, they are trying to create chaos.

Will it work?

NCAA President Charlie Baker does not think it will.

In an article written by Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, he writes how many doubt the clearinghouse will withstand inevitable legal challenges, administrators here provided legitimate reasons for why they believe in its long-term survival. Most notable of those, says NCAA president Charlie Baker, is that the clearinghouse’s appeals process — arbitration — is equipped with subpoena powers.

“They do have that power,” Baker told Yahoo Sports. “Arbitration typically has subpoena power and I’m pretty sure since this one sits inside an injunction, they will have it.”

Dellenger wrote that officials at the power conferences confirmed that “significant subpoena powers” exist under the arbitration appeals process, but those powers are less expansive than subpoena authority within a courtroom.

The decision to use subpoena powers and how to use them is expected to rest with the arbitrator presiding over the appeals process.

A subpoena is a legal document issued by a court or other authorized body that compels an individual to appear in court or at a deposition to give testimony or provide documents or other tangible evidence. 

“We won’t have complete subpoena power, but if an athlete goes into arbitration … those records, you can get access to some of those records,” said Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork in the article.  

Bjork is a member of a settlement implementation committee that helped construct the new enforcement entity, along with Clemson athletic director Graham Neff.

In the article, Neff details the factors used to form a compensation range.

“Athletic performance is a big part of it. Your social media reach and following. Market — where schools are at. The reach of your school within said market,” he said.

According to Neff, the reach will vary by school.

“The reach of Georgia Tech in Atlanta is different than the reach of Georgia State,” he says.

Neff believes that a “majority” of NIL deals will derive from “associated companies,” as school sponsors, multi-media rights partners and individual alumni and boosters work to provide universities with additional compensation so they can exceed the $20.5 million revenue sharing cap that each school is afforded.

Third-party NIL compensation that passes the clearinghouse does not count against the cap. As Neff said, “There’s some toothpaste back in the tube.”

Deloitte, which is a multinational professional accounting services network based in London, is one of the Big Four accounting firms. According to Dellenger, Deloitte claims that 70 percent of past deals from booster collectives would have been denied in their algorithm, while 90 percent of past deals from public companies would have been approved.

Deloitte also shared with officials that about 80 percent of NIL deals with public companies were valued at less than $10,000 and 99 percent of those deals were valued at less than $100,000. These figures suggest that the clearinghouse threatens to significantly curtail the millions of dollars that school-affiliated, booster-backed collectives are distributing to athletes.

“No one is trying to restrict someone’s earning potential, but what we’re trying to say is, ‘What is the real market?’” Bjork said in the article. “Everybody you talk to about the pro market will tell you that NIL deals for pro athletes are really small. In the collective world, we created a false market.”

There’s teams around the country that had long-standing winning streaks either continue into the off-season or end during the 2025 campaign. How about a enduring losing skid that finally concluded?

For an Iowa high school softball team, a long-lived losing streak came to an end earlier this week on Tuesday night. The South Tama Trojans ended a 80-game skid with an 11-1 win over Vinton-Shellsburg, according to a The Cedar Rapids Gazette report.

It was a streak that had dated back to after South Tama’s last win, coming on June 26, 2021 over Eagle Grove. That’s 1,817 days in between victories for the Iowa high school softball program.

What was arguably even more eye-popping was how long ago the Trojans’ last WaMaC Conference victory was: June 27th, 2016. South Tama had snapped a streak that was nearly double that of the regular season losing skid, which the Trojans had gone 3,643 days since its last WaMaC victory over Williamsburg nearly a decade ago.

South Tama had scored a mere 19 runs through the first twelve games of the regular season before they had run up against Vinton-Shellsburg, in which they piled up 11 runs, one more than its previous season-high. The Trojans ended up losing the second game of a double-header against Vinton-Shellsburg,

The Trojans are 1-12 on the season and in two previous seasons, South Tama had finished with a pair of 0-31 records per Jeff Linder of The Cedar Rapids Gazette. South Tama didn’t field a softball team in 2022.

Between July 2024 and June 2025, Missouri spent $31.7 million on NIL, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Eli Hoff reported. That figure includes a hefty sum last month, per financial documents and invoices from the Mizzou-focused NIL collective, Every True Tiger.

In 2024, Missouri spent nearly two-thirds of those dollars on football and 25% on men’s basketball, according to the Post-Dispatch, while the rest was split among the rest of the athletics programs. All told, the Tigers spent $12.4 million in 2024, and that number increased to $25 million so far this year.

Of that $25 million, nearly $10.3 million came this month, just before the House v. NCAA settlement takes effect. The idea of “front-loading” NIL deals became a topic of conversation as the agreement awaited final approval, ushering in the revenue-sharing era and creating a clearinghouse to vet deals.

Under the House settlement, schools will be able to share up to $20.5 million directly with athletes. Additionally, the NIL Go clearinghouse is in place, vetting deals worth more than $600. Run by Deloitte, it is meant to help determine fair market value, per settlement terms.

Deals struck prior to June 6 – the date Judge Claudia Wilken approved the settlement – and paid out before July 1 will be vetted by the clearinghouse. According to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, more than 130 deals were submitted as of Wednesday night.

Every True Tiger was named one of On3’s Top 15 NIL collectives in the country last year, and the state’s law plays a big part in the relationship with the school. Missouri’s law allows an NIL collective to receive institutional funds for distribution to athletes, meaning every True Tiger shifted from operating as a donor-driven collective to a marketing agency. According to the Post-Dispatch, funds listed on the invoices are dubbed “talent fees.”

“Because of the leniency with the state law, the school and NIL collective have been aggressive,” a fellow SEC NIL collective leader told On3’s Pete Nakos of Mizzou and Every True Tiger.

Missouri football received the bulk of the NIL funds last year, securing slightly less than $8 million in 2024, according to the Post-Dispatch. The Tigers put together an impressive season, finishing 10-3 overall and winning the Music City Bowl against Iowa. It marked the second straight 10-win season for Eli Drinkwitz and Mizzou after going 11-2 in 2023, capped by a Cotton Bowl victory over Ohio State.

The rising junior collected 19 wins in the circle and holds a 3.38 career ERA with 193 strikeouts while also slashing .398/.921/.540 with 38 home runs and 90 RBI for her career. Last season, Spearman hit 20 home runs and walked 55 times, which was fourth best in the country.

The season before, Spearman was named the CUSA Freshman and Player of the Year and is a two-time All-CUSA First Teamer. The El Paso native was the 21^st ranked player in the transfer portal according to Softball America. Her .430 batting average this past season set a program record and her .606 on-base percentage and .977 slugging percentage were both ranked fifth in the country.

She led the team in starts (21), ERA (3.54) and opponent batting average (.221) to go along with her team-leading offensive performance.

Tech’s offseason has been busy, signing the No. 3, No. 7 and No. 29 players in the portal before the addition of Spearman.