NIL

Villanova's basketball team should benefit from the NIL settlement, but little else is immediately clear

For Philadelphia, whose only FBS football program is forever on life support, the biggest news from the House v. NCAA settlement appears to be that Big East member Villanova belongs to the conference whose men’s basketball programs are expected to have the most money at their disposal of any conference. The settlement means schools now […]

Published

1 month ago

June 9, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Villanova's basketball team should benefit from the NIL settlement, but little else is immediately clear

For Philadelphia, whose only FBS football program is forever on life support, the biggest news from the House v. NCAA settlement appears to be that Big East member Villanova belongs to the conference whose men’s basketball programs are expected to have the most money at their disposal of any conference.

The settlement means schools now can disburse a floating pool of money, expected to be a maximum of $20.5 million in the upcoming school year and increasing annually. This is on top of whatever name, image, and likeness money student-athletes negotiate for themselves, as long as the process of procuring that NIL money meets new guidelines.

In short, schools now will officially be paying their athletes salaries, and doing so in a sanctioned manner. Super. Good for the kids.

This will not, in any way, create any sort of equity, nor will it keep schools and boosters from cheating. It is lipsticking a pig that is irredeemably ugly and irretrievably unfair.

There are a mind-numbing number of other likely consequences, from the Power Four conferences continuing to splurge on their powerhouse football teams, to roster limits squeezing both recent college recruits and existing players off teams on which they planned to play or teams on which they’d already played, to kids getting grandfathered into schools but not on to the teams.

There’s a possibility the ruling is delayed by further legal wrangling, but when it goes forward, there will be tons of fallout and a few lawsuits, too: For example, when some Title IX audit at, say, Alabama reveals that the football team received $20.4 million while women’s soccer, tennis, and swimming split 100 grand. Roll over, Tide.

And what would an NCAA resolution be without the creation of yet another layer of bureaucracy? Enter the College Sports Commission (CSC), a (supposedly) independent LLC tasked with enforcing the rather nebulous new rules, investigating alleged violations, and handing down punishments for those who run afoul of the nebulous new rules. This means that the bumbling NCAA, for decades a study in misadministration, no longer will selectively oversee or inconsistently adjudicate violations.

The CSC will rely on athletes self-reporting outside NIL deals. It also will be run by Bryan Seeley, whose last jobs involved running Major League Baseball’s often bizarre PED and domestic-violence investigations. He was hired by the commissioners of the Power Four conferences — the Southeastern Conference, Big Ten, Big 12, and Atlantic Coast Conference.

So, an MLB guy hired by bigwigs to police those same bigwigs.

What could possibly go wrong?

At any rate, using a formula that Division I programs like those in the Big East are unencumbered by FBS football programs — Villanova’s team is in the FCS, formerly known as Division I-AA — they’ll have more cash available for their premier programs. This should give teams like Villanova more available revenue, approaching $6 million on average per school, according to numbers presented at a the Global NIL Summit and reported by ESPN.com’s Dan Wetzel, or about 23% more than schools from the next highest-spending conferences.

Of course, that’s just the money coming from the school. That does not include money from third-party NIL sources, like NIL collectives such as Villanova’s “Friends of Nova,” which reportedly this season delivered $1.7 million in NIL money to star forward Eric Dixon. That source of money will not be capped, though any amount exceeding $600 must be validated by the CSC. And that money must be self-reported by the athlete.

Despite an already healthy NIL pool, Villanova missed the NCAA Tournament all three years after Jay Wright’s retirement and fired coach Kyle Neptune. The Wildcats hired Kevin Willard in March.

The main intent of the House class-action lawsuit was to pay current and former athletes in arrears of the next 10 years, and the NCAA and the group formerly known as the Power Five conferences (the Pac-12 used to be a power conference) will pay out nearly $2.8 billion to about 390,000 former and current athletes who played before 2021, when the current NIL rules were created, and it also resulted in the revenue-sharing model for the immediate future. Division I schools have until June 15 to opt in, and all of Philadelphia’s D-I schools either have or are expected to opt in. The Ivy League, which includes Penn, has said its schools will not opt in.

The adjudicators also sought to produce a path to contain NIL bidding wars that might make playing fields more even and oversee NIL income and expenditure.

For instance. Ohio State’s benefactors essentially bought a national title last season by spending a record $20 million on its team. However, assuming the Buckeyes and their ilk muster third-party NIL money, there’s no reason they can’t spend more than double that amount annually.

More locally, after the 2022-23 season, Penn lost Jordan Dingle, the Ivy League Player of the Year. He entered the transfer portal and landed at St. John’s, where he cashed in on NIL money in his final season of eligibility — NIL money that doesn’t exist in any large amounts at Ivy schools, since the league does not allow NIL collectives.

The Quakers went 9-5 in the Ivy League in both 2021-22 and 2022-23 with Dingle leading the way, but fell to 3-11 in 2023-24 without him. A 4-10 mark in 2024-25 led to the firing of coach Steve Donahue after nine seasons.

Donahue’s replacement, local high school and college legend and former Iowa coach Fran McCaffery, was hired in part because of his familiarity with NIL and the transfer portal.

How McCaffery navigates these new, uncharted waters will be fascinating to watch.

As for Villanova:

No more excuses.

NIL

Argument over ‘valid buisiness purpose’ for NIL collectives threatens college sports settlement

Less than two weeks after terms of a multibillion-dollar college sports settlement went into effect, friction erupted over the definition of a “valid business purpose” that collectives making name, image likeness payments to players are supposed to have. The new College Sports Commission sent a letter to athletic directors last week saying it was rejecting […]

Published

6 minutes ago

July 15, 2025

Your Sports Nation

The new College Sports Commission sent a letter to athletic directors last week saying it was rejecting deals in which players were receiving money from collectives that were created solely to pay them and don’t provide goods or services to the general public for profit.

A lead attorney for the players responded by saying those instructions went against settlement terms and asking the CSC to rescind the guidance.

“This process is undermined when the CSC goes off the reservation and issues directions to the schools that are not consistent with the Settlement Agreement terms,” attorney Jeffrey Kessler wrote to NCAA outside counsel Rakesh Kilaru in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.

Yahoo Sports first reported details of the letter, in which Kessler threatens to take the issue to a judge assigned with resolving disputes involved in the settlement.

Kessler told AP his firm was not commenting on the contents of the letter, and Kilaru did not immediately respond to AP’s request for a comment.

Yahoo quoted a CSC spokesman as saying the parties are working to resolve differences and that “the guidance issued by the College Sports Commission … is entirely consistent with the House settlement and the rules that have been agreed upon with class counsel.”

When NIL payments became allowed in 2021, boosters formed so-called “collectives” that were closely tied to universities to work out contracts with the players, who still weren’t allowed to be paid directly by the schools.

Terms of the House settlement allow schools to make the payments now, but keep the idea of outside payments from collectives, which have to be approved by the CSC if they are worth $600 or more.

The CSC, in its letter last week, explained that if a collective reaches a deal, for instance, for an athlete to appear on behalf of the collective, which charges an admission fee, that collective does not have a “valid business purpose” because the purpose of the event is to raise money to pay athletes, not to provide goods or services available to the general public for profit.

Another example of a disallowed deal was one an athlete makes to sell merchandise to raise money to pay that player because, the CSC guidance said, the purpose of “selling merchandise is to raise money to pay that student-athlete and potentially other student-athletes at a particular school or schools, which is not a valid business purpose.”

Kessler’s letter notes that the “valid business purpose” rule was designed to ensure athletes were not simply being paid to play, and did not prohibit NIL collectives from paying athletes for the type of deals described above.

To prevent those payments “would be to create a new prohibition on payments by a NIL collective that is not provided for or contemplated by the Settlement Agreement, causing injury to the class members who should be free to receive those payments,” Kessler wrote.

___

AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports

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NIL

Lane Kiffin calls out rev-share rules, says some teams ‘not staying within’ cap

While adjusting to the revenue-sharing era in college athletics, coaches have made their frustrations clear. Big 12 coaches called for transparency and clarity last week at the conference’s media days, and Lane Kiffin also shared his thoughts on the post-House v. NCAA settlement landscape. Kiffin called out the rules around revenue-sharing set under the agreement. […]

Published

51 minutes ago

July 15, 2025

Your Sports Nation

While adjusting to the revenue-sharing era in college athletics, coaches have made their frustrations clear. Big 12 coaches called for transparency and clarity last week at the conference’s media days, and Lane Kiffin also shared his thoughts on the post-House v. NCAA settlement landscape.

Kiffin called out the rules around revenue-sharing set under the agreement. Schools are now able to directly share up to $20.5 million with athletes, and the first payments went out this month. That figure is set to increase annually under the 10-year settlement.

Rev-share offers cannot be sent to recruits until their senior years of high school, meaning Aug. 1 is a landmark date. As Kiffin looked at where things stand, he sees schools going above that $20.5 million cap. That adds to the questions he has.

“We get a lot of questions like, what’s it like now?” Kiffin said in his remarks Monday at SEC Media Days. “We’ve been operating – we have – under these cap guidelines of what was coming and what it was going look like. I think we’ve done a really good job of that. Obviously means you can’t sign as many players as you would like at times because you have a budget. So we’re obviously hopeful that will be rewarded by doing that.

“I think it’s obvious people aren’t staying within that cap, so I think the whole thing will be, what does that look like? That’s what we don’t know. What does it look like when you don’t and what are the punishments for that? Do you win and that comes later? So that’s remained to be seen, but already got the questions about the cap, what that’s like having to do that. We’ve been doing that for a while, operating on that.”

As the NIL era transformed college sports, Lane Kiffin was outspoken about its impact. He was also quick to make jokes on social media and recalled a quip about Texas A&M’s highly rated recruiting class in 2022 as dollars started flowing.

The cap set by the House settlement is for revenue-sharing from the school. Third-party NIL deals will be vetted by the Deloitte-operated clearinghouse, NIL Go, if they are worth more than $600. That has been the subject of frustration from NIL collectives in light of recent guidance from the College Sports Commission.

But when asked whether there should be a salary cap in college football – something Deion Sanders suggested a week ago at Big 12 Media Days – Kiffin said that’s the goal with the rev-share limit. But he stressed the need for clarity with regard to following the rules.

“I think that’s what we attempted. Doesn’t seem like that’s working very well,” Kiffin said of the $20.5 million cap. “So yeah, I mean, stating the obvious. That was the intention of what was going on because there were so many complaints when NIL started about, okay, everybody has different advantages, and different payrolls. Saw those a couple years ago. I was up here at one of these joking about a luxury tax based on A&M’s spending or whatever it was. So that was supposed to be being fix, and now it’s not.

“Again, we’ve tried to follow the guidelines because that’s what we were told we needed to do. I’m not saying they’re wrong for doing it – I’m not calling anybody out. If the system isn’t solid enough to prevent that, then we really don’t have a system. So you’re not operating on a salary cap.”

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NIL

Argument over ‘valid buisiness purpose’ for NIL collectives threatens college sports settlement

Argument over ‘valid buisiness purpose’ for NIL collectives threatens college sports settlement – myMotherLode.com Link 0

Published

1 hour ago

July 15, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Argument over ‘valid buisiness purpose’ for NIL collectives threatens college sports settlement – myMotherLode.com

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Villanova's basketball team should benefit from the NIL settlement, but little else is immediately clear

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Villanova's basketball team should benefit from the NIL settlement, but little else is immediately clear

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Argument over ‘valid buisiness purpose’ for NIL collectives threatens college sports settlement

NIL

Lane Kiffin calls out rev-share rules, says some teams ‘not staying within’ cap

NIL

Argument over ‘valid buisiness purpose’ for NIL collectives threatens college sports settlement

YSN

Villanova's basketball team should benefit from the NIL settlement, but little else is immediately clear

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NIL

Argument over ‘valid buisiness purpose’ for NIL collectives threatens college sports settlement

NIL

Lane Kiffin calls out rev-share rules, says some teams ‘not staying within’ cap

NIL

Argument over ‘valid buisiness purpose’ for NIL collectives threatens college sports settlement

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