“So many vows…they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.”

Ser Jamie “The Kingslayer” Lannister was not speaking specifically about the predicament Michigan and Michigan State may soon find themselves if House Bill No. 4643 passes when speaking in George R.R. Martin’s classic A Clash of Kings, but the situation applies.

Four state lawmakers in Michigan have authored HB 4643 in an attempt to exempt the state’s universities from any rules and accountability that may prevent Michigan or Michigan State from paying players or recruits as much as they would like, and also stop any entity from punishing those schools for violating any rules. 

There’s nothing new to that. The NIL era was born in 2019 via a state law in California, and various state legislatures have been trying to give their schools advantages ever since under the widely-recognized legal theory commonly known as “My dad can beat up your dad.” 

The difference here is that Michigan’s HB 4643 goes one step further. It would prohibit the requirement to report NIL deals to the NCAA or any associated entity which, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is the entire idea behind the new College Sports Commission. 

Not only are schools now required to report any NIL deal of at least $600 to the CSC, soon the Power 4 conferences will circulate a document that will basically serve as a blood oath to follow the rules established by the CSC, abide by any applicable punishments, and keep their mouths shut. Oh, and definitely don’t try to sue their way out of it. As Yahoo Sports reported last month:

Officials from the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC are circulating a draft of a groundbreaking and first-of-its-kind document intended to prevent universities from using their state laws to violate new enforcement rules and, in a wholly stunning concept, requires schools to waive their right to pursue legal challenges against the new enforcement entity, the College Sports Commission.

The document, now viewed by dozens of leading school administrators, would bind institutions to the enforcement policies, even if their state law is contradictory, and would exempt the CSC from lawsuits from member schools over enforcement decisions, offering instead a route for schools to pursue arbitration.

The schools would essentially be forced to sign the document, otherwise they’d run out of teams to play:

The consequence for not signing the agreement is steep: a school risks the loss of conference membership and participation against other power league programs.

“You have to sign it,” says one athletic director who has seen the document, “or we don’t play you.”

“As a condition of membership, you must comply with the settlement and enforcement,” says a power conference president with knowledge of the document.

So, what’s a school to do if HB 4643 passes? Comply with their conference rules and defy state law? Or obey the law and risk expulsion from the Big Ten? Honor their father or protect the king?

Look, as we all learned from Schoolhouse Rock, the introduction of a bill is a long way from a passing a law. And this isn’t even the first bill of its kind; Tennessee passed a similar law on May 1. As of now, the Volunteers and Commodores remain in the SEC. But then again, the CSC document remains unsigned.

It remains to be seen if the CSC and its associated agreements spawned by the House settlement will survive various legal challenges, and so it’s not surprising to see state lawmakers run the same play that’s worked so well the last six years or so. And while HB 4643 works its way through the Michigan state house in Lansing, it will be interesting to see if the Wolverines and Spartans flex their muscle to try to kill the bill or to get it passed. 

Part of the reason the unregulated, Wild West era of NIL in college athletics had to go, we were told, was because that system was unsustainable. It seemed to be sustaining just fine at Missouri though.

Via the Freedom of Information Act, the Columbia Missourian uncovered a treasure trove of documents related to Missouri’s NIL program, giving perhaps the most unvarnished look at how college athletes were paid in the NIL era. Those documents were available because Missouri paid its athletes straight from the athletics department to the Tigers’ collective — Every True Tiger Brands, LLC — and the newspaper got ahold of invoices ETT sent to the university.

The headline figure was that Missouri spent $31.7 million on NIL within the past year — the vast majority going to football — but even that hardly tells the true story. In fact, Mizzou spent just shy of $25 million from January 2025 to June, including a whopping $10.279 million in June alone. This practice came to be known as “front-loading,” as Mizzou offloaded payments that likely would be denied by the new Deloitte-run NIL Go clearinghouse (whose legality has yet to be challenged). Mizzou also spent $4.647 million in January, a period that coincided with the football transfer portal, and $3.592 million in May, a period that coincided with the basketball portal.

To the original point above, the Missourian uncovered invoices dating back to September 2023, and the numbers generally rose over time, even before the House settlement and its consequences became a reality. 

Broken into roughly 7-month periods, here’s how the money rose over time:

September 2023-April 2024: $794,171 average (High: $881K | Low: $662K)
May 2024-November 2024: $1.64 million average (High: $1.872M | Low: $902K)
December 2024-June 2025: $3.738 million average (High: $10.279M | Low: $1.211M)

Even removing the outlier of June 2025, Mizzou was still spending an average of $2.5 million per month on NIL during the last six months of the “unregulated” system.

As for how that money was spent, the Missourian found ETT paid nearly two-thirds of every dollar it was supplied on football ($8 million of the $12.4 million in total), with men’s basketball getting 23.5 percent, baseball just below 4 percent, women’s basketball just below 3 percent ($348,100 in real dollars) and on down to the tennis team, which received $100,000. 

Like all SEC schools, Missouri will spend the full $20.5 million “salary cap” as allowed under the House settlement, with $18 million coming in actual dollars and $2.5 million in new scholarships counting toward the cap. Most observers anticipate football eating up 75 percent of the cap, but Georgia announced in February it will spend roughly 66 percent of its $20.5 million on football, in line with how Missouri distributed its NIL money. 

The fight for the money football and men’s basketball does not consume will be real and vicious. At Mizzou, that likely manifests between baseball, women’s basketball and the rest of the Olympic sports. The Tigers endured a historically bad season on the diamond, complete with a last-place 3-27 record in conference play. Afterward, AD Laird Veatch, in announcing that he would not fire head coach Kerrick Jackson, said a “lack of support” explained the club’s performance.

“We have not invested at the level that we need to really be competitive in this league, and that sport in particular, it’s an incredibly competitive sport,” Veatch said. That support will likely come at the expense of Missouri’s other sports — but not football or men’s basketball. 

To make up the gap, Mizzou — like every other school — will increase its efforts to generate outside sponsorships for its athletes. 

“We’re going to need our businesses, our sponsors to really embrace that as part of the new era,” Veatch said. “It’s going to be on us as athletic departments (and) Learfield as our partner to continue to integrate those types of opportunities in meaningful ways for sponsors.”

As the numbers proved, the money to pay athletes simply for being Missouri Tigers was there. Will Mizzou find a way to get that money to its athletes in our new, guardrail-ed era?