NIL

Deadline, expedited College Sports Commission roll out, worries non-Power Conferences

Published

6 months ago

June 15, 2025

Dan Butterly sat inside a large conference room inside Orlando’s World Center Marriott Resort and listened as Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork and select members of the Settlement Implementation Committee explained how the newly-approved House v. NCAA settlement would change college athletics as we know it during the first panel of last week’s National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) convention.

Bjork is part of a 10-person working group made up of two ADs from each of the five defendant – known colloquially as the “Power” – conferences that have been developing ways to implement the terms of the House v. NCAA class-action settlement approved late June 6 by California district court judge Claudia Wilken.

And while the NACDA panel was certainly educational, especially for ADs and administrators from the more than 300 Division I schools that weren’t defendants in the groundbreaking House case, which combined three separate lawsuits against the NCAA, it left many in the room with more questions than answers.

“In some ways it felt like they were trying to educate us, but at the same time talking down in some ways,” Butterly, the Big West Conference commissioner, told On3 after emerging from that panel Tuesday morning, “just because of the lack of information that’s available to the rest of us in the room.”

A week after Wilken’s approval, the NCAA and defendant conferences jointly released a 36-page question-and-answer document late Friday that provided some clarity on an array of questions provided to the NCAA over the last year. But there still remain several key issues that have non-defendant Division I conferences and schools raising concerns about the expedited pace at which these groups are being asked to opt-in to the new world order, even after the original June 15 deadline was extended to June 30.

Butterly described it as creating “frustration and confusion” for schools from outside the defendant/Power conferences – i.e. the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC.

“Now we know where the goalposts stand, and rather than being in a defensive stance and not know which way the ball is going to go, now we know where the ball is going and you have to adjust to it,” Butterly said. “But we just don’t know the playing rules yet, and it’s really about trying to get clarification beyond the stuff we see posted (in the media).”

NEW WORLD ORDER

The new House settlement formally ends the NCAA’s long-standing “amateurism” model in favor of revenue-sharing that allows Division I schools to provide direct financial payments to student-athletes beginning July 1. At least for the 2025-26 academic year, Division I programs are able to share up to $20.5 million, or 22-percent of the Autonomy/Power conferences’ aggregate revenue from media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorships.

There is also nearly $2.8 billion in back damages to be paid out over a 10-year period to former NCAA student-athletes who competed between 2016-24 that were either fully or partially unable to take advantage of NIL or rev-sharing. A significant portion – more than 85-percent – is expected to go toward athletes who participated in the highest revenue-generating sports: football and men’s basketball. Before Wednesday’s Title IX appeal was filed, putting back damages on pause during the appeal process, the first back payments were set to be paid within 45 days of the settlement’s finalization – July 21.

The House settlement also facilitated the creation of the College Sports Commission, a new enforcement entity that will implement the settlement’s rules around revenue-sharing, NIL and roster limits, as well as Deloitte’s “NIL Go” clearinghouse, which will regulate and approve third-party NIL deals above $600 between athletes and non-institutional entities based on an algorithm that determines an athlete’s fair-market-value within an established “range of compensation” based on similar NIL deals.

As NCAA president Charlie Baker explained at a May 20 panel set up by the Knight Commission, the College Sports Commission and NIL Go will serve as “the vehicle through which most of the so-called ‘money issues’ get addressed.”

But while all those new innovations are generally seen as welcomed changes across what had become an almost unchecked marketplace in college athletics, it’s the general lack of transparency about what the next stage will look like, including yet-to-be-finalized specifics – including legal contract language – about the College Sports Commission and NIL Go.

“It was very alarming and frankly discouraging that institutions that had a choice of whether to opt-in or not felt an urgency to make that decision, and there was a huge vacuum of information about how the terms will be implemented and what the impacts could be,” Knight Commission CEO Amy Perko told On3. “This plane is being built while it’s in the air.”

According to Butterly, the non-defendant conferences have yet to receive any indication whether they’ll be required to sign the same “participation agreements” the Power Five programs must sign with the College Sports Commission that not only codifies the settlement terms but binds all parties against taking legal action to settle disagreements.

Michael Cross, the Southern Conference commissioner, also raised similar concerns about a yet-to-be-revealed financial charge associated with joining the CSC – much like there’s a cost to be a part of the NCAA – or to utilize Deloitte’s NIL Go clearinghouse.

“None of those entities are doing their work for free, but there’s been no suggestion or clarity about where and how the costs and expenses to run these entities are going to be assigned,” Cross told On3.

And given the lack of transparency with those outside the defendant conferences, there is concern those legally-binding agreements could be forced on institutions just prior to the new June 30 deadline, not allowing time for each institution to best evaluate the full legal scope of the agreement.

“That’s the $20.5 million question,” Butterly said. “Once this information is released, … if they require as part of the opting in … that you have to agree to this contract as an opt-in institution, that takes some time. You can’t just as an AD or commissioner sign off on behalf of your membership or institution. That has to go through a legal process.”

Added Cross: “Nobody would run a business this way, nobody would say: ‘Oh yeah, we’ll write you a blank check and send me the bill later.’”

MONEY MATTERS

While most of the defendant/Power conference institutions are expected to take full advantage of the new rev-sharing cap, which allows programs to dish out up to the $20.5 million annually to student-athletes as they see fit, that figure is simply unreasonable for many institutions outside the Power Five conferences.

Not that it’s stopping them from opting in. All 11 Big West programs, which includes Hawaii for all non-football sports until the Rainbow Warriors officially join the Mountain West in 2026, already opted into the House settlement. But that doesn’t mean those Big West programs will be able to take full advantage of all the same financial benefits as their Power conference peers.

“We’re not going to be at the $20.5 million level, I’m just being blunt,” Butterly said of the Big West, a non-football conference. “One of my institution’s athletic directors said, ‘Our budget is $20.5 million and we’re not going to be able to double our budget to pay student athletes.”

Facing similar financial limitations, the Southern Conference (SoCon) is split 50-50, with five of its 10 schools opting in to the House settlement and five opting out for the first year while the dust settles, preferring to take a wait-and-see approach before reevaluating their options prior to the 2026-27 academic year.

“At our level, I don’t have anybody that’s going to go to $20.5 million, and that’s OK,” Cross said. “It doesn’t prevent us from meeting on the playing field, it doesn’t prevent us from meeting on the basketball court.”

Even at a Power program like Alabama, which produced an annual revenue of nearly $235 million but posted a roughly $28 million overall deficit in FY 2023-24, money remains a concern. Especially when, like most other Division I programs, its two revenue-generating sports – football and men’s basketball – often help to subsidize its 19 other non-revenue-generating sports.

“Our smallest net financial losers – from a financial standpoint, they’re all important programs – are men’s and women’s tennis, each lose about $1 million, and everybody else is more than that. … And from a financial standpoint, we’re in a pretty good position compared to most schools out there,” Byrne said on Tuesday’s episode of McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning with Greg McElroy and Cole Cubelic. “But it’s still challenging the new model because now we have a $20.5 million line item from a rev-share standpoint, which I think is the right thing to do, we’re going to fully fund it, but we’ve got to have that money come from somewhere. So, it’s a bit of a tight rope you’re walking right now.”

In addition to rev-sharing restrictions, all 32 Division I conferences are responsible to sharing in the $2.8 billion in back damages paid out over the next decade. The Big West is responsible for approximately $31.5 million – “a significant impact,” Butterly said – with the NCAA expected to withhold more than $3 million annually from the conference’s annual revenue distribution figure.

“That’s a direct impact on what we can do for conference championships and what we can do for our student-athletes at an institutional level,” Butterly said.

While he declined to provide a specific number, Cross indicated the SoCon’s financial responsibility for back damages is “millions of dollars annually, and at our level, those are real dollars.” In an effort to better manage their finances, at least in this first year, the SoCon ruled it will not expand scholarship limits beyond the previous NCAA standards prior to the House settlement ruling, even though the settlement allows for increased scholarship opportunities.

“All of our schools want to be competitive, they want to be competitive at the highest level, and they all operate within budgets,” Cross said, “but the order of magnitude is different and understanding what those costs might be is a real factor in the decision-making.”

And while the Power conferences are pushing to expand the College Football Playoff even further to add additional games – and revenue opportunities – to help offset the cost associated with paying both back damages and future revenue-sharing, the non-defendant conferences don’t currently have that option to generate new revenue.

“Those dynamics haven’t changed (for non-defendant schools), the pie hasn’t grown, and we’re going to spend a lot more money for our slice of pie,” Cross said. “And it isn’t going to look a whole lot different in size.”

WHAT’S NEXT WITH COLLEGE SPORTS COMMISSION, NIL GO

While the College Sports Commission and NIL Go are effectively taking over enforcement and regulation of the monetary side of college athletics, the NCAA will continue to manage other aspects such as academic eligibility and performance, as well as working to continue to govern rules around recruiting, sports betting, and other fraud and safety violations.

Within that vein, the NCAA plans to overhaul its own governance model to better align with the terms and conditions of House settlement and College Sports Commission. That includes deleting more than 150 previous bylaws and rules, many of which restricted direct payment to student-athletes – which is now legal, of course.

But what’s more concerning to the non-defendant conferences is a move to grant the Power conferences as much as 65-percent weighted voting authority in future committees, thus giving the four most powerful leagues even greater influence to reshape collegiate sports as they see fit.

“The CFP (Power) Four will have 59 institutions (between) four conferences with potentially 65-percent of the weighted vote in Division I governance moving forward,” Butterly said, “and many of us may not even have a representative in the room where it’s going to happen.”

Of course, that’s not sitting well with the 28 other conferences and more than 300 Division I institutions that are not a part of the Autonomy/Power Four leagues.

“That’s just not a way we should be governing a 370-member Division I governance group moving forward,” Butterly said.

The Division I Board of Directors will vote on that proposal in their June 23 meeting, which is just a week before the newly extended June 30 opt-in deadline.

In the meantime, as non-Power conference programs continue to weigh their options on whether or not to fully embrace the new post-House world of college athletics, the majority simply want to be included in the conversation and then be afforded the necessary time to make informed decisions at an institutional and conference level.

“There are legitimate questions. Get us some answers, and then give us some time to digest it. Don’t say, hey, you’ve got two weeks,” Cross said. “I’m not saying we need six months, but geez, is 30 days with the Fourth of July intervening and everything else (going on) really that difficult? Is the world going to collapse if July 1 comes and goes and not everybody’s opted in yet? What’s the big deal? Nobody’s playing games until August.”

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Everyone caught up to Oregon’s business model. Can Ducks win it all in a world they pioneered?

Published

2 minutes ago

December 18, 2025

Your Sports Nation

After decades of milestone wins on its climb to college football powerhouse status, Oregon found itself on the other side of a signature victory this season.

As Indiana celebrated on the Ducks’ home field on Oct. 11, an Oregon staffer shook the hand of a Hoosiers assistant coach and congratulated him on a 30-20 win that helped validate IU as a national championship contender.

“We’re hard to beat,” the Oregon staffer said.

No doubt. Since joining the Big Ten last year, the Ducks are 17-1 in conference play and 24-2 overall, with a league title in their debut season. Since 2010, Oregon is tied for fifth in the nation in victories with Oklahoma at 161. Only Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and Georgia have more.

“We’ve been building to a standard of what winning football looks like, regardless of conference,” head coach Dan Lanning said this week.

After the Ducks spent years breaking through barriers that previously required something akin to birthright status for entry, college football has met them where they are. Adaptability and innovation are cornerstones of the Oregon brand, so of course, no school was better prepared to succeed when NCAA amateurism crumbled and the ability to effectively pay players became a necessity for programs that aspire to win national championships.

Oregon football has never been better, but the Ducks are no longer college football’s gate-crashers.

“There’s been some great stories in college football, but it’s even harder to stay there, and (the Ducks) have found a way to stay there,” said Craig Pintens, who was a high-ranking administrator at Oregon from 2011 through ’18 before becoming athletic director at Loyola Marymount.

In this year’s College Football Playoff, Indiana, Texas Tech and Ole Miss are the new-money climbers, no longer constrained by their histories.

The Ducks? Heading into a first-round home game against 12th-seeded James Madison on Saturday, they are just another team trying to win a championship.

Well, maybe not just another team.

You see, Oregon is not quite a member of the establishment class, either. It has a lot more in common with Ohio State, Georgia, Oklahoma, Alabama and Miami these days than with the Hoosiers, Red Raiders and Rebels — with one notable exception.

That first group has combined for 13 national titles since 2000 and 34 in college football’s poll era, dating to 1936.

The Ducks are still seeking their first.

“They’ve built the entire sundae at this point,” Pintens said. “It’s just a matter of putting that cherry on the top. And it is inevitable. It’s going to happen.”

College football has never cultivated upward mobility. Past success is the best predictor of future success. Lineage and tradition are prized commodities.

The schools at the top of the food chain tend to stay there — or have an easier time getting back when they slip. Those toward the bottom generally get stuck.

There are outliers. Nebraska looks as if it may never recreate the glory days of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Clemson went from good to elite under Dabo Swinney, but that era of dominance is increasingly looking like a moment in time rather than a permanent change.

And then there’s Oregon, the most obvious exception that proves the rule.

The Ducks didn’t have USC’s Heritage Hall, a shrine to a program that claims 11 national titles and eight Heisman winners. They didn’t have Touchdown Jesus, Notre Dame’s iconic monument to the program’s essential place in the history of college football.

“We didn’t have the kinds of things that Ohio State and Texas and all these legacy programs had, but we did feel like we had a chance,” former Oregon athletic director Pat Kilkenny said.

The first baby step toward Oregon shedding its history came in Shreveport, La., of all places, with quarterback Bill Musgrave leading coach Rich Brooks’ Ducks to a victory in the program’s first postseason game in 26 years, the 1989 Independence Bowl against Tulsa.

The mid-1990s featured trips to the Rose and Cotton bowls that signaled progress but also showed the Ducks still had a long way to go: Oregon lost those games to Penn State and Colorado by a combined score of 76-26.

Nike co-founder and Oregon alum Phil Knight’s involvement and investment in the program brought a grander vision in the early 2000s. Why not put up a billboard in Times Square to promote quarterback Joey Harrington as a Heisman Trophy contender in 2001?

“I think our optimism was more about Holiday Bowl and Top 25,” said Kilkenny, an Oregon native. “But somebody like Phil Knight gets involved, that doesn’t work for him. He doesn’t want to do anything unless he can be the best.”

Oregon football had no distinguishing characteristics, so Knight helped create them.

With Nike’s help, Oregon made uniforms a differentiator in recruiting, unveiling a fresh look almost weekly.

“Being fashion-progressive isn’t exactly indicative of a strong football program, but (Knight) saw it as brand-building,” Kilkenny said.

The Ducks were on the front end of the spread offense revolution under coach Mike Bellotti, then promoted Chip Kelly to head coach and changed the way the game was played by optimizing fast-paced football.

When the facilities arms race was escalating, Oregon built its so-called Death Star, a tinted-glass fortress with a barber shop, sleep pods and tech-integrated lockers. The $68 million Hatfield-Dowlin Complex, funded largely by Knight, opened in 2013.

The Ducks reached the national championship game in 2010 and 2014, losing each time.

They haven’t been back since, which suggests the ascent has stalled. That’s not the case. Through a whirlwind of coaching changes from Kelly’s successor, Mark Helfrich, to Willie Taggart to Mario Cristobal to Lanning in the span of only seven years, Oregon was still progressing.

“I think they’ve built a tremendous culture, and that culture has turned over through multiple coaches,” said Pintens, who credits his former boss, athletic director Rob Mullens, with overseeing the continued growth at Oregon.

Even with Knight’s backing, Oregon is not among the top revenue-generating programs in college football.

“Oregon is not as resourced as some of the other top powers in college football,” Pintens said. “They lack a population base. They don’t play in a huge stadium.”

Autzen Stadium’s gameday experience is one of the best in the country, but the place seats about 56,000, about half the capacity of the largest stadiums in the Big Ten and SEC.

When Oregon spends, it spends on what matters most.

“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning,” Oregon’s Dan Lanning said earlier this season in response to then-Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy’s comments about how much the Ducks’ roster costs. “We spend to win.”

In 2020, the NCAA lifted its ban on paying college athletes for their name, image and likeness. Quickly, those deals became a proxy for paying players, and Oregon was again an early adopter. Founded by Knight and other prominent donors, Division Street quickly became one of college football’s most well-run NIL collectives, groups that pool funds from boosters to license players’ rights.

Taggart and then Cristobal had already changed the nature of Oregon recruiting, turning the school into a destination for blue-chippers, despite the school’s limited number of those prospects within its geographic footprint.

Lanning was hired away from Georgia to keep that going in 2021. His ability to embrace a more transactional form of recruiting while still establishing a winning culture has allowed Oregon to narrow the gap between itself and the likes of Ohio State and Georgia.

NIL has been “an equalizing force,” Pintens said.

“You could have better facilities, you could have better coaching, better everything, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have any dollars to support that, it’s going to be really difficult to put together a team,” he said.

The transformation that took Oregon decades is happening much faster elsewhere, as paying players spreads talent around and gives the traditional have-nots a chance to become haves.

“The historical programs that weren’t able to compete, it did give them a chance to put a little jet propulsion into their football program, if that’s where they chose to invest,” Kilkenny said.

Fourth-seeded Big 12 champion Texas Tech, with a roster backed by billionaire booster Cody Campbell that reportedly cost more than $28 million, this season won its first outright conference title since 1955.

In the SEC, sixth-ranked Ole Miss has effectively mobilized its resources with the Grove Collective and ripped off three straight double-digit victory campaigns while LSU and Florida (with a combined six national titles) fired their head coaches this season.

In the Big Ten, Indiana, which started the year having lost more games than any other major college football program, has turned unprecedented investment into an unfathomable turnaround under coach Curt Cignetti. The Hoosiers kept rolling after the win in Eugene, knocked off Ohio State in the conference title game, and enter the Playoff as the No. 1 team in the country, boasting the program’s first Heisman Trophy winner in quarterback Fernando Mendoza. The Ducks are no longer the disruptors.

“The willingness and the belief in taking what had been done and saying, OK, we can be No. 1,” Kilkenny said. “We can win it all, and we can be a national brand, that has all happened.”

Oregon’s challenge now is not just to check the last box on the resume and join the blue bloods once and for all but to keep the new wave of gate-crashers from jumping ahead of them in line on the way to the top of the mountain.

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Kirk Herbstreit issues an apology for misunderstood post following Army-Navy game

Published

56 minutes ago

December 18, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Kirk Herbstreit drew the ire of the college football world earlier this week. Now, he’s moving quickly to clear the air after a social media post sparked backlash following the Army–Navy game.

Herbstreit, who’s become the face of ESPN’s college football coverage, addressed the situation in a lengthy post on X (formerly Twitter). He apologized for what he described as a misleading caption attached to a video clip promoting his Nonstop podcast with colleague Joey Galloway.

“Just wanted to address a mistake that we made on my socials earlier this week related to last weekend’s CFB Saturday,” Herbstreit wrote. “We posted a video where Joey Galloway and I were talking about how strange it was to be home and not traveling on a CFB weekend since the end of August and how we felt like we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We posted the video with a caption that was very misleading about ‘Weird not having any CFB this weekend.’”

Herbstreit acknowledges that the wording created a bit of confusion, appearing dismissive of games that were played, most notably the Army–Navy Game: “Some took that out of context and ran with it. That’s on me,” he wrote. “My apologies for any disrespect (albeit unintentional) to the teams that played last weekend, especially [Army] and [Navy].”

The original post, which has since been deleted, included a clip from the podcast with the caption, “Saturday not having college football threw us for a loop,” accompanied by a laughing emoji. That message quickly drew a response from Navy Athletics, which quote-tweeted the post with a photo from Saturday’s game.

More on Kirk Herbstreit, Army-Navy controversy

Alas, Navy went on to defeat Army 17–16 in one of college football’s most iconic rivalry games, a matchup that has occupied a standalone window on the Saturday following conference championship weekend for years. While it has no impact on the College Football Playoff, the game remains one of the sport’s most-watched events, averaging 7.84 million viewers on CBS.

In his apology, Herbstreit emphasized that the Army–Navy Game remains one of his favorite events on the college football calendar: “Not sure there is a game I personally look forward to more EVERY year than Army and Navy,” Herbstreit added.

“They play for the love for each other and love for the game. Anybody who has ever watched me for the last 30 years on TV knows how I feel about that game.”

Beyond Army–Navy, last weekend still featured a full slate of college football action. Bowl season opened with Washington facing Boise State, the FCS playoffs held quarterfinal games, and South Carolina State defeated Prairie View A&M in the Celebration Bowl.

Listening back to the deleted clip itself, Herbstreit and Galloway never actually stated there was no football being played. Instead, they reflected on the unfamiliar feeling of being home for the first time since August without their usual travel routine.

Still, the initial caption struck a nerve. It highlighted how easily attention can drift toward the Playoff and power conference landscape at the expense of the broader sport.

Herbstreit closed his statement by reiterating that the controversy stemmed from miscommunication, not disrespect. At the least, he felt it necessary to publicly address the situation, and let the college football world know he meant no ill-will towards Army-Navy.

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$87 million coach reportedly offered ‘blank check’ by Michigan to replace Sherrone Moore

Published

2 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Kalen DeBoer has done his part to deny any interest in the Michigan head coaching vacancy, but that hasn’t stopped an army of vocal college football analysts from speculating that he could jump ship from Alabama and become the next head man of the Wolverines.

DeBoer signed an $87 million contract over eight years with Alabama early in 2024 as the man to replace Nick Saban, and so far the results have been up and down, but mostly positive.

However connected DeBoer may be to the Crimson Tide at this point in time, there are reportedly some serious power brokers linked to Michigan who are extending quite an invitation, according to ESPN analyst Greg McElroy.

What Michigan is offering Kalen DeBoer

“Michigan has been applying the full court press from the very beginning. Michigan has offered what I’ve been told is a blank check to try to get Kalen DeBoer out of Tuscaloosa and to Ann Arbor,” McElroy said on the Always College Football podcast.

That talk comes right as DeBoer has Alabama in the College Football Playoff, where he will seek to improve on his 0-2 record against Oklahoma in the first-round game on Friday.

“Now, the timing is unique here, because Kalen DeBoer is in the midst of preparing his team for [the playoff]. Frankly, I don’t think that Kalen DeBoer is ultimately going to take the job,” McElroy said.

“I don’t think Kalen DeBoer wants to take the job. I think Kalen DeBoer is happy at Alabama. I think the narrative that he’s unhappy, or he’s this or that or his family doesn’t like this or his family doesn’t like that, I think it’s untrue.”

Current insider reporting suggests that DeBoer’s representatives are seeking a contract extension from the school for the coach, but that remains a very fluid situation right now with no set conclusion.

But if DeBoer should lose to the Sooners again and get the Tide bounced from the playoff early?

Sure, it would raise the temperature around his tenure, but to suggest that it would be enough for him to abandon ship and try again at Michigan is unlikely.

Michigan will still pursue, however unlikely

“I think people are just grasping at straws, but it doesn’t mean that Michigan won’t continue to try to woo him,” McElroy said.

“It doesn’t mean they’re going to stop trying to go get him. They’re gonna try. Whatever they have to do, they’re gonna try, because there’s a lot of people that believe that Kalen DeBoer is one of the top coaches in America. So you go all in for that coach. And I think Michigan will continue to try to go all in on Kalen DeBoer.”

It stands to reason that Michigan, which finds itself in a coaching decision it didn’t expect to be in at this point in time, will do whatever they can to attract a big name.

But what if that big name already has a big job?

The feeling between Michigan and DeBoer is not mutual

“They can be interested. Is the interest actually reciprocated? I don’t know the answer to that, frankly. I frankly don’t think it is,” McElroy said.

“I think Kalen DeBoer, like I said, will be the head coach [at Alabama] moving forward, but he’s going to likely turn down more money at Michigan if he does end up staying in Tuscaloosa.

“At least, that’s what it sounds like right now. Because when I hear ‘blank check,’ you can interpret that how you want to interpret that.

“It sounds like, to me, Kalen DeBoer is going to be very wealthy on either side. But I do know that Kalen DeBoer is, right now, not interested in having a conversation with Michigan, and I do know this: that Michigan is not interested, yet, in accepting, the answer no.”

Bankruptcy trustee presses case against Deion Sanders’ son Shilo

Published

3 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Dec. 17, 2025, 10:04 p.m. ET

Shilo Sanders is in a legal dispute with a bankruptcy trustee over approximately $250,000 in alleged unauthorized fund transfers.
The core issue is whether Sanders’ NIL earnings belong to him or to the bankruptcy estate for his creditors.
Sanders filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in October 2023 to discharge over $11 million in debt from a 2022 civil court judgment.

The trustee in the bankruptcy case of former Colorado football player Shilo Sanders filed a response in court Dec. 17 that supports his argument that Sanders violated bankruptcy law by making unauthorized transfers to himself of approximately $250,000.

The court filing is the latest volley in bankruptcy case of Sanders, who filed a Chapter 7 petition in October 2023 seeking to get out of more than $11 million in debt.

The trustee in the case, David Wadsworth, sued Shilo Sanders in October, seeking recovery of the money and an accounting from Sanders. Sanders’ attorney then filed a motion to dismiss that complaint in November by arguing that the trustee had it all wrong.

The latest filing from Wadsworth’s attorney rebuts that notion as litigation related to the bankruptcy case continues on multiple fronts in addition to this one. Sanders’ debt stems from a civil court judgment in Dallas in 2022.

“The Defendants are wrong,” the trustee’s attorney, Peter Cal, said in court documents.

What is at issue in Shilo Sanders’ bankruptcy case this time?

The court-appointed trustee in this case is in charge of rounding up Sanders’ non-exempt assets for the bankruptcy estate to divide among his creditors. The trustee has alleged having trouble doing that and filed a complaint against Sanders related to money he traced in Sanders’ business accounts for earnings from his name, image and likeness (NIL). Those businesses are named as defendants with Sanders in the complaint – Big 21 and Headache Gang.

The big issue is who the money in question belongs to – the bankruptcy estate or Sanders. Sanders’ earnings before he filed the bankruptcy petition generally belong to the bankruptcy estate for the benefit of creditors, while earnings that came from work after the bankruptcy filing belong to Sanders.

Sanders’ attorney, Keri Riley, stated in court documents that the money in question belonged to Sanders because they were “post-petition earnings.”

The trustee disputed that in his response Dec. 17 and said such factual disputes can’t be resolved at this stage of the litigation.

Sanders “relies on the unsupported argument that all funds in the Big 21 Bank Account were post-petition earnings of the Debtor (Sanders),” the trustee’s attorney stated. “The Court should not consider the argument because it relies upon a factual assertion that is not included in the (trustee’s) Complaint.”

The trustee’s attorney then includes a footnote.

“Because there were funds in the Big 21 Bank Account on the Petition Date, the Defendants’ argument is demonstrably wrong,” the footnote states.

Timing of Shilo Sanders’ NIL earnings in dispute

The trustee’s attorney also noted that “even if the earnings are paid to the Debtor post-petition, they are considered prepetition earnings when they arose from a prepetition contractual interest.”

He argued the trustee pleaded his case well enough for the trustee’s complaint against Sanders to move forward. A bankruptcy judge will decide on that.

“It is more than plausible that at least certain of the post-petition deposits were based on the Debtor’s prepetition NIL contracts and, therefore, are subject to turnover,” the trustee’s filing states.

The trustee said he wants Sanders to “account for the distributions” after “improperly” exercising control over property of the bankruptcy estate.

How did the Shilo Sanders bankruptcy case originate?

A security guard at Sanders’ school in Dallas sued Sanders and his parents in 2016, alleging Shilo caused him permanent and severe injuries when he tried to confiscate his phone at school in 2015, when Shilo was 15. The parents were dismissed from the case before trial, but when the case finally went to trial in 2022, Shilo didn’t show up for it and got hit with a $11.89 million default judgment as a result.

The security guard, John Darjean, then moved to collect on that judgment in 2023, leading Sanders to file for bankruptcy to try to get out of it.

Darjean is fighting that with a separate complaint that alleges the debt should not be discharged in bankruptcy court because it stems from a “willful and malicious” injury. Sanders has claimed he acted in self-defense. That complaint remains pending, as does a separate complaint from Darjean that accuses Sanders of improperly omitting or concealing assets in his bankruptcy closures, which he denied.

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$45 million college football head coach reportedly offers Lane Kiffin unexpected role

Published

4 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Your Sports Nation

The College Football Playoff travels to Oxford on Saturday with an unusual subplot: an 11-win Ole Miss team entering the postseason without the coach who compiled that record, Lane Kiffin.

Meanwhile, Tulane, which Ole Miss faces Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, also has an outgoing coach, as Jon Sumrall has opted to finish the season in New Orleans before taking over at Florida.

Kiffin’s 2025 Rebels closed the regular season at 11–1, securing a CFP berth behind a high-powered offense that averaged 498.1 total yards per game, the third-most in college football.

Within days of the Egg Bowl, Kiffin accepted LSU’s offer, a reported seven-year contract worth roughly $91 million, and announced he would not coach Ole Miss in the playoff.

Ole Miss promptly elevated defensive coordinator Pete Golding to lead the program into the bracket.

On Wednesday, Sumrall broke down the matchup and joked that he had offered Kiffin a spot in Tulane’s coaches’ box.

“They’ve got a lot more stability for the game than people realize. They’re going to be who they’ve been; they’re just not going to have Lane on the sideline,” Sumrall said. “I’ve reached out to Lane to see if he wants to sit in our coaches’ box for the game, but he hasn’t given me an answer yet.”

Florida Gators head coach Jon Sumrall. — Gainesville, FL, USA; Florida Gators head coach Jon Sumrall smiles during the press conference at the Heavener Football Training Center at the University of Florida. | Matt Pendleton-Imagn Images

Tulane arrives after winning the American Athletic Conference and finishing 11–2.

The Green Wave boasts one of the nation’s best turnover margins (+10) and a defense that has tightened steadily since an early setback in Oxford on Sept. 20, a 45–10 loss.

Adding to the narrative, Sumrall, who signed a reported six-year, roughly $45 million deal to become Florida’s next head coach, has said he will remain with Tulane through the postseason before joining the Gators full-time.

Tulane has already designated passing-game coordinator Will Hall as Sumrall’s successor once the playoff run concludes.

This moment reflects a new normal in college football’s accelerated coaching market, with major hires unfolding as teams prepare for postseason play.

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$36 million college football coach reportedly out of race for Michigan vacancy

Published

5 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Michigan is the last remaining Power Four college football program to find a new head coach in the 2026 cycle.

The Wolverines fired head coach Sherrone Moore on Dec. 10 with cause and are now one week into the coaching search. Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer, Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham, and Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz are among those being floated as potential replacements.

One name that previously received attention for the vacancy was Washington head coach Jedd Fisch. On3 and ESPN college football insider Josh Pate reported Fisch’s interest in the Michigan head coaching vacancy has declined in the last few days.

“There’s been some sentiment today that maybe Jedd Fisch’s name has cooled,” Pate said. “I think that’s accurate. The critical take-home points are that I don’t know if Jedd Fisch is going to be a factor in the Michigan search moving forward… I don’t think Jedd Fisch is going to be an option for them.”

Washington Huskies head coach Jedd Fisch holds the LA Bowl championship belt | Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images

Fisch’s waning interest is a relief to Washington, as it is all too familiar with head coaches leaving for other jobs. The Huskies lost Kalen DeBoer to Alabama in the 2024 offseason when Nick Saban announced his retirement from the Crimson Tide.

The Florida alumnus spent the first 24 seasons in the coaching ranks as an assistant at a high school, in the Arena Football League, at six different NFL franchises and five different college football programs. He served as Michigan’s passing game coordinator in 2015 and 2016 under Jim Harbaugh, part of the reason he is linked to the Wolverines’ current opening.

The only head-coaching capacity Fisch had served in before he took the Arizona vacancy was as UCLA’s interim coach in the 2017 Cactus Bowl against Kansas State.

Arizona finished 1-11 in 2021, the lone win against California (10-3) in November. The Wildcats improved to 5-7 in 2022, a record that included an upset victory over a ranked UCLA team. Fisch followed up a 3-3 start in 2023 with seven consecutive wins, including an Alamo Bowl win over Oklahoma (38-24).

Fisch filled the Washington vacancy left by DeBoer in the 2024 offseason. An up-and-down first season led to a 6-7 season, capped by a Sun Bowl loss to Louisville (35-34).

The Huskies put together a stronger effort in 2025. Washington concluded the regular season at 8-4 and defeated Boise State (38-10) in the LA Bowl in SoFi Stadium.

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