Texas A&M’s newest wide receiver, Kevin Concepcion, hasn’t caught a pass yet at Kyle Field, but he’s already scoring big. According to recent reports, Concepcion has racked up $2.5 million in NIL deals, highlighting how being an Aggie can boost a football player’s brand in a big way.

Since transferring from NC State, Concepcion has teamed up with major brands like Topps, Call of Duty, and Fanatics, thanks to savvy guidance from his marketing agent Bryan Miller of The Familie. With a standout freshman year under his belt (he earned ACC Rookie of the Year honors) the talented wideout saw his NIL value skyrocket upon arriving in College Station.

This news comes as the State of Texas continues to be at the forefront of NIL innovation. Recent state legislation, signed by Governor Abbott, allows Texas universities to directly pay athletes through revenue-sharing deals. Texas A&M Athletic Director Trev Alberts even hinted at pushing forward with revenue sharing soon, putting the Aggies ahead of the curve nationally.

For Concepcion and future Aggies, the NIL landscape at Texas A&M just keeps getting brighter. Here’s to hoping this off-field excitement translates to more wins on the field.

The South Carolina softball team has a lot to be proud of this season. And the latest recognition is finishing the 2025 season ranked No. 14 in the country, according to the final poll released by Softball America.

The Gamecocks were one of the nation’s biggest surprises this season after being projected to finish dead last in the SEC. Instead, they defied all odds and doubters, posting a 13-11 conference record. It is only the second winning SEC record in the program’s history.

In her first season at the helm of the program, head coach Ashley Chastain Woodard led South Carolina to a top-eight national seed. After winning their regional, the Gamecocks then hosted a Super Regional for the first time in program history, coming within one out of punching their ticket to the Women’s College World Series. A ninth inning comeback by UCLA in Game 2 held South Carolina from making their first trip to Oklahoma City.

Chastain Woodard was named National Coach of the Year by D1Softball.com as the Gamecocks finished a historic season with a 44-17 record.

D1 Softball Final Top 25:

1. Texas

2. Texas Tech

3. Oklahoma

4. Tennessee

5. UCLA

6. Oregon

7. Ole Miss

8. Florida

9. Clemson

10. Florida State

11. Arkansas

12. Alabama

13. Nebraska

14. South Carolina

15. Liberty

16. Georgia

17. Texas A&M

18. Arizona

19. Stanford

20. Virginia Tech

21. LSU

22. Mississippi State

23. Ohio State

24. Duke

25. North Florida

The 2025 season will be remembered as a turning point for South Carolina softball. With a Top 15 finish, a national seed, and hosting a Super Regional under first-year head coach Ashley Chastain Woodard, the Gamecocks have proved that they belong among the nation’s elite.

Excuse St. John’s athletic director Ed Kull if he’s highly skeptical of the suggestion that the Big East is poised to become men’s college basketball’s big-budget bully.

Kull can’t fathom a scenario where the sport’s deep-pocketed traditional powers allow Big East programs to outspend them for top-tier talent.

Advertisement

“Unless you’re telling me their collectives are all folding and shutting down, I can’t see how that’s going to happen,” Kull told Yahoo Sports.

The idea that Big East basketball is among the big winners from last Friday’s House vs. NCAA settlement stems from the structure of college sports’ new revenue-sharing rules. Schools can directly distribute a pool of up to $20.5 million to athletes in year 1 (July 2025 to June ‘26) and can give out even more money subsequently as the annual cap escalates.

SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC schools are preparing to spend most of this year’s sum on football in an effort to remain competitive in the sport that rakes in the most money and bankrolls the rest of an athletic department. The University of Georgia earlier this year revealed that football players will receive 75% of the available money, compared to 15% for men’s basketball, 5% for women’s basketball and 5% for the school’s remaining teams. Texas Tech has previously earmarked 74% to football. Other power-conference football programs are expected to gobble up 70 to 80%.

Those projections leave most Power Four men’s basketball programs with pools of about $2 to $4 million to pay their players. Schools with richer tradition in basketball than football — a Kansas, Kentucky, Duke or North Carolina for example — could conceivably exceed that and distribute up to $5 million to men’s basketball players in an effort to stay ahead of the competition.

Advertisement

The calculus is very different for schools who don’t have to feed the football beast, schools that either don’t have FBS football programs or don’t have realistic aspirations of competing for titles at that level. Big East schools, as the theory goes, can invest heavily in basketball with however much cash they can raise. In the Big East, only UConn has an FBS football program. Butler, Georgetown and Villanova compete in football at the FCS level.

“Basketball is in fact our priority sport here, so that’s where the money’s going first,” Big East commissioner Val Ackerman told Yahoo Sports.

“We’re lucky that all our members are focused on one sport,” Kull added.

The same goes for Gonzaga, perennially men’s college basketball’s best program that doesn’t hail from a power conference. Gonzaga athletic director Chris Standiford acknowledged the “structural advantage” of Gonzaga being able to distribute a higher percentage of its revenue sharing pool to men’s basketball players, but he also deemed the idea that the Zags could now outspend SEC and Big Ten programs a “false narrative.”

Advertisement

Whereas schools from the Power Four conferences are all gearing up to pay their athletes the maximum $20.5 million they’re allowed to, neither the Big East schools nor Gonzaga are likely to even approach that cap figure. They may not have the financial burden of football, but they also don’t have the revenue that comes from massive football media rights deals, sponsorships and ticket sales.

How close to the $20.5 million cap will Big East schools get? There are Big East schools “approaching half,” one source told Yahoo Sports. Another source estimated that Big East schools will ultimately pay athletes anywhere from $7 million to $12 million in revenue-share money, with the majority going to men’s basketball. Both sources noted that Big East schools are raising this money through pleas for alumni donations and corporate sponsorships.They can’t simply rely on existing revenue streams.

Standiford declined to estimate how much Gonzaga will pay men’s basketball players, but he made it clear that without the benefit of football revenue, the Zags also won’t come close to the $20.5 million mark. Gonzaga, Standiford said, is “committed to being competitive.” That doesn’t mean always being the highest bidder. It means raising enough money to make competitive offers to priority recruits and hoping that Gonzaga’s winning track record and history of player development prove persuasive.

“When our coaches are out recruiting, we want to be in the conversation financially with student-athletes that our coaches see as a good fit for our program,” Standiford said.

Advertisement

While Gonzaga and the Big East schools may be able to directly allocate more money to men’s basketball players than their Power Four peers, they’re not naive enough to think that an SEC or Big Ten juggernaut is just going to concede a recruiting battle. They expect Power Four schools to try to make up for any financial disadvantage via third-party and booster-backed name, image and likeness deals.

The House vs. NCAA settlement calls for the establishment of a new enforcement entity, the College Sports Commission (CSC), which oversees the rev-share cap management system and NIL Go clearinghouse. The CSC, headed by former MLB vice president of investigations Bryan Seeley, will be responsible for stamping out the pay-for-play deals that have dominated the NIL era of college sports, theoretically capping the market for athletes and ensuring that schools do not exceed the $20.5 million they’re allowed to distribute.

Athletes are required to submit to the clearinghouse all third-party NIL deals that exceed $600 — so basically all of them. The clearinghouse then must determine which deals are for a valid business purpose and are within a “reasonable range of compensation” and which are simply a recruiting incentive.

How will the clearinghouse determine which deals are circumventing NIL rules and which are legitimate? Nobody knows. College coaches and administrators are also in the dark on whether the clearinghouse’s decisions will hold up in court against a legal challenge and on what sorts of investigative or punitive powers the new enforcement arm will possess.

Advertisement

Caitlin Clark appearing in a State Farm commercial or Cooper Flagg hawking New Balance shoes almost certainly wouldn’t trigger any red flags. But what about Tyson Chicken brokering a seven-figure deal with an incoming five-star point guard at Arkansas? Or Nike doing the same for a coveted quarterback transferring to Oregon? Or some school’s collective connecting a wide receiver with a car dealership owned by an affluent alum?

“What everyone is waiting to see is how this NIL clearinghouse will work,” Ackerman, the Big East commissioner, said. “If schools are capped per the terms of the House settlement but they can circumvent the cap through these third-party payments, then I think that any quote-unquote ‘advantage’ that anyone has is out the window. That would threaten this structure that has been crafted, which is intended to create some guardrails and to allow schools to responsibly manage their money.

“If the Wild West we’re in now can’t be managed through this clearinghouse and schools can supplement in significant ways what they’re spending directly, it will remain to be seen who the advantage goes to.”

For either Gonzaga or the Big East to have any semblance of a financial edge, the clearinghouse must be able to combat pay-for-play NIL deals and power-thirsty boosters who flout the rules by depositing money into athletes’ bank accounts under the table.

Advertisement

Count many in college sports circles as having serious doubts that will happen.

Ohio State donors reportedly raised $20 million to pay for the 2024-25 football roster that went on to capture the national championship last January. The men’s basketball rosters everywhere from Kentucky to North Carolina to BYU reportedly will cost well over $10 million next season. As Kull, the St. John’s athletic director noted, it’s hard to give big-money donors the power to help assemble a team for a few years, only to yank it away out of nowhere.

“I know the thought process and the hope was that the settlement would remove collectives from the equation,” Kull said. “I don’t see that happening. An SEC football program might get 80% of the revenue sharing money, but it’s not going to dissuade their boosters in how they’re currently doing NIL for basketball. So I don’t see it being the advantage that we all in the Big East would love it to be.”

The way Standiford sees it, third-party NIL deals are about to be “the new battleground” in college athletics. The Gonzaga athletic director envisions athletic departments investing heavily into telling the stories of their star players, building their individual brands and trying to make them attractive to corporations seeking to partner with college athletes.

“You can compete in an open market for the advantage of your program, versus trying to beat the rules,” Standiford said. “Play by the rules — just do it better than anybody else.”

Welcome back to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet. (Want to receive it in your email every Wednesday? Easy sign-up here.)

Name-dropped today: Bryan Seeley, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, Justin Ishbia, Dick Vitale, Sue Bird, David Zaslav, NiJaree Canady, Heather O’Reilly, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, Kara Nortman and more. Let’s go:

Driving the Conversation

What does the massive money shift in college sports actually change?

A lot has happened to the business of college sports since last Friday, when the historic House v. NCAA settlement was finalized, so let’s go with a “Previously, on college sports upheaval …” theme:

> As of July 1, each DI school can directly pay its athletes via an annual revenue-sharing pool set at around $20.5M. (A salary cap? Umm, not quite.)

> The settlement includes a new oversight and enforcement organization: The “ College Sports Commission.” The CSC enforces the rev-share “cap” and — much more importantly — is empowered to review any meaningfully sized NIL deals with players. (We’ll come back to this in a sec.)

> Name to know: Bryan Seeley, formerly MLB’s head of investigations, now head of the CSC.

> The big conferences (Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC and even the Pac-12) all agree to abide by the new rules. (Umm, not quite?)

> Congress has a proposed bill to codify a lot of the House settlement (good luck with that).

That brings us to today, when that new review system, called NIL Go, launches. NIL Go is overseen by the CSC and managed by the accounting firm Deloitte.

NIL Go is the most pivotal — and persnickety — element of this entire new universe: Athletes must self-report into the NIL Go system any third-party NIL deal worth $600 or more for review. (As my colleague Stewart Mandel pointed out: “Which, in the major sports, is pretty much all of them.”)

Deals that don’t meet a hazy “fair-market value” criteria will be flagged, rejected or sent to arbitration. (But wait: Isn’t “market value”… what the market is willing to pay?)

One college football team’s personnel director put it bluntly to my colleague Justin Williams:

“If you tell a booster or business owner they can’t give a star player $2 million, there will be lawsuits. There’s no enforcing this. Fair market value? F— Deloitte. This is going to get even crazier.”

Mandel says every legal expert he has talked to thinks NIL Go won’t survive a legal challenge. Williams predicts the return of the old-school college football “bag man.”

Here’s the upshot: The system goes live today, and Seeley, his CSC investigators and Deloitte can try to constrain the (ironically pretty efficient!) competitive forces that have always and will always dominate college sports.

Between revenue sharing and NIL (“Go” or no go), the biggest, most well-funded college programs will be spending $50 million or more — per year — on their programs (and that doesn’t count ever-increasing coach or AD or GM salaries). The only limit is that there are no limits.

Judges can rule. Policies can change. Accounting firms can require a login. But Buddy Booster is going to find a way to get that recruit for their program.

Get Caught Up

Epic tennis rivalry spells viewership boom

Big talkers from the sports business industry:

> French Open’s Alcaraz-Sinner final: Did we all just watch the sports event of the year? It’ll be hard to match. (Five-set tennis FTW, and — as expected — the ratings for that match were as blistering as the shots, topping out at 2.6 million in TNT’s first year at Roland Garros. Not all is rosy for TNT: More on that below …)

> F1 2026 schedule reveal: 24 races (three in the U.S.), a new stop in Madrid and a “grueling” season finale, but the eye-opener was F1 choosing to put the Canadian Grand Prix up against the Indy 500. For all F1’s sizzle, the Indy 500 remains the granddaddy of global auto racing.I defer to my colleague Jeff Gluck’s astute analysis of that conflict: “Why would F1 even consider this?”

More Gluck: “Instead of weighing the optics, F1 never hit the brakes on its quest for motorsports domination and plowed right into a head-to-head battle with one of the most cherished traditions on the international racing calendar.”

> U.S. Open at Oakmont: Follow my colleagues at The Athletic for coverage of golf’s U.S. Open this week, but here is a great story at the intersection of the course’s myth and reality. (One more: The secrets of Oakmont’s distinctive “church pew” bunker.)

> World Cup 2026, one year out: Host cities across the U.S. are “taking a light approach,” per my colleague Asli Pelit, but expect the ramp-up to accelerate this summer. (Loved our team’s predictions on how things will play out over the next 365 days.)

> MLB Anonymous Player Poll results: Our league-wide player polls always yield fascinating results (just ask Tyrese Haliburton). MLB players said they would like to play for Texas’ Bruce Bochy, but there is a reason Colorado’s Bud Black got fired. Most interesting data point: Nearly 80 percent of players said legalized sports betting has changed how fans treat them.

Other current obsessions: Netflix returns to boxing with Alvarez-Crawford … Justin Ishbia eventually buying the White Sox … Dick Vitale staying on ESPN … College football front-office consultants getting the bag … the legendary Sue Bird talking with our “No Offseason” crew … the return of “Drive to Survive” legend Guenther Steiner (to MotoGP) …

What I’m Wondering

What happens to TNT Sports?

“It hasn’t been a real driver for us.”

That’s Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, on live sports programming and rights that will be jettisoned from his oversight upon the WBD split into two parts: the high-growth “Streaming and Studios” company Zaslav will oversee and “Global Networks,” a debt-laden collection of presumptively declining cable assets, including TNT Sports.

Ironically, TNT is in the spotlight this week with sports fans for its exceptional French Open coverage and ongoing Stanley Cup Final broadcasts, along with a recent deal to license more CFP semifinals from ESPN.

I checked in with my colleague Andrew Marchand to wonder: What’s the future for TNT Sports?

“For TNT Sports, it will, in theory, be more nimble and have more optionality. Sports will be the main driver of the new company, whereas previously it was very important, but probably not No. 1. Fans will be able to watch all of its networks on linear TV.

“Where it becomes a bit more interesting is in the streaming game. It could do a deal and be on Max, or it could license its programming out, to say, an ESPN DTC. Or it could do both.

“TNT lost the NBA but has picked up rights, so it is still very much in the game to go along with a portfolio that includes the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, MLB playoffs and the Stanley Cup playoffs, among other properties.”

Grab Bag

Ratings Point: 2.4 million

No women’s college softball game ever has drawn a larger audience than Texas’ title-clinching win over NiJaree Canady and Texas Tech.

Oh, and Canady signed another $1M NIL deal to return to Texas Tech next season (BTW: a deal done in advance of the new NIL Go launch, so not beholden to that system). In some nice timing, the startup AUSL pro league debuted last weekend. Stock way, way up on women’s softball.

Don’t miss: My colleague Lindsay Schnell’s profile of Canady. (Congrats to Schnell on her much-deserved 2025 Billie Jean King Award for excellence in women’s sports coverage, given to her by the Associated Press Sports Editors.)

Related: People watched Fever-Sky (even without Caitlin Clark): The WNBA is showing plenty of data-backed signs that the TV-viewing enthusiasm from last season is still building, and it transcends Clark.

Is it possible nearly 2 million fans tuned in to CBS last Saturday thinking they’d see Clark? Perhaps a few of those did, but the far more likely reason was that they saw one of the league’s great rivalries available on broadcast TV and decided to tune in.

Payout of the Week: $1 million

What U.S. women’s national team alum Heather O’Reilly and her squad of former and current players earned for winning The Soccer Tournament, the winner-take-all 7-on-7 competition, for the second straight year.

($1M is a great purse; on a per-player basis, that’s more than MLS players qualifying for the Club World Cup will make.)

Investors of the Week: Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds

The “Deadpool and Wolverine” buddies went in on the Aussie SailGP franchise, a league powerhouse. “Welcome to Wake Waves,” anyone? (I’ll show myself out.)

Meanwhile: SailGP came to NYC last weekend, and it was a scene.

Runner up: Kylian Mbappe, who invested in a SailGP team of his own (France, naturally).

Branding of the Week: Boston Legacy

You might remember the debacle of a brand launch for “BOS Nation,” Boston’s NWSL expansion franchise. To their credit, the ownership team acknowledged their error, pivoted to the solid “Boston Legacy” and then — lessons learned — deftly executed their “crest” reveal.

ICYMI: Last week, we published an exclusive 1-on-1 with superlative women’s sports investor Kara Nortman, whose Monarch Collective owns a piece of the Boston Legacy (along with two other NWSL teams). Hear from Nortman here.

Save the Date: Aug. 30, 2025
Lee Corso’s “College GameDay” farewell (appropriately when Ohio State hosts Texas, given how many times Corso has donned the “Brutus” headgear to predict an Ohio State W.)

Beat Dan in Connections: Sports Edition
Puzzle #261 — 0:30
Try the game here!

Worth Your Time

Great business-adjacent reads for your downtime or commute:

Finding Jordon Hudson: “Hudson did not respond to an interview request for this story… So in lieu of hearing from her directly, the next best option? Walking — or in this case, driving — hundreds of miles in her shoes.” — Brendan Marks, with the definitive story on one of the most fascinating sports figures of the year, including a random run-in with Bill Belichick.

Two more reads worth your time:

(1) Revisiting Roger Federer’s incredible commencement speech.

(2) I enjoy a sash on a soccer/football shirt (as do many!), so this history of the distinctive style had my attention.

Back next Wednesday! Text your colleagues this link so they can get MoneyCall every Wednesday for free. And check out The Athletic’s other newsletters, too.

(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)