TYSONS CORNER, Va. — At a shared office space in Northern Virginia, amidst the maze of desks and glass walls, it is difficult to tell where the College Sports Commission begins and ends.
Maybe one day the CSC will have its own standalone headquarters like the NCAA, the organization that has been governing intercollegiate athletics for 120 years, the last 27 from a sprawling campus in Indianapolis.
For now though, the fledgling enforcement agency, created a year ago by the Power 4 conferences to regulate the new ways college athletes are compensated, fits snugly in 1,500 square feet.
Despite its modest accommodations, the CSC has come a long way. But certainly not far enough to please everybody, admits Bryan Seeley, the former head of investigations at Major League Baseball who launched the organization a year ago by himself from a bedroom desk in a New Jersey apartment.
“My 5-month-old baby was sleeping, or not sleeping, as the case may be, in the bedroom next door,” Seeley said last month, after meeting with SEC officials in Destin, Fla. “Eleven months later, we’ve got a staff of 20 very highly accomplished people. We have made a ton of progress.
“Now, if you’re an athletic director or a coach, and you need to win this year, that doesn’t resonate with you, that we have made a lot of progress in year one, and we’ve got more to do. You need the system to be fully functioning, or you need to know that rules are going to be enforced, and how they’re going to be enforced right now.”
Because of that, this all still seems precarious — a startup with stakeholders second-guessing their investment. Twelve months in, many across college sports wonder whether the CSC can be what it was intended to be: an enforcement body with the power to rein in the skyrocketing costs of competing at the highest level, bringing predictability to the world of $40 million football rosters and $6 million small forwards.
Seeley is also not getting what he expected. Instead of enforcing rules, he has spent a lot of time reshaping and interpreting them. He hears from people throughout college sports that they want rules, but their actions don’t always back that up. The Brendan Sorsby gambling case didn’t fall under the CSC’s jurisdiction but perfectly summed up what has become an ungovernable enterprise.
Monitoring and evaluating the fair-market value of name, image and likeness deals? Enforcing a cap of about $21 million on what schools can directly pay athletes? Differentiating between and defining various entities that help schools funnel funds to college athletes? A legally binding agreement to cooperate with investigations and comply with rulings?
The conferences came up with those ideas, not Seeley and the CSC, but now some school officials are reluctant to abide by any of them.
The CSC has not brought order during this turbulent time of transition, but that should come as no surprise. Seeley and his team have so far been no match for the most powerful force in college sports: a culture of noncompliance and institutional autonomy that is older than the NCAA itself.
“We can’t rely on the CSC to provide all the stability in college sports,” Oklahoma athletic director Roger Denny said. “We have to be willing to be governed, and so (the CSC) can only go so far on their own.”
Working as designed?
On June 6, 2025, within an hour of a federal judge in California approving a $2.8 billion settlement of multiple antitrust lawsuits facing the NCAA and five major conferences, Seeley was announced as chief executive officer of the newly created College Sports Commission.
Under the terms of the so-called House settlement, schools were permitted to directly pay their athletes for the first time, capped at spending about $21 million this year. NIL deals of $600 or more between athletes and third parties would be required to go through an approval process to assess fair-market value. The system was designed to crack down on booster-funded entities known as collectives that were using NIL as a de facto pay-for-play relationship, and to keep schools from working around the cap.
Seeley’s job was to enforce those rules. Or so he thought.
“I expected that the rules coming out of the settlement were the rules, that they were mostly agreed upon by schools, and that the job would just be a lot more focused on just enforcing those rules as they exist and trying to combat circumvention via investigations,” Seeley told The Athletic in a recent phone interview.
“Certainly that has been a big part of the job, but a lot of the job has also been trying to adapt as schools very quickly offered compensation to student-athletes that was unrealistic under existing rules, and managing and trying to deal with the ways in which schools tried to go about getting that compensation to student-athletes, even though it didn’t comply with the rules.”
According to the latest data compiled by the CSC, more than 26,500 third-party NIL deals for college athletes worth more than $240 million have been cleared through the online NIL Go platform. The CSC also noted over 1,000 deals worth about $56 million have not been cleared.
While some within college sports are frustrated with what they see as a lack of efficiency in processing deals and inconsistency in the CSC staff’s evaluations, Seeley insists the system is working as designed.
At the heart of the issues is a simple problem: Schools are committing more money to athletes than the rules were set up to allow. The $21 million cap went into effect months after Ohio State won the national championship with a $20 million football roster, and the richest programs used the Buckeyes’ number as a starting point for future rosters, not a ceiling.
“I believe that the cap college number in the House settlement is too low,” Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua said during a congressional hearing for the Protect College Sports Act in early June. “I believe we need to fix a more realistic cap.”
At the heart of sports’ player compensation problem is that athletes are still — by rule — not paid to play like the pros. In reality, though, schools are valuing athletes based on points they can score and yards they can gain more than the size of their social media following.
“Schools are under enormous pressure to compete with each other and get money to student-athletes, and I understand those pressures, but the algorithm wasn’t built to factor those pressures into how it calculates the range of compensation for student-athlete NIL deals,” Seeley said.
Seeley said the issue impacts basketball even more so than football, because schools are allocating far less rev-share funds (about $4 million compared to upward of $15 million) and are using outside NIL to cover a greater percentage of the total roster budget in basketball (around 30 percent) than football (upwards of 40 for most rosters and well over 50 percent in a lot of cases).
The sheer volume of deals that need to be assessed by the CSC is also greater than was expected when the system was designed, which slows the process.
Schools have needed to find creative ways to steer millions of dollars to athletes outside of revenue sharing, and those deals often bump up against the rules. Already a judge is being asked to weigh in on how the rules are being applied. A hearing was held in Northern California last Wednesday, with House plaintiffs’ attorneys arguing athletes are being unfairly restricted from certain NIL deals that flow through the multimedia rights firms that hold contracts with schools.
The P4 conferences have invested millions of dollars into the CSC. If they don’t believe they are getting their money’s worth, they have the power to change that — but it takes consensus.
“People have to commit to a system,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said during his conference’s spring meetings. “Doesn’t matter what system you pick, and there are a lot of opinions about what the system should be. Fundamentally, are a large group of institutions going to commit to make the system work?”
Raising the rev-share cap or creating exceptions to help schools retain athletes could provide some immediate relief, but immediate relief shouldn’t be the focus, Seeley said.
“My overall concern is that the pressure to get money to football athletes will potentially lead to short-term fixes that do not solve the long-term problems. That is what I’m trying to avoid,” Seeley said. “Schools need some certainty here, and that is not going to occur if we just change rules based on behavior every time behavior doesn’t match the rules.”
Simply raising the rev-share cap would unlock the necessary dollars to get athletes paid during the football season. But that doesn’t address bigger questions about competitive balance and just how much conferences want to level the playing field by limiting schools with the most spending power.
Seeley says probably no one meets more often than he does with Sankey, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips and Brett Yormark of the Big 12, and he expects steady discussions with and without him in the coming weeks on possible rule changes. But changes require consensus among the P4, and even within conferences unanimity is rare.
“Consensus is hard to come by in college sports,” Seeley said. “I’ve been told if the settlement had gone before a vote of all Power 4 schools, it wouldn’t have been unanimous.”
Enforcement amid pushback
There is no better example of the consensus-building problem than the participant agreement which conferences sent out to schools in November — and which still has not been signed and delivered by every P4 school. Yormark said at Big 12 meetings last month all his member schools have now signed it, after Texas Tech officials raised concerns in the fall that led to modifications.
The agreement predates the CSC and was worked on by conference lawyers before the settlement was even approved. It was supposed to be a powerful tool that bound the schools to abide by rules that they set up and not challenge them — or encourage others to challenge them on their behalf — in court. But not all the schools agreed to sign last spring, and the CSC was launched without it.
Seeley hired an investigative staff with serious credentials, led by Katie Medearis, a former federal prosecutor. But he said that without the participant agreement in place, the NCAA is still better positioned to investigate violations under its jurisdiction than the CSC is.
“We are attempting to do it,” he said. “One of the challenges I’ve seen in this space is when you go and try to enforce something on a school, they push back, and they often push back with everything they’ve got. If you, as a central entity, are not strong and empowered, you’re going to have a hard time getting cooperation and information. That’s a challenge we have to overcome.”
Seeley encourages coaches and administrators to come forward with information if they believe rules are being broken.
“The power in college sports is with the schools,” he said. “If you compare this to MLB, where the commissioner’s office has a lot of power, where I used to work, it’s nothing like that in college sports.”
So the entity that was created in some ways to replace the NCAA is stuck fighting similar battles the folks with big offices in Indianapolis have faced for years.
“I’m very happy with where the (College Sports Commission) is,” Seeley said. “It bothers me when some of the public comments are about fixing the CSC or CSC reform. But the CSC is doing exactly what people asked us to do, enforcing the rules as written.
“The reforms that people are talking about are enforcement reform or rules reform, whether you want to be tied to these rules and policies that you all have agreed to. But the CSC itself is operating at a high level.”
— The Athletic‘s Scott Dochterman contributed reporting.