OXON HILL, Md. — The head of the College Sports Commission said Wednesday the new enforcement body is beginning the process of looking into potential violations of NIL and revenue-sharing rules, and that those investigations would go better if schools would sign an agreement to abide by rules and not challenge them in court. Bryan Seeley, the chief operating officer of the CSC, said he was heartened that university presidents from Arizona, Washington, Virginia Tech and Georgia released a letter
Bryan Seeley, the chief operating officer of the CSC, said he was heartened that university presidents from Arizona, Washington, Virginia Tech and Georgia released a letter earlier this week encouraging their peers to sign the participant agreement.
The Power 4 conferences sent an 11-page document to their schools in mid-November that requires them to cooperate with investigations, abide by enforcement decisions and not file lawsuits challenging rules and rulings made by the CSC.
“I think we’re in a much stronger place on enforcement overall and on investigations, if we have that participant agreement signed, I think it matters a lot,” Seeley told reporters after making a presentation at the NCAA convention.
A few days after the agreement was distributed by conferences to member schools, the general counsel for Texas Tech said the school should not sign the agreement because it could violate state laws. Texas Tech booster and billionaire businessman Cody Campbell also has been pushing for schools not to sign the agreement. The Texas attorney general followed up with a statement saying no schools in his state should sign.
Attorneys general from several other states, including Tennessee and West Virginia, later made a separate public statement questioning the legality of the agreement.
“And that basically stopped the thing in its tracks,” Seeley said.
Big 12 lawyers have been working with the Texas attorney general’s office on modifications to the document, which predates the College Sports Commission and was crafted by the general counsels of the power conferences.
“My sense, in seeing the some of the public comments about the agreement, I think there’s some fair feedback that we’d be able to incorporate into a revised participant agreement,” Seeley said. “And then there’s some feedback that would essentially water the document down such that it has no force and effect, and would make it meaningless.”
Seeley said he is still hopeful the document will be signed by power conference schools that agreed to the $2.8 billion lawsuit settlement that led to the creation of a new system of direct payments from schools to athletes.
“And my sense is the vast majority of schools want to sign this document and want a strong participant agreement,” Seeley said.
He encouraged other schools that support the agreement to do so publicly and quoted a portion of the letter sent by Arizona, Georgia, Virginia Tech and Washington.
“Stability is not created by new rules alone, but by a willingness to live by those rules,” he said.
College sports leaders have been hoping for help from Congress in the form of a federal law that would bolster settlement rules and provide some antitrust protection to the NCAA and conferences.
But the recent failure of the SCORE Act to even get to the floor for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives late last year has dimmed prospects of that happening anytime soon.
“I’m not of the belief that college sports is fundamentally broken,” Seeley said. “I’ve seen some sky-is-falling articles, particularly over the past 10 days with the transfer portal, but there are definitely problems in college sports. No one from the outside is coming in to fix those problems for us. We will either collectively, working together, fix those problems ourselves, or they won’t be fixed. And so if you’re a school that wants to fix those problems, that wants strong enforcement in this space, I would encourage you to be vocal about the fact that you want that and encourage other schools, particularly other schools in your conference, to go ahead and be vocal and to sign the document.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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