The College Sports Commission — the new enforcement agency of college sports — has asked all schools under its purview to agree to waive their right to challenge future punishments in court as part of an agreement that would give the agency significant power to investigate and punish rule breakers in the era of NIL deals and direct athlete payments.
The CSC, which launched in July, sent a 10-page membership agreement to all power conference schools Wednesday afternoon and asked them to sign it in the next two weeks. The terms of the agreement are designed to close loopholes that have made it difficult for the NCAA and CSC to enforce rules established by the recent House settlement that dictate how college athletes can be paid.
The agreement will not go into effect unless every school signs.
“The starting place in all this is the settlement, but the participant agreement really puts a lot of meat on the bones of that in terms of enforcement,” CSC chief executive Bryan Seeley told ESPN on Wednesday.
The House settlement allows each school to spend up to $20.5 million this year in direct payments to its athletes. It also empowers the CSC to make sure any name, image and likeness deals an athlete signs with a third party are for a “valid business purpose” rather than a recruiting incentive. College sports leaders hope that the CSC is able to use its authority to enforce a spending cap that prevents the richest schools from gaining too much of a competitive advantage.
Schools that sign the agreement will waive their right to challenge any CSC rulings in a courtroom. Any appeals of a CSC punishment would instead go through an arbitration process that was agreed upon as part of the House settlement.
The schools must also agree that they won’t try to encourage or assist any other parties — their state’s attorney general, for example — to file lawsuits against the CSC. Any school violating that rule would lose at least one year of revenue from its conference and miss at least one year of postseason play in any sport involved in the dispute.
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Many of the rules that govern college sports are susceptible to legal challenges because they aren’t backed by the collective bargaining agreements that provide stability to professional sports leagues. Seeley said college sports leaders are searching for a solution that will keep their peers from exploiting that weakness by filing a lawsuit when they face a potential punishment.
“[Schools] do not want to live in a world where rules are made by individual state lawsuits,” Seeley said. “They don’t want the rules to depend on what state you’re in and what judge you may be in front of. In any individual situation where a school is disciplined, the school may have an incentive to [file a lawsuit] to get out of discipline. But collectively, the schools don’t want that.”
However, many of the key clauses of the agreement apply only if they don’t conflict with a school’s existing state law.
Several states have laws that prevent public institutions from resolving disputes via arbitration. Other states have passed specific college sports-related laws in recent years that contradict some of the CSC’s rules. Seeley said a federal law that replaces those state laws would likely be necessary to completely fortify the new rules from legal challenges.
The terms of the agreement sent out on Wednesday would give Seeley and his team more power than the NCAA’s enforcement office has had in the past. Schools who sign must agree to use “best efforts” to get their coaches and any associated boosters to cooperate with future CSC investigations. A school can be punished if a coach or booster fails to cooperate.
According to the terms of the agreement, the CSC also has the authority to assume that a person who doesn’t cooperate is holding back information that would harm its case and to take that into consideration when deciding whether a violation has occurred.
The CSC has not launched any investigations since opening its doors on July 1. The organization hired a head of investigations earlier this month and expects to start pursuing several leads on potential violations in the coming month.
