On January 9, 2026, the College Sports Commission sent formal compliance notices to 20 schools, warning of “serious concerns” regarding NIL and revenue-sharing arrangements. The letter carried weight on paper: the CSC was created as the enforcement arm of the House v. NCAA settlement, with authority to investigate violations of the $20.5 million annual revenue-sharing cap. Five months later, the agency has issued zero fines, zero postseason bans, and zero scholarship reductions against any school for exceeding that cap.
Not one.
LSU’s football roster is costing somewhere between $40 and $50 million this year — Brian Kelly confirmed the number. That’s roughly two to two-and-a-half times the cap. Texas Tech offered roughly $6 million to a single transfer quarterback, a deal that was processed inside the same system supposedly enforcing these rules. Between 30 and 50 of the 70 power-conference schools are projected to exceed the cap in Year 1. The programs know there’s no real consequence coming, and they’re spending accordingly.
The CSC’s CEO, Bryan Seeley, offered this to ESPN in May: “I was hired to launch the CSC and enforce the rules as written. It is totally fine with us if the rules end up changing if there is consensus to change those rules. But until that happens, we’re going to enforce the rules as written and that’s what we were told to do.” He also said: “We didn’t write the rules.”
That’s the whole tell. The sheriff got hired by the people robbing the bank, and he’s very clear that it’s not his fault the vault keeps getting emptied.
The CSC’s one concrete enforcement win: a $1 million-plus arbitration case against 18 Nebraska football players whose contracts with an “associated entity” didn’t comply. Nebraska. Not LSU. Not Ohio State. Not the programs spending $40 million on rosters while the cap sits at $20.5 million. The agency also proudly notes it has cleared over 26,000 NIL deals worth $242.3 million — the administrative equivalent of a parking authority announcing it’s processed a lot of tickets while a semi truck has been idling in the handicapped spot since January.
The SEC and Big Ten created and funded the CSC, then largely ignored what it created. Iowa State AD Jamie Pollard — whose program is apparently following the rules — said the quiet part at full volume this spring: “The four commissioners spent a lot of money creating the CSC. Then to have two of the conferences not want to adhere to it is perplexing to me, because then why did we spend the money? If you didn’t want rules, then why did you create this entity?”
This has a precedent. It’s the same structural problem that neutered the old NCAA enforcement apparatus for decades — rules written by the powerful, enforced selectively against the weak, challenged indefinitely in court by anyone with a legal budget. The only schools that actually follow the cap are the ones with the least leverage to break it. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the system operating exactly as the powerful schools designed it.
Ross Dellenger was flagging this openly months before the CSC sent its January notices:
Schools are guaranteeing 3rd-party NIL, collectives are paying recruits & $50M frontloaded rosters are here.
As the NIL clearinghouse is mired in legalities, Big 12 coaches say cap circumvention is happening.
“People are lying & promising fake things.”https://t.co/zc8m5LCYqn
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) July 9, 2025
Schools making impossible promises to recruits and transfers, coaches describing colleagues as “lying and promising fake things” — and then the CSC issues letters, and nothing happens. The warning didn’t change the behavior because the behavior was never going to change. The cap is a PR product, not a policy.
Ohio State’s own president is essentially admitting it. Ted Carter called the current model “not sustainable” while noting Ohio State is one of only five schools that can “play at this level in terms of NIL” — meaning above the cap, which is where Ohio State is operating.
Ohio State president Ted Carter calls college sports’ current model “not sustainable.”
Under the current structure, Ohio State is only one of five schools that can “play at this level in terms of NIL,” he says, in reference to above-the-cap funding.https://t.co/nt0QA4faES
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) February 19, 2026
The acknowledgment that the cap doesn’t apply to the five richest programs in the country is coming from the president of one of those programs. Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark said the hard cap “obviously hasn’t panned out as well as we had thought.”
Everyone in power is telling you this is broken. Nobody in power is fixing it.
The schools that get hurt are the ones nobody is protecting: AAC programs, MAC schools, G5 conferences whose compliance doesn’t get rewarded, only punished. A Senate Commerce Committee report found that 40% of all-conference honorees in G5 conferences transferred in 2023 — mostly upward, to power programs with money to spend. The teams that follow the rules watch their best players leave. The teams that break the rules sign them. The CSC reviews the paperwork and clears the deal.
Washington AD Pat Chun called it “a fraudulent market.” He’s not wrong — but the more useful question is who benefits from keeping it fraudulent, and whose phone number the CSC doesn’t seem to have.
