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Eighteen Nebraska football players are taking their fight over rejected NIL deals to arbitration, marking what’s probably just the beginning of athletes pushing back against rulings from the College Sports Commission (CSC). The rejected deals, all made through Nebraska’s media rights partner Playfly, are worth more than $1 million combined, according to Yahoo Sports.
The CSC’s clearinghouse, NIL Go, flagged these contracts because of something called “warehousing.” That’s when a company basically locks up a player’s NIL rights for every future partnership and endorsement deal. To get approval from the CSC, contracts need to spell out specific work the players will actually do (think TV commercials, autograph sessions, that sort of thing).
Husch-Blackwell is representing the players; the law firm’s got a track record handling college sports cases.
This isn’t going to be an isolated incident. Yahoo reports that athletes at multiple schools are thinking about challenging NIL Go decisions too.
The CSC is drowning in submissions right now. Brandon Marcello at CBS Sports reported that the commission can’t keep up with how many NIL deals are flooding in for review. Between January and February alone, they approved 3,704 deals totaling $39.29 million. But they also rejected 187 deals worth $14.36 million.
“I don’t think the system was designed with this amount of associated deals in mind,” CSC CEO Bryan Seeley told CBS Sports.
Those 18 Nebraska cases that reached arbitration? They’ve all been rolled into one case because the deals are so similar to each other.
Following its launch last June, NIL Go has processed more than 21,000 deals worth around $16.5 million. Schools are scrambling to find ways to spend money above the revenue-sharing cap, and it shows.
“In general, in arbitration, deals are consolidated because the issues are essentially the same,” Seeley said. “And what that often looks like is they are different student-athletes, but it’s the same or identical deal, or similar or identical deal, and they’re all from the same school.”
Review times have gotten longer as the volume keeps climbing. Seeley pushed back on the idea that the CSC doesn’t have enough staff to handle everything. He says the real problems are how the deals are structured and companies not providing enough information when they submit contracts.
At the time Marcello reported on the backlog, 18 NIL deals had gone to arbitration. Now we know they all involved Nebraska players.
