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NCAA, power conferences file response to House settlement complaint over NIL deals, alleged CSC violations

IMG_0985by: Griffin McVeigh05/05/26griffin_mcveigh

The NCAA and power conferences across college athletics have filed a response to the House settlement’s class counsel. In the filing from class counsel, which has been reviewed by On3’s Pete Nakos, attorneys argued the College Sports Commission is violating the settlement by rejecting specific NIL deals.

“CSC CEO Bryan Seeley’s declaration in House defendants joint response to plaintiffs challenge that the CSC is violating the settlement by rejecting MMR NIL deals,” Nakos said via X.

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Bryan Seeley, the CEO of the CSC, had his declaration included. He spoke about there being third-party “NIL pools” to help schools pay student-athletes. You can check out the full thing from Seeley down below.

“Institutions have made arrangements with affiliated third parties to divert money into ‘NIL pools,’ wherein the 3rd party re-allocates corporate sponsorship dollars, which otherwise would be paid to schools, to specified student-athletes thru manufactured NIL deals-all,” Seeley said.

The filing from the NCAA and power conferences highlighted what happens when the student-athlete disagrees with the decision.

“If CSC does not clear a deal and a student-athlete believes CSC got it wrong, the remedy provided in the Settlement Agreement is arbitration—not dashed-off and devoid of-fact motions from Class Counsel seeking categorical relief,” they said.

CSC has not cleared NIL deals worth over $29 million due to school sponsors and booster-operated companies

In a new data release by the CSC in March, associated contracts tied to schools’ sponsors and booster-operated companies made up 63% of all NIL agreements in the last two months. In total, the CSC said 711 deals worth $29.3 million have been reviewed and not cleared. Playfly Sports and Learfield deals that are facilitated with legitimate brands have also been slowed down by the clearinghouse in some instances and classified as associated-entity deals.

“We’ve been applying the rules consistently across institutions; we’ve been applying the rules consistent with the settlement,” Bryan Seeley told On3 back in April. “Until we’re ordered, it doesn’t change what we’re going to do. The timing of this motion was not a coincidence. This motion was filed shortly before an arbitration hearing that has been scheduled for later this month. In which the CSC was going to prove, conclusively, that a school’s multimedia rights partner was an associated entity.

“What plaintiff’s counsel tried to do here is avoid the arbitration process that they agreed to in the settlement, and instead get the issue in front of the court in California with no facts attached to it. No information about what’s really going on on campus. And what’s really going on on campus, on many campuses, is that the schools’ multimedia rights partners are being directed by the schools to provide certain NIL payments to certain student athletes in order to recruit and retain those student-athletes, which makes those partners associated entities under the settlement.”

On3’s Pete Nakos contributed to this report