The system built to control the chaos of NIL is already drowning in it, as the College Sports Commission is hardly getting any time to catch its breath. The system designed as a watchdog in college sports is running into challenges its creators didn’t quite see coming.

“The massive increase in associated deal volume of this kind of manufactured NIL is leading to some increased review times in NIL Go,” said Bryan Seely, a former Major League Baseball executive, who was handed over the charge to oversee compliance following last year’s House v. NCAA settlement. “I don’t think the system was designed with this amount of associated deals in mind.”

Created in the wake of the House v. NCAA settlement, the College Sports Commission keeps tabs on the new revenue-sharing system. Any NIL deal above $600 from third-party sources must pass through NIL Go. Since it’s outside funding, it doesn’t count against a school’s revenue-sharing limit. However, is CSC regretting while ushering in the new model?

According to the reports, there has been a surge in the number of submitted deals over the months of January and February. Seely was initially encouraged by athletes’ adoption of the new reporting system. However, a growing pile of unapproved deals is now causing significant review delays, making it difficult for them to enforce the CSC guidelines. 

Amidst this rising pressure on CSC, YahooSports’ Ross Dellenger shared a screenshot of a report titled “NIL Deal Flow Report.” It gave a glimpse of the NIL Go Deal Activity. As found in the report, the system cleared 21,025 deals, whose total value was $166.50 million. Coming to the concerning bit, it did not clear 711 deals amounting to about $29.30 million in total value. 

That $29.3 million bottleneck is not a simple administrative issue. It represents hundreds of complex, collective-driven contracts disguised in traditional endorsements. Because these manufactured deals walk on a razor-thin line between legal compensation and illicit pay-for-play, the CSC is forced to do exhaustive manual reviews, completely paralyzing the watchdog’s operational bandwidth.

Over the past two months, the system signed off on over 3,700 NIL deals amounting to $39.29 million. At the same time, it rejected 187 deals valued at $14.36 million. When the system was first mapped out, officials believed nearly 90% of deals would pass through automated approval without human review. The reality, however, is far different. It looks nothing like the traditional endorsement economy NIL was once modeled after.

“The lack of staff is a contributing factor to increased deal review times, but it is not a large contributing factor or even the most significant contributing factor,” he said. “A lot of these are problems with the system just not being designed to handle this.”

The systematic paralysis directly validates Nick Saban’s harshest warnings. The legendary coach didn’t just lament players cashing in, but also cautioned that an unregulated and transactional culture would eventually break the sport’s guardrails. With millions in questionable deals now suffocating the oversight agency, Saban’s grim prophecy has fully materialized.

Nick Saban’s take on the NIL came out to be true 

From the very beginning, Saban was against the “pay for play” culture that NIL brought with itself. Reportedly, he retired from college football after his wife, Terry, pointed out the cultural shift among the college football players. Three years later, when Donald Trump invited him, along with 50 other guests, Saban shared his fear about the NIL. 

“People, instead of making decisions about creating value for their future, they were making decisions about how much money could they make at whichever school they can go to or transfer to,” he said.

One of the central topics at the roundtable was the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act, better known as the SCORE Act. The proposed bill aims to bring structure to college sports, particularly the fast-growing NIL compensation landscape. Along with Saban, former Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer, too, pointed out how donors are luring athletes with fat checks.

“The only thing I dislike about the SCORE Act get rid of the collectives. That’s cheating,” said Meyer. “Donors put money in a pot, and it’s distributed to players through the coach and players. That’s not allowed, that’s called pay for play.”

The CSC’s gridlock proves that a watchdog agency alone can’t tame this new frontier. As coaches like Saban and Meyer have argued, without federal legislation like the SCORE Act to draw clear lines, the chaos is only beginning.