A member of the U.S. House of Representatives is raising questions about — and demanding answers from — the recently created College Sports Commission concerning its procedures for determining the permissibility of college athletes’ name-image-likeness deals with entities other than their respective schools.
Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., announced Friday she sent a letter to the CSC in which she expressed concern that the CSC “is unnecessarily restricting college athletes’ ability to monetize” their NIL. Trahan, who has been involved with several legislative efforts concerning college sports in recent years, also called the CSC’s approval process “slow, inefficient, and inscrutable” and alleged it is “sowing new chaos in college athletics.”
She wrote: “Public reporting indicates that the CSC operates with a staff of only four full-time employees to scrutinize deals, investigate rules violations, and enforce punishment. And recently, the CSC announced it was standing up an anonymous “reporting tip line,” effectively outsourcing enforcement and raising serious questions about its organizational capacity.”
In addition, she asked the CSC to respond by Nov. 1 to a set of questions and document requests.
What is College Sports Commission?
The CSC was created in conjunction with a federal district judge’s approval in June of the settlement of three athlete-compensation antitrust cases against the NCAA and the Power Five conferences. The CSC was charged with overseeing and enforcing compliance with the going-forward aspects of the settlement, which also included $2.8 billion in damages for current and former athletes.
Under one part of the settlement, which is facing six appeals to the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals, athletes were allowed to continue making NIL agreements with entities other than their schools. But the power conferences wanted to bring greater scrutiny to those arrangements. Any Division I athlete who has a deal, or deals, worth $600 or more must report those deals to a system called “NIL Go.” That data is then evaluated by the CSC to determine whether the deal has a “valid business purpose” and is within “a reasonable range of compensation.”
Athletes whose deals are not cleared can revise the arrangement and resubmit it, cancel the arrangement or appeal through an arbitration process.
As the process has gotten underway since July 1, a variety of concerns have been raised, and the CSC caused confusion in early September when it initially announced more than 8,000 deals worth a total of $80 million had been approved, then issued a correction a day later in which it revised those figures to just under 6,100 and less than $35.5 million.
This past week, Front Office Sports reported at least two school collectives had begun to pay players before those deals had been approved by the CSC.
College Sports Commission faces demands
In her letter, Trahan noted the various college-sports bills pending in the House and Senate and wrote in such an environment, “it is vital that (Congress) obtain all the facts about the CSC’s current operations and performance.”
She then requested that the CSC provide a variety of information, as of Oct. 10, including:
- “Number of deals and each deal’s value currently (1) submitted to NIL Go, but not cleared, (2) denied, (3) cleared, and (4) in neutral arbitration.”
- “The CSC’s staffing levels, including the number and roles of full-time employees and external employees (for instance, outside consultants or lawyers).”
- “Number of reports to CSC’s anonymous reporting tip line.”
She also asked for detailed information about “each deal that CSC has denied” and “copies of any internal standard operating procedures with which the CSC complies when processing NIL deals, including any documents that explain CSC’s determination of (fair market value) or ‘valid business purpose.’”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: U.S. Rep Lori Trahan demands answers from College Sports Commission
