The State of NIL Go: One Year Review and No Clear Answers

The clearinghouse cleared 95% of deals in its first year. The way it reports those numbers makes it impossible to know whether that means anything.

The College Sports Commission (“CSC”) was created to legitimize NIL deals through the NIL Go platform. One year in, there's no solid proof that it has. And with the public warnings it issued about cap circumvention, it appears colleges still haven't chosen to legitimize the process either.

Former prosecutor, Bryan Seeley, has been tasked with overseeing the launch and success of the College Sports Commission and NIL Go.

POTUS gives a yearly State of the Union address. This is the Hopkins Sports Law State of NIL address.

NIL Go launched June 11, 2025. After a year of reviewing deals, the College Sports Commission has published enough data to take stock. But the numbers don't tell the whole story. Read alongside the CSC's June 23 memo, they raise more questions than they answer about whether the CSC can actually police NIL in college sports.

Let’s start with the headline most are using following the release of CSC's July 8, 2026 NIL Deal Flow Report. Through June 30, 2026, NIL Go had cleared 34,195 deals worth $355.24 million against 1,812 not cleared worth $89.85 million. That's a 95.0% clearance rate. With a clearance number that high the system must be working, right?

"Not so fast, my friend." (Hat tip, Lee.)

Go back to what Deloitte told coaches at spring meetings in May 2025: run the old collective deals through the algorithm retroactively, and roughly 70% would have been denied. People love to set that 70% next to today's 95% and call it a contradiction. It isn't, at least not cleanly.

The 70% was one narrow population—legacy pay-for-play collective deals. The 95% is everything NIL Go now sees, and most of what it sees are small, ordinary, genuinely compliant deals plus non-associated deals that never existed in the 70% sample.

Different populations. Different denominators.

Here's the real problem. The number that would let you actually compare—the clearance rate on Associated deals alone, the collective deals—is the one number the CSC doesn't publish. So the comparison everyone wants to make is the comparison the current reporting is built to prevent. That gap in reporting is the thread that runs through everything that follows.

Now let’s look at the trend, because it complicates things, even for my own argument. Here's 2026 broken down period by period:

January–February: 3,704 cleared, 187 denied, about 95%.

March–April: 5,531 cleared, 442 denied, roughly 93%.

May–June: 7,639 cleared, 659 denied, about 92%.

The rate inched down each period while denied dollars rose every period: $14.36 million, then $26.87 million, then $33.68 million. In two months the total value of not-cleared deals went from $56.17 million to $89.85 million, up about 60%.

Let's be clear about what those numbers actually mean.

My concern has been that the clearance rates will rise mechanically as the CSC exempts more deals from review. Through June 30, the data shows the opposite—more money got stopped, not less. So right now, that concern is my prediction, not what the evidence is showing us.

Here's why I'm still holding tight on my prediction though: the big exemption hike (explained below) didn't take effect until July 1, one day after this data closed. This latest report is the baseline. The next one, and the reports that follow, are the real test. At least, slightly more real than what we’ve seen so far (without the deals broken down into Associated versus Non-Associated deals, it’s convoluted data).

The mechanics of all of this are worth detailing.

Under the policy in place since April 2026, Associated deals up to $2,500 skipped Range of Compensation (“RoC”) review until a player hit $15,000 in aggregate Associated compensation for the year. As of July 1, 2026, that jumped to $600–$15,000, exempt until $50,000 in aggregate. Roughly a threefold increase in the ceiling in three months. Raise the ceiling far enough and the denial rate improves without a single collective changing what it does. The CSC's own memo builds in an aggregation rule so athletes can't split one big deal into several small ones to duck review, which tells you deal-splitting was already happening.

There's a second thing quietly and artificially suppressing the denial rate. Until the CSC switches the model to prediction intervals in early July, the CSC says it will "postpone taking action on Associated deals" that sit just above the current RoC ceiling but "could fall within the range once the model is updated." The CSC says this is all "in the interest of giving student-athletes the most generous possible evaluation." It's a temporary measure. But don't mistake what it means in the meantime: deals that are over the line today aren't being denied. They're just being parked until a more athlete-friendly model can clear them.

None of that touches the deals that never show up at all. That's the last item in the memo, but the most telling.

The CSC reported that player agents are taking money from schools through NIL "consulting" agreements, "allegedly using the agreements to (1) route funds from the institution to their student-athlete clients and/or (2) supplement or replace representation fees otherwise owed by the student-athlete to the agent." It goes further: those agreements "may directly violate NCAA bylaws," citing Bylaw 13.2.1, and the CSC will review them "regardless of whether an agent is also being paid directly by a student-athlete." It is also investigating whether collectives are paying agents' representation fees "on behalf of student-athletes in order to circumvent the cap."

These are allegations, not findings. To be clear, the CSC's own words are "reports," "allegedly," "investigating." But if they hold, here's how the scheme works, and also why NIL Go will never be able to detect it.

The school or collective signs a services contract with Agent X—not with any athlete—for "consulting" or "recruiting insight." Nothing in the contract references a specific athlete's name, image, or likeness. The school pays Agent X directly, say $150,000 a year.

On paper it's just a regular ol' vendor invoice, like paying any outside consultant. It never passes through NIL Go, because NIL Go only reviews deals that compensate an athlete for use of their NIL. And NIL Go can't evaluate what it can't see.

Agent X separately represents Athlete Y. Off any submitted contract, the agent moves money to the athlete—cash, a "signing bonus," or forgiving fees the athlete would otherwise owe. The CSC memo describes that last form almost exactly: agents using the agreements to "supplement or replace representation fees otherwise owed by the student-athlete." Because the hand-off is never packaged as NIL compensation and never memorialized in a deal over $600, there's nothing to submit to the CSC.

If the allegations hold, the school paid the athlete and used the agent as the conduit. The only paper is a consulting contract that looks legitimate on its face. Nothing in that chain was ever a reportable NIL deal, so NIL Go's deal reviewers never see it. The CSC issued a written warning about this, which tells you it's neither rare nor small.

And the volume is moving one direction. NIL Go now has 41,183 registered student-athlete users, 1,354 institution users, and 5,858 representative users, all up from the prior report. Based on those numbers, the CSC is reviewing and making final calls on more than 90 deals a day. It also concedes that Associated deal volume—the collective deals—has surged since January, which is why fewer deals now clear within 24 hours, down to 41% from 45% two months earlier. Collectives aren't fading under the new regime. They're busier than ever.

Arbitration, meanwhile, has nearly emptied out, from 21 deals to 2. Whatever fights are happening over this money, they aren't happening inside NIL Go anymore.

So here's where the void in the reporting leaves us. We get only deal counts and dollar totals. No split between Associated and Non-Associated. No data on resubmissions. No count of what never got submitted at all. That reporting only tells you how many deals cleared. It doesn't tell you the one thing that matters: is the clearinghouse changing how money moves into college sports, or just changing how that money gets reported? On the evidence the CSC has chosen to release, you can't answer that. And that's not an accident of the data. It's a choice about what to publish.

The last question about all of this is the thorn that has been perpetually stuck in the NCAA’s side: antitrust.

To decide whether a deal is priced fairly (compensation to the athlete), the CSC uses a single model, built with Deloitte. That model uses three pillars to determine if the compensation exceeds a reasonable range of compensation ("RoC"). Those three pillars are "institution market reach, social media reach, and student-athlete performance." If a deal’s compensation is within the RoC of at least one pillar, the CSC determines that a particular deal is commensurate with rates and terms of similarly situated individuals. 

The CSC just announced the model will move to "prediction intervals rather than confidence intervals" to judge "whether a single deal falls within the range of what comparable individuals receive."

The CSC justified the move to a prediction model, explaining: "Prediction intervals account for the natural variability in how similarly situated student athletes are compensated, making them well-suited for evaluating whether a single deal falls within the range of what comparable individuals receive."

Let’s ignore the numbers for a moment and just focus on the structure of this model. What we have is one entity, coordinating with the NCAA, the conferences, and the schools, using a single methodology to decide what an athlete's work is worth. That’s a group of competitors agreeing on a formula that sets the price of labor. That system raises antitrust concerns.

The CSC has a legitimate defense here, however.

The RoC model was essentially birthed from the terms of the House settlement, and that settlement was approved by a federal court. Conduct blessed by a court is harder to attack than a naked agreement among rivals.

But that defense also has limits.

Approval of a settlement is not blanket antitrust immunity. Litigation like Ili v. NCAA is already pressing antitrust theories against the NCAA's NIL restrictions for athletes who reside in states with their own NIL laws. So I won't call an antitrust challenge a sure thing (nothing in the law ever is). I will say this though: the moment you have competitors using one formula to cap what workers can earn, you've built exactly the kind of arrangement antitrust law was written to scrutinize.

And if we know one thing by now, it's that college athletes are going to scrutinize, aka sue, the NCAA.

This is the first State of NIL Address. It won't be the last (as long as NIL and I last until this time next year). Subscribe to Cedric's weekly, The Fine Print Docket Substack, so the next one—and everything that comes before then—lands in your inbox.

Cedric Hopkins is an attorney and former Division I basketball player at the University of New Mexico. He's the author of The Fine Print, a book on the law and business of NIL and revenue sharing in college sports, and the founder of Hopkins Sports Law, where he delivers on-campus NIL, revenue-share, and agent-contract workshops, and helps athletes understand this complex new world of college sports. He's an educator, not an agent. Learn more at hopkinssportslaw.com.