The House settlement was supposed to clean up the chaos in Name, Image, and Likeness deals. The pitch was simple: revenue-sharing would finally restore order, eliminate the shadiest agreements, and give schools a firmer grip on compensation. It sounded neat, and for a moment, almost promising.
Yet, just three months in, that dream is starting to look more like a nightmare. A fresh investigation has uncovered schools and collectives already sidestepping the new rules, leaving a reported $11 million deal stuck in bureaucratic limbo.
Why Is the New NIL System Already Hitting Roadblocks?
When NIL Go launched in June, it was marketed as the ultimate fix. Under the new system, every NIL deal worth over $600 had to pass through the clearinghouse for approval, preventing athletes from signing deals in the shadows.
The system built with Deloitte was designed to confirm that all deals had “fair-market value” and weren’t just thinly veiled pay-for-play offers. While it looked good on paper, the cracks have already started to show in practice.
According to a report from Front Office Sports, multiple power-conference collectives have decided they are done waiting for approvals. At least two have already paid athletes before their deals were explicitly approved, while others are watching athletes skip the submission process altogether. The reason, unfortunately, is painfully simple: NIL Go is too slow.
In fact, the system is so slow that it currently has $11 million worth of deals pending review. Some agreements have sat in the portal for weeks without updates, leaving athletes and agents demanding payouts. This has led some to believe the model is unsustainable, with one source admitting they do not see it surviving.
The investigation also revealed that many players do not even bother to submit their deals for review in the first place. “Out of close to 70 agreements we sent out in August, only about 20 were actually submitted,” one SEC source admitted. “The rest? They just never made it into the portal.”
The reasons for this are varied. According to the source, some players do not know how to use the portal, others simply do not care, and a growing number are worried their deals will be rejected for failing to meet the commission’s “fair-market value” test. This situation leaves collectives stuck in the middle.
Meanwhile, conference sources had more to add to the growing list of concerns. “Agents and players are badgering us nonstop, ‘Where’s my check? Where’s my money?’” Another SEC collective insider told FOS. “So we started paying out the smaller ones. We can’t afford to wait forever.”
This frustration is not isolated to the SEC, either. An ACC collective leader revealed, “I have deep concerns as to the longevity of this system. We wanted it to work. But if NIL Go won’t, we don’t have a choice but to go around it.”
For its part, the College Sports Commission insists that the rules are still the rules.
Pay-for-play remains banned, using NIL Go is mandatory, and “eligibility consequences” loom over anyone who ignores the process. The problem is that the commission has only four full-time staffers to police thousands of athletes across Division I. That management deficit is a primary cause of the delays.
This situation creates what one source calls “a very uncomfortable situation for everybody involved.” And “uncomfortable” might be a polite way to put it. The longer these delays drag on, the more this compliance safeguard looks like an industry-wide game of chicken.
So, do schools and collectives follow the rules and wait, or do they risk eligibility fallout by paying early? At the moment, it appears many are choosing the latter.
