NCAA, College Sports Commission resist attempts to 'rewrite' House Settlement

“b. MMR employees are embedded in athletic department offices on campuses to assist with student-athlete NIL generation, taking direction from the athletic department staff on which recruit recruits to provide NIL deals to, and in what amounts.”

The matter has been assigned in Judge Claudia Wilken’s U.S. District Court of Northern California  to magistrate judge Nathanael M. Cousins and scheduled to be addressed in the court May 27, 2026, at 11 a.m. PT.

The CSC’s position in its response is not that MMRs should be entirely denied the opportunity to have NIL agreements with student-athletes but rather that a third-party arbitrator – the CSC uses NIL Go, an “online portal built with assistance from Deloitte” – should review each proposed deal on an individual basis and determine the merits of those proposals accordingly.

The plaintiffs’ filing seeks to declare that “NIL agreements involving Multimedia Rights companies are not subject to review by the Collegiate Sports Commission.”

This component in the ongoing layers to the settlement emanates, in part, from the Nebraska football players having proposed NIL deals worth more than $1 million with that school’s MMR, PlayFly rejected.

The Nebraska athletes retained the legal services of Husch-Blackwell and have sought to have the matter settled via arbitration after the CSC’s initial rejection of the NIL deals.

But the CSC pushed back last month and again this week, declaring that schools are seeking to use NIL deals via their MMRs as a method to “divert money into NIL pools.”

Per Seeley’s declaration, “Institutions have made arrangements with institution-affiliated third parties (including but not limited to MMRs and apparel companies) to divert money into ‘NIL pools,’ wherein the third party reallocates corporate sponsorship dollars, which otherwise would be paid to schools, to specified student-athletes through manufactured NIL deals – all as part of the recruitment and retention of student-athletes.”

The CSC has shared further data which it has maintained illustrates NIL Go’s clearance of most NIL proposals – 21,025 approvals against 711 rejections through February 2026 – in a timely manner. Per the CSC, “70% of deals were resolved” within one week and “50% deals were resolved within 24 hours.”

Per the CSC, proposed deals that took longer oftentimes lacked all of the documentation required to formally ratify an NIL arrangement.

When the CSC first released that data in late March, it also included a signed letter from Seeley as well as representatives from the Power Four conferences – ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC.

The House Class Counsel has contended with its filing that the CSC has illustrated “overreach” and a “narrow” definition of “associated entities” (such as MMRs) to reject these proposals and establish precedent against future proposals.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: NCAA reacts to Nebraska NIL dispute: A 'rewrite' of House Settlement