Who Regulates the New Regulator of College Sports?

College sports spent much of the last decade confronting the limits of NCAA authority. Courts weakened restrictions on athlete compensation, states adopted competing NIL laws, and universities increasingly resisted a regulatory model that appeared unable to accommodate the economic realities of modern college athletics. The response has not been the disappearance of regulation. Instead, college sports has begun building a new regulatory structure around the College Sports Commission.

Created as part of the settlement framework reshaping Division I athletics, the College Sports Commission now occupies an unusually important position in the emerging college sports economy. Among its responsibilities is the review of certain third-party NIL agreements, including deals worth $600 or more. The objective is understandable: distinguish legitimate commercial compensation from arrangements designed primarily to circumvent limits on direct institutional payments to athletes.

Without some form of oversight, the new system would be relatively easy to avoid. Universities and affiliated boosters could theoretically shift compensation outside formal revenue-sharing structures and label those payments NIL deals. A regulatory mechanism capable of evaluating whether third-party agreements have a legitimate commercial purpose is therefore not an unreasonable addition to the system.

The more interesting question is what happens once that regulator begins exercising meaningful economic power.

For an athlete, an NIL agreement is not an abstract compliance question. It can represent a significant source of income, and the ability to enter those agreements has become part of the broader market in which athletes choose schools, build brands, and evaluate their collegiate careers. When a regulator can delay, reject, or require changes to those agreements, it is making decisions that directly affect an athlete's economic opportunities.

That makes the design of the regulatory process just as important as the existence of regulation itself.

The College Sports Commission is emerging at a moment when college sports is attempting to solve a problem that has existed throughout the NIL era. The NCAA initially responded to athlete compensation by maintaining broad restrictions while allowing states, institutions, collectives, and markets to develop around them. The result was a fragmented system in which enforcement struggled to keep pace with economic innovation.

The Commission represents an attempt to reverse that dynamic. Instead of allowing the market to develop first and regulating it later, college sports is trying to create a mechanism capable of reviewing transactions as they occur.

That could produce greater consistency. It could also reproduce many of the problems that undermined confidence in the NCAA's previous regulatory model.

A regulator derives legitimacy from more than its ability to enforce rules. The people subject to those rules need to understand how decisions are made, what standards are being applied, how long decisions should take, and what process exists when they believe the regulator has made a mistake. Without those safeguards, oversight can quickly become another source of uncertainty.

This is particularly important in NIL because determining whether a deal reflects legitimate commercial value is not always straightforward. Athlete markets are highly individualized. A player with a large social media following may command significantly more than another athlete with similar on-field performance. Local businesses may value an athlete differently from national brands. A company may pay a premium because an athlete has particular relevance to its customers, geography, or marketing strategy.

There is no universally correct price for an athlete's publicity rights.

That creates an inherent challenge for any regulator asked to determine whether compensation is commercially reasonable. The more aggressively the Commission evaluates the value or purpose of individual agreements, the closer it comes to making judgments about what an athlete should be worth in a private market.

Some oversight is necessary if the revenue-sharing framework is going to have meaningful boundaries. But the distinction between preventing circumvention and regulating market value can become narrow very quickly.

The problem becomes more complicated because the College Sports Commission is not a conventional government regulator. It does not derive authority from voters or from a traditional administrative agency established by Congress. Its power comes from the institutional structure created around the settlement of college sports litigation and the participation of the conferences and schools operating within that structure.

Private regulation is not inherently illegitimate. Sports have always relied heavily on private governing bodies because competition requires common rules, coordinated enforcement, and specialized expertise. The NCAA itself is a private association, as are many of the organizations that govern professional and international sports.

But private regulators exercising significant economic authority face a particular legitimacy problem. They need to demonstrate that their procedures are fair precisely because many of the traditional accountability mechanisms associated with public regulation do not exist.

That means transparency matters.

Athletes and their representatives should know the standards used to evaluate agreements. Similar transactions should produce reasonably similar outcomes. Decisions should occur quickly enough that regulatory delay does not effectively become a rejection. Athletes should receive meaningful explanations when agreements are questioned, and there should be a credible process for challenging decisions without immediately resorting to litigation.

Otherwise, the system risks creating the same cycle college sports is supposedly trying to escape: rules are adopted, athletes dispute their application, courts become involved, and regulatory authority weakens further.

That would be particularly ironic because the College Sports Commission exists partly as a response to the NCAA's inability to maintain a stable regulatory framework under sustained legal pressure.

The Commission therefore has an opportunity to learn from that history.

The NCAA often treated regulatory authority as something it possessed because its members had agreed to its rules. Over time, that assumption became increasingly difficult to defend as those rules affected substantial economic interests. Courts began asking whether restrictions were legally justified, athletes questioned why they had so little influence over regulations governing their opportunities, and states intervened when they believed the existing system was too restrictive.

The lesson is not that regulation itself was the problem. College sports clearly needs regulation. The lesson is that regulatory authority becomes fragile when the people subject to it do not view the process as legitimate.

That distinction matters for the College Sports Commission because its influence is likely to extend beyond individual NIL deals. If the new system succeeds, the Commission could become one of the central institutions responsible for maintaining the economic boundaries of college sports. Its early decisions will therefore help establish expectations about what kind of regulator it intends to be.

A narrow enforcement body focused primarily on obvious attempts to circumvent compensation rules would occupy one role. A regulator that regularly evaluates the commercial value and structure of private athlete agreements would occupy a much broader one.

The second model requires considerably stronger procedural safeguards.

There is also a competitive dimension. Regulatory uncertainty does not affect every participant equally. Large athletic departments, sophisticated collectives, experienced agents, and major brands are better positioned to navigate complicated compliance systems. Smaller businesses and less prominent athletes may be more sensitive to delays, legal costs, and uncertainty about whether an agreement will ultimately be approved.

Poorly designed regulation can therefore produce the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of creating a fairer market, complexity can advantage the participants with the greatest resources to navigate it.

That is why the central question surrounding the College Sports Commission should not simply be whether it can control the NIL market. It should be whether it can create a regulatory system that athletes, institutions, and commercial partners can understand and reasonably trust.

College sports has spent years searching for stability after the collapse of the NCAA's traditional approach to athlete compensation. The creation of a new regulator may provide part of that stability, but replacing one institution with another does not automatically solve the underlying governance problem.

The legitimacy of the new system will depend on how authority is exercised, not simply where that authority is located.

The College Sports Commission has been created to regulate an increasingly complex market. Its larger challenge will be proving that the regulator itself deserves the power it has been given.

* Photo courtesy of Rutgersmbb (Instagram)