ESPN treated the opening game of the WNBA season like a big event, producing its pregame and halftime shows from Gainbridge Fieldhouse with as many as seven on-air analysts, including vets like Ryan Ruocco, Rebecca Lobo, and Holly Rowe calling the game. Even Malika Andrews was on site.

Ruocco and Lobo were fine, I guess, but they didn’t meet the moment on a couple of important occasions. Ruocco noted that Caitlin Clark went to the locker room at least two times, and viewers didn’t know why. The announcers speculated that Clark was experiencing problems with her hip and groin, which made sense given her injury problems last year. But it wasn’t true. It turns out that the star was getting her back readjusted. Rule number one of announcing: Don’t speculate.

And now, the main event…

When the Supreme Court blew open the doors to college athletes getting paid, in June 2021, plenty of people pictured a financing model akin to Buddy Garrity peeling off bills for some blue-chip halfback in Friday Night Lights. Instead, the new college sports economy has turned out to be less small-town boosterism than corporate intermediation, with Learfield, Playfly, JMI Sports, and a handful of other multimedia-rights companies—MMRs, in the parlance of the industry—having inserted themselves between schools, brands, and athletes’ name, image, and likeness rights. That shift crystallized last month, when private equity firm TPG agreed to acquire Learfield in a deal reportedly valuing the “monetization engine” at nearly $2 billion. (Standard disclosure: TPG is an investor in Puck.)

College sports, in short, are getting fully financialized. Whether this new N.I.L. architecture can endure, however, may turn on a critical upcoming hearing overseen by Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins, the special master adjudicating disputes arising from last June’s landmark $2.8 billion House v. NCAA antitrust settlement. On May 27, Cousins will evaluate whether the College Sports Commission—the newly empowered enforcement arm of the post-House era—gets a green light to aggressively police athletes’ outside N.I.L. deals, subjecting them to invasive scrutiny.

Established by the Power Four conferences and staffed largely by conference and NCAA insiders, the CSC is concerned that these MMRs are buying up athletes’ N.I.L. rights prematurely, without concrete sponsor deliverables, and engineering the brand activation later. To the commission, this warehousing of N.I.L. rights resembles pay-for-play in more sophisticated attire—a way for schools to funnel money to athletes while sidestepping the House-established revenue-share cap, currently around $20.5 million per Division I school. (The number is primed to reach about a third of revenue from media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorships, or $33 million, by 2034-35.) The CSC has already begun cracking down, rejecting more than $1 million in N.I.L. deals involving Nebraska football players, per Yahoo Sports.

Now Jeffrey Kessler, the star plaintiffs’ lawyer behind the House settlement, is taking aim at the commission’s theory that MMRs are effectively doing the schools’ dirty work. At the upcoming hearing, Kessler will argue that MMRs and ordinary brand sponsors should not be swept into the category of “associated entities”—the settlement’s term for boosters and N.I.L. collectives whose deals may be subjected to greater oversight. In Kessler’s telling, the CSC has converted a narrow anti-circumvention tool into a roving N.I.L. surveillance squad, delaying and investigating third-party deals that the settlement was supposed to leave alone.

Kessler’s textual argument is that associated entities are supposed to exist, in significant part, to benefit a particular school’s athletic program. MMRs, he contended, may have school clients, but they are fundamentally commercial enterprises—“agnostic” about which team wins on Saturdays or who enters the transfer portal. In other words, they are free agents in the college-sports economy, capable of serving many constituencies at once. Kessler is seeking a sweeping declaration placing MMRs and brand sponsors outside the CSC’s regulatory authority.

That effort has forced the NCAA and the conferences to defend the CSC’s enforcement powers in federal court. Their response was blunt—Kessler isn’t enforcing the settlement, he’s trying to rewrite it after the fact by carving out categorical exemptions for the middlemen now reshaping the N.I.L. marketplace. To rebut his charge of regulatory overreach, they provided data showing 21,025 N.I.L. deals approved against just 711 rejected—a clearance rate north of 95 percent. But their main argument was procedural—that the settlement already established an arbitration mechanism precisely for disputes of this kind.

Which means the threshold issue may have less to do with Learfield or Playfly than with who gets to draw the first enforceable boundary lines in this emerging market. The CSC argued that Kessler is trying to short-circuit the House arbitration process before it can establish meaningful precedent—which matters, since those Nebraska deals will hardly be the final point of contention.

If Judge Cousins grants the sweeping declaration that Kessler is seeking, he could effectively federalize every definitional fight over the CSC’s authority, imposing limits on regulatory architecture still under construction. If he sends the parties back to arbitration, the system will mature case by case—messily, privately, and far less satisfactorily for anyone hoping for bright-line rules. Either way, the money is not waiting.

Thanks, Eriq. See you all tomorrow.

John

Need help? Review our FAQ page or contact us for assistance. For brand partnerships, email ads@puck.news.

You received this email because you signed up to receive emails from Puck, or as part of your Puck account associated with {{customer.email}}. To stop receiving this newsletter and/or manage all your email preferences, click here.

Puck is published by Heat Media LLC. 107 Greenwich St., New York, NY 10006