For months, conferences and schools have been asking how the rules of college sports’ new era will actually be enforced and what the price of breaking them may be. On Wednesday, they finally got a look at some agreed-upon answers.
The Power 4 conferences sent an 11-page document to their schools that requires them to cooperate with investigations, abide by enforcement decisions and not file lawsuits challenging rules and rulings made by a recently created college sports governing body if they want to take part in the new revenue-sharing system with athletes.
The College Sports Commission’s Participant Agreement, obtained by The Athletic, spells out the terms and conditions agreed to by the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and SEC. The agreement was also sent by the CSC to the other 28 Division I conferences for them to distribute to any schools that want to take part in revenue-sharing payments to athletes.
Schools that break the terms of the agreement by suing the CSC or the conferences over agreed-upon rules, or encouraging or aiding other entities to file lawsuits, could have their league revenue distributions cut off and face postseason bans in the sports involved in violations.
The agreement also requires schools to “not support, advocate for or lobby for any change in federal, state, or local law that would alter or be inconsistent with its obligations under this Agreement.”
The agreement stipulates — frequently — that it does not override existing state laws.
The College Sports Commission was created by the P4 and launched earlier this year to enforce new rules for big-time college athletes that came out of the $2.8 billion House v. NCAA lawsuit. Bryan Seeley, the former head of investigations for Major League Baseball, was hired to be the CSC’s chief executive officer.
The CSC is responsible for enforcing the revenue-sharing cap that schools directly paying athletes must adhere to, along with sport-by-sport roster limits. The CSC also oversees the approval process of athletes’ name, image and likeness deals.
There is no hard deadline for schools to review and return a signed Participant Agreement, but the hope is they will do so within about two weeks. The agreement has received sign-off from power-conference attorneys and officials who spent months working on it, negotiating detailed language and getting feedback from member schools.
The agreement was delayed several months as the conferences haggled over what penalties should be available for the CSC to impose on rule-breakers. The menu of potential penalties is not addressed in the Participant Agreement and still needs to be finalized and codified into NCAA bylaws and CSC rules and policies.
The penalties are similar to what the NCAA has handed out over the years to schools and individuals who violate rules: suspensions for coaches and administrators, fines for schools, stripping athletes of eligibility, roster reductions — including limits on the number of transfers a program can take — recruiting restrictions and postseason bans for teams. A person briefed on the negotiations detailed the potential penalties to The Athletic, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the conferences were not making the discussions public.
Penalizing schools with reductions of their revenue-sharing cap, a common weapon of professional leagues that operate with a salary cap, is not permitted because it would violate terms of the House settlement. However, the person said restrictions could be placed on the percentage of available revenue a school could allocate to certain teams. Most P4 schools are spending between 65-75 percent of the up to $20.5 million they are permitted to pay athletes through rev share this year on football.
The postseason ban was a sticking point among the conferences, with the Big Ten pushing back against it being used as a possible penalty, before agreeing to that measure being available only under four particular circumstances:
- If a school blatantly disregards a penalty — for example, allowing an athlete to compete who has been ruled ineligible or permitting a suspended coach to work with his or her team.
- If a school or representatives actively obstruct a CSC investigation.
- Failing to cooperate with an investigation.
- Egregious conduct that gives a competitive advantage to a team within a particular season. This would limit the postseason ban to being a real-time punishment that could only impact the season during which the violations occurred.
Much like the NCAA, CSC enforcement will require cooperation from participating schools, though the process comes with several important differences.
Rulings will be made by Seeley and not a committee. Appeals by schools and individuals will go to an outside arbiter. By signing the participant agreement, schools and those who work for them are agreeing not to challenge rulings and rules in court.
“To the extent not prohibited by Participant’s state laws, the CSC and Participant hereby agree to waive any right to a jury trial with respect to all disputes arising out of CSC enforcement action or otherwise relating to this Agreement,” the agreement states.
State laws and court rulings have upended the NCAA’s ability to govern college sports and led conference and NCAA leaders to seek help from Congress in the form of a federal law and antitrust exemption that will allow them to create standardized rules for national competition.
A college sports bill to address these issues, the SCORE Act, has passed through committee in the House of Representatives and could move to the floor for debate and a vote as soon as December.
