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Cheaters cheat has been the rationale behind any new rules.
Paying athletes is now governing college athletics. In 2025-26, each power conference school can share $20.5 million of its own money among athletes on all their teams. That’s called revenue sharing, which might mean otherwise in the pros.
Most will give the most to football because that is the big financial driver of college sports. Estimates range from 70-80 percent. Men’s basketball gets 10-20 percent and whoever’s left over can get a million here or million there to reach the salary cap that the school must verify.
Apparently, all of the power conferences are making all of their schools sign a letter saying they will abide by all of the new rules. That’s where the “cheaters cheat” factors in because, well, it’s true.
How and where the schools get the $20.5 million has not been clearly defined, but that part of it doesn’t make any difference unless, for example, they cannot get it from athletic donors, who are known for dumping millions every year into war chests of the most powerful.
The biggest problem is going to be the NIL programs that can still exist at every school under new regulations: Every NIL deal above $600 has to pass the clearing house under a new College Sports Commission (CSC) that will be assisted by the Deloitte number crunchers.
Can you smell how that smells from wherever you are?
Thanks, mainly to the NCAA, NIL evaluations of various “deals” were never laid out, like how much is a single post worth on social media sites with 5 million followers? What cars and commercials cost is a lot easier to figure.
But the Wild West phrase came up because some schools never really knew how to evaluate these opportunities, and other schools didn’t care. There have been reports of the first NIL class members getting enormous payments and told they will figure out NIL later. But again no one told anyone what anything was worth, and the promise of NIL morphed into athletes being bid for out of the transfer portal.
Cheaters cheat by knowing how to cheat, and my guess is the schools that have had success doing that will find a way to keep doing it.
The new CEO of the CSC is Bryan Seeley, who handled enforcement in Major League Baseball, where sign stealing went on for years and was only occasionally prosecuted (Astros, Red Sox a few years ago).
Seeley had to deal with 30 MLB teams with relatively small rosters. There are more than twice that many schools in the power conferences, each offering 16 to 30 varsity programs to hundreds of athletes.
Some of those schools try to understand the regulations and have compliance offices that will check on them. But the wealthiest schools got that way by just buying the best players and thus the best teams.
Cheaters always find a way to cheat.
Art Chansky is a veteran journalist who has written ten books, including best-sellers “Game Changers,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Dean’s List.” He has contributed to WCHL for decades, having made his first appearance as a student in 1971. His “Sports Notebook” commentary airs daily on the 97.9 The Hill WCHL and his “Art’s Angle” opinion column runs weekly on Chapelboro.Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
