The moment everyone has been waiting for has finally arrived—the settlement in House v. NCAA has been approved. Athletic directors, coaches, athletes, and fans have been anxiously awaiting the day where Judge Claudia Wilken would approve this settlement. And rightfully so. This settlement strikes at the core of the NCAA’s amateurism model. The NCAA has said that its rules regulating student-athlete compensation are the “standards of amateurism,” the “‘mold’ of rules providing that ‘athletes must not be paid’” to preserve the “‘character and quality” that differentiates it from professional sports.”[1]

While Alston led to student-athletes being allowed to profit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL), the schools were still not allowed to make payments to the athletes. This settlement changes that. Schools will now be able to make payments directly to their athletes for use of their NIL. Understandably, this is the most notable aspect of the House settlement. However, another significant outcome of this settlement is the creation of the College Sports Commission, which is partnering with Deloitte to launch the NIL Go clearinghouse.

The NIL Go clearinghouse platform is meant to serve as a vetting process for third-party NIL deals entered into by collegiate athletes. When an athlete enters into a third-party NIL deal of $600 or more, they will be required to submit details about that agreement to the platform, which will then screen the deals based on a variety of factors. While the precise algorithm for evaluating these deals is unknown, there is some information available. When a deal is submitted, the platform will make three determinations: (1) is the third party an “associated entity” with the university, such as a booster, or a business contracted with a school like a university sponsor or apparel brand?; (2) is the deal for a “valid business purpose?”; and (3) is the deal within Deloitte’s “range of compensation” paid to similarly situated individuals?[2] While each of these determinations present their own legal issues, the third determination, seemingly a fair market value analysis, likely presents the most difficulty.

This fair market value analysis considers a number of factors, including athletic performance, an athlete’s social media reach, the market of the athlete’s school, and the reach of the school in that market.[3] While these factors seem reasonable enough to determine the fair market value of a particular deal, the issues for the NIL Go platform likely do not arise out of these factors, but out of using the fair market value analysis as a method of approving or denying NIL agreements entered into by collegiate athletes and third parties.

When an agreement is reviewed by NIL Go, it may be denied if it does not fall into the range of compensation determined by Deloitte’s algorithm. If an agreement is denied, an athlete has three options: cancel the agreement, revise and resubmit the agreement, or request arbitration. For example, if a Kansas basketball player enters into an agreement worth $2 million, but the clearinghouse has determined that the compensation range is $500,000 or below, the athlete could revise the deal and resubmit it to the clearinghouse. It is possible that Kansas could provide the remaining $1.5 million from its revenue share pool, but there are no guarantees that would occur. Disregarding any legal issues, this outcome seems blatantly unfair to the athlete. After negotiating a deal for himself, he has been told he is being paid over his fair market value, a number determined by factors completely out of his control.

Along with this unfairness, the fair market value analysis and range of compensation limitation may run into issues with antitrust law. 15 U.S.C. § 1 prohibits any “contract, combination, . . . or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce.” Price fixing is considered a restraint of trade. According to the United States Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, price fixing is “an agreement among competitors to raise, fix, or otherwise maintain the price at which their goods or services are sold.”[4] This form of restraining trade may well be relevant to the range of compensation limitation set by the NIL Go platform. The NCAA, the College Sports Commission, and Deloitte, are essentially agreeing on a formula which determines what the fair market value, or fair price, for an athlete’s NIL is in any given deal. By rejecting deals that exceed an athlete’s fair market value, the clearinghouse effectively sets a ceiling on what the athletes can earn. This suppression of the market for collegiate athlete NIL deals appears to represent the exact behavior that antitrust laws are designed to prevent.

This fair market value “ceiling” may sound familiar—it sounds similar to salary cap rules in professional sports. However, a critical difference between professional sports and collegiate sports is the athletes’ ability to collectively bargain. In a league like the NBA, the athletes are employees represented by the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), which engages in collective bargaining with the league to determine many things, including the salary cap rules. However, collegiate athletes are not employees (yet), and thus do not have a collective bargaining agreement to set out the terms for something like the NIL Go clearinghouse.

The NIL Go clearinghouse is supposedly designed to reduce payments from booster-funded collectives to athletes disguised as NIL deals, where the athlete was providing little to no real value to the collective. This has certainly been an issue since collegiate athletes have been allowed to profit from their NIL, however, the clearinghouse may be eliminating one problem while creating another, potentially bigger problem. The effects of the NIL Go clearinghouse, and the Housesettlement generally, on collegiate athletics remain to be seen. What seems clear, however, is that the NCAA’s legal problems will not be going away any time soon.

Davis Bax is a rising 3L at the University of Kansas School of Law, where he is president of the Sports Law Society and the St. Thomas More Society. He can be found on LinkedIn as Davis Bax.

[1] Brief for Petitioner at 27, National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, 594 U.S. 69 (2021) (Nos. 20-512 and 20-520).

[2] Ross Dellenger, What is NIL Go, and why is it the latest subject of debate among college sports leaders?, Yahoo Sports (June 13, 2025, 7:00 AM) https://sports.yahoo.com/college-sports/article/what-is-nil-go-and-why-is-it-the-latest-subject-of-debate-among-college-sports-leaders-120028561.html

[3] Id.

[4] Price Fixing, Bid Rigging, and Market Allocation Schemes: What They Are and What to Look For, U.S. Dep’t of Just. Antitrust Div., 2 (2021) https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2016/01/05/211578.pdf