RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. — Ross Bjork is done waiting.
The Ohio State athletic director stood outside the Big Ten’s spring meetings this week and laid out, plainly, where he believes his conference — the biggest and richest in college sports — is headed if Washington, D.C. keeps stalling and the College Sports Commission continues to sputter.
“We cannot govern nationally right now,” Bjork said. “There are too many extenuating forces. So, can we have a subset at our conference, but we’re still going to play each other?”
Big Ten weighs governing itself as national model falters
No one is shying away from the conversation in the Big Ten. At a luxury resort tucked into the cliffs along the Pacific Coast, conference officials spent three days discussing a future in which the Big Ten governs revenue-sharing deals itself, setting its own rules built on the foundation of a legally defensible framework.
This contingency plan – or idea – will grow legs if the CSC’s slowly evolving enforcement arm needs a jolt and the federal help they have sought in Congress falls through in the near future.
Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti did not discount the idea of the conference looking inward to police itself, but added a fundamental change in enforcement isn’t contingent on what happens in Congress.
“I would tie it to, can we see progress in the CSC?” he said Tuesday. “Can we make the change we think to adjust it? Can you protect that with help from Washington? That’s one piece of it.”
Frustration with NIL enforcement, House settlement reaches breaking point
The growing pains of the CSC, the enforcement arm that the power conferences themselves created out of the multibillion-dollar House v. NCAA settlement last July, have been apparent. Its NIL clearinghouse was supposed to clear or reject third-party deals within 24 to 48 hours, but only 45% of deals have been resolved within that window. Bjork, who served on the House Implementation Committee, said the system is jammed but salvageable if the conferences can convince the plaintiffs in the House case to change the language in the deal.
He and other athletic directors believe the system is too restrictive on players by limiting third-party deals with multimedia rights companies. Earlier this month, an arbitrator held up the CSC’s decision to deny 18 NIL deals between Nebraska football players and Playfly Sports, which is partnered with Nebraska’s athletics department, because the CSC labeled it as an “associated entity.” In an unrelated case, House plaintiffs are set to question the CSC’s definition of an “associated entity” in a California courtroom in June.
Big Ten leaders also believe the revenue-sharing cap needs to be tweaked, Bjork said.
Revenue-sharing overhaul could widen gap
One concept on the table: scrap the House settlement’s cap structure, built on the average revenue of all 68 power-conference athletic departments, and instead let each league build its cap based solely on its own conference’s average revenue. Schools are currently allowed to distribute up to 22% of the average revenue among schools in the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC, which amounted to $20.5 million for the 2025-26 academic year.
“We went down this path because we created this fraudulent market to be able to compensate our athletes,” Washington athletic director Pat Chun said. “You agreed to these aspects of the settlement, which basically put a system in place to measure these fraudulent deals. And lo and behold, go figure out that this whole thing just doesn’t work.”
Such a change would almost certainly hand the SEC and Big Ten higher caps than the ACC and Big 12. More than 75% of the value of third-party deals submitted to the CSC this year has come from the Big Ten and the SEC.
Such a change on the conference level would lead to another seismic change among competitive programs in the power conferences, but Bjork didn’t seem apologetic.
“If it’s percentage based off revenue, then drive more revenue,” Bjork said. “And that can lift your percentage.”
The other power leagues are unlikely to sign off, at least immediately, and any changes would likely require unanimous agreement among the five conferences named in the House settlement. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark told Yahoo Sports this week he opposes immediate changes to the settlement without a long-term plan for the CSC.
There is hope that the CSC can be fixed, even though most schools have yet to sign the CSC’s participation agreement. The CSC continues to operate without those signatures, and Petitti believes that it can continue.
“I just want to be really clear, because I’ve seen some reports and I’ve seen some people say that you’re breaking this rule or that rule,” Petitti said. “We’ve put in virtually more deals than anybody. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do: put the deals in, get the results.”
Passing legislation in Congress to codify the House settlement terms and introduce proper antitrust protection for the NCAA and its membership would strengthen the CSC’s enforcement, too, but Petitti insists tweaks to the system must come from the membership, not Washington D.C.
“Can we get to make adjustments that we think we need, based on the real-time experiences of what’s happened?” Petitti said. “And what’s sustainable about that? How does it impact what we’re doing going forward? Because we’re going to still face that with or without Washington. So we’ve got to be willing to come up with some sustainable model.”
With little faith in Congress, college sports leaders eye conference-driven future
Frustration isn’t localized in college athletics. Legislation to protect the NCAA and its conferences appears to be on its last leg on Capitol Hill. After months of committee meetings and debates, the SCORE Act was pulled from the House floor this week. Meanwhile, a bipartisan Senate effort from Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell continues to be negotiated behind the scenes and has yet to be introduced. Several collegiate power players, including the ACC’s and Big 12’s commissioners, signed a letter supporting the yet-to-be-seen legislation this week. Noticeably absent from the signatories were the sport’s big brothers: the SEC and Big Ten.
Several Big Ten athletic directors told CBS Sports they haven’t been shown what’s actually in the bill, a shared point of contention and anxiety among the nation’s larger schools and conferences.
The bill, should it be introduced, also faces a tight runway before Congress’s summer recess.
Chun, a constituent in Cantwell’s home state, doesn’t have much confidence in the bill’s prospects.
“I am also in the camp that is not expecting help from D.C.,” said Chun, who has spent time on Capitol Hill. “Because there comes a point where, after all these years, you just can’t expect it.”
Petitti, who serves on President Trump’s rules committee tasked with presenting proposals to “save college sports,” is not as pessimistic.
“As long as there are people in D.C. that are motivated to try to help college athletics, I think they deserve our time,” he said.
He added: “At some point, if we can’t get something, does it sort of stop? It won’t be us stopping. There’s no reason for us to stop. We’ve been on this road long before I got here.”
Inside the Big Ten’s meetings this week, Bjork said, the talk turned to what the Big Ten could actually do on its own and what it could legally defend.
One legal opening, reported this week by Yahoo Sports, came earlier this spring. In Choh v. Brown University, a federal appeals court upheld the Ivy League’s prohibition on athletic scholarships, ruling the plaintiffs failed to define the relevant market. With legal precedent, conference-by-conference rule-making may survive antitrust scrutiny in a way NCAA-wide rule-making no longer can.
Again, that’s a point the conferences and their highly paid attorneys will discuss and debate. It’s a common scene in college athletics, one that has tired decision-makers who increasingly feel impotent in the face of the strain of dwindling revenue streams and uncertainty on revenue-sharing enforcement.
“It feels like … since COVID hit (in 2020), whatever league that I’ve been in, it seems like we talk around in circles, but we can never put a pin on something and then say, ‘OK, let’s do this,’” Bjork said. “Now’s the time. Let’s put a pin on something, and let’s at least have our options.”
The coaches in the meetings echoed the AD’s frustration with the quickly changing world of college athletics, ranging from rules changes on the football field to the bigger issues tied to the House settlement and CSC.
Oregon coach Dan Lanning said the sport has reached a breaking point that the NCAA’s existing structure cannot resolve.
“There’s not 138 teams that can compete for a national championship or are playing on the same level. There isn’t parity,” Lanning said. “Maybe they shouldn’t all be represented by the same people.”
USC coach Lincoln Riley said coaches inside the room pushed for the Big Ten to model its rule-making more closely on the NFL, which attended the conference’s meetings this week and offered a presentation. Coaches, Riley said, would be directly involved in rules-making discussions, and there would be fewer committees, fewer veto points and more authority at the conference level. College football has “a lot of cooks in the kitchen,” he added, and the conferences need to “take control of” how rules get made.
Market value. Antitrust. Collusion. The need for “guardrails” from Congress, the popular buzzword in college athletics over the last five years, which schools seemingly hop over in the current ecosystem the moment they identify a competitive advantage.
Big Ten pushes toward action as clock ticks on fractured system
The path forward, Bjork said, runs through a matrix of decision-makers: presidents, athletic directors, attorneys general across the conference’s 14 states, public university boards and the league’s Council of Presidents and Chancellors. The first step, he said, is to align with the states within the Big Ten’s footprint.
“Oh, I think they would all be in alignment, especially within our footprint to say, hey, look, we think this is a clear pathway,” Bjork said. “Let’s work together. If we have clear, salient points around the legal side, around some kind of durability, around some kind of cost certainty, then I think we can have a beautiful framework.”
For now, it’s just an idea. The doomsday clock might be ticking, but there’s no intention of pulling off the radical – like leaving the NCAA altogether. The decision-makers are still toiling away, trying to fix the system they created. Radical Ideas are seemingly the new normal.
“Now’s the time,” Bjork said.
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