CSC urges schools to agree to pay-for-play rules

OXON HILL, Md. — The head of the new regulatory body for college sports urged schools to sign an agreement sent out nearly two months ago pledging to abide by new rules that govern how to pay players, saying, “If there was a time to stick out your neck, it’s now.”

Bryan Seeley, the CEO of the 7-month-old College Sports Commission, used his presentation at the NCAA convention Wednesday to thank leaders from four schools who put out a statement backing the agreement. He urged others to sign on.

“My sense is that the vast majority of schools want to sign this,” Seeley said. “But I suspect if a school wants this, you’re thinking, ‘Why am I going to stick my neck out [if other schools won’t also sign],'” Seeley said. “If there was a time to stick out your neck, it’s now.”

In late November, the CSC sent its university participation agreement, an 11-page document that all 68 schools from the four largest Division I conferences need to sign for it to go into effect. It outlines the CSC’s role in monitoring how schools pay out the $20.5 million they’re allowed to spend on players’ name, image and likeness and looks at how the CSC regulates third-party payments to players.

But the most contentious part of the agreement is language that forbids schools from suing the agency.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in directing that state’s schools not to sign, called the agreement a “power grab.” Other state AGs followed suit.

On Tuesday, school presidents at Arizona, Washington, Virginia Tech and Georgia released a statement urging their colleagues to sign on.

“Stability is not created by new rules alone, but by a willingness to live by them,” the statement read.

Seeley latched onto that with a plea of his own to a roomful of college sports administrators.

“I’m not of the belief that college sports is fundamentally broken and the sky is falling, but there are definitely problems,” Seeley said. “No one from the outside is coming to fix those problems. We’ll either collectively come together to fix those problems or they won’t be fixed.”

Seeley said the CSC is talking to the conferences about tweaking some of the language — “fair feedback,” he called it — while cautioning that other proposed changes “would water the document down such that it has no enforcement … and would make it meaningless.”

Debate over the consequences of all 68 schools not signing the agreement has run the gamut, from those who believe the CSC could enforce its rules anyway to others who think it would eventually shutter the entire system.

Seeley gave a nod to proposals, now stalled in Congress, that could add muscle to many of the CSC’s functions.

“But we don’t know when that help is coming, and in the interim we should be working hard collectively to try to fix some [of the issues],” he said.