Inside the suspect deals bogging down the CSC

Hello and happy Wednesday. I had a whole other story planned, but scrapped it to show you some things I think perfectly explain yesterday’s new CSC complaint. 

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Yesterday, the College Sports Commission (CSC) released its latest NIL Deal Flow report. In a call with reporters (that FOIAball was pointedly not invited to), CEO Bryan Seeley mentioned the clearinghouse was struggling. 

The Commission—established by somewhat dubious judicial fiat—is apparently overwhelmed by the exact kind of agreements it is meant to root out. 

“I don't think the system was designed with this amount of associated deals in mind," Seeley said.

You may think the CSC is making excuses for its delays vetting contracts. And we’re not often inclined to defend it. 

But we can do a pretty good job elucidating the flood of sketchy numbers the CSC is likely trying to sort through.

Like everything, blame social media.

The CSC considers an associated entity anything “that’s either controlled by a donor or is working on behalf of the school to help retain and recruit student athletes.” For the purpose of this blog, we’ll call them NIL collectives. 

Why can’t the CSC handle them? 

Well, in classic college football fashion, it’s a problem of everyone’s making. 

Seeley was named CEO of the CSC on June 6, 2025. A month later, he announced a blanket ban on deals from NIL collectives. 

Those agencies had faced minimal scrutiny, operating in a wild, wild West during the initial years of Name, Image, and Likeness compensation. 

The CSC and its NIL Go platform, whose proprietary algorithm FOIAball exclusively revealed last month, was an effort to stem the free-for-all, rooting out the pay-for-play deals the NCAA bans.  

Two weeks later, amid outcry from the rich boosters (who even established an aggrieved working group called The Collective Association), the CSC relaxed its rules, saying it would manually vet deals with associated entities. 

That was in July 2025. It’s now March 2026. You’d think they’d have found a solution.

But it is tricky: How do you start approving the exact thing your organization was built to reject?

In his comments, Seeley said neither staff shortages nor his system was to blame, but rather the lack of information coming from the deals. 

"There are people who do not wanna provide information, particularly if it's information they think that will lead to their deal not being approved," Seeley said. "And the people in this case are not student-athletes. The people are the entities doing the deals or the schools."

Which tracks. In speaking with numerous NIL experts, many described universities as having a “see-no-evil” policy during the pre-CSC era. Sort of like they’ve always operated when it comes to paying players. These newfound collectives, it seems, are used to not being frisked. And not eager to start. 

We don’t have access to all the information the CSC has (we can be reached at [email protected]), but FOIAball did obtain over three years of NIL deals from UCLA. 

One was for all NIL compensation the university vetted from mid-2022 to mid-2024. Another was for football from mid-2024 to 2025. 

We can assume this wasn’t all the documentation UCLA received about these deals. But even a partial picture still raises plenty of questions.

According to the April 2022-May 2024 figures, first obtained by CalMatters, UCLA athletes inked 952 NIL deals during that span.

If you would like to know how NIL Go and the CSC is supposed to work, look at the UCLA women’s gymnastics team. They had 125 deals worth $2.5 million, all with recognized brands. 

By contrast, football had 263 deals. Over 43% of them, 115, were payments directly from UCLA’s NIL Collective Men of Westwood. 

Those vary widely in scope.

On Nov. 8, 2023, Men of Westwood paid $4,000 to an unnamed UCLA football player for “social media.” 

The same day, Men of Westwood paid $270,000 to a football player. Also for “social media.” 

Sure, there are differences between a quarterback doing a whole campaign on Instagram and a nickel cornerback doing a single tweet. But without additional information, the kind the CSC says it isn’t getting, which one do you think is fair and which is a handout to ball out?

That becomes extremely glaring when you see NIL collectives like Men of Westwood were paying more for social media than actual, real brands. 

A February 2024 deal for “social media” for Bubblr sparkling energy water paid a women’s gymnast (likely Jordan Chiles) $250,000. Chiles currently has 1.6 million Instagram followers.

In May 2024, Men of Westwood, which doesn’t have a product to sell, paid a football player $450,000 for social media. That year, UCLA’s biggest star was probably Carson Schwesinger. He has 37,000 followers.

In a two-year span, UCLA reported football players took in $1.7 million in NIL money. Over $1.1 million was from Men of Westwood for social media.

Legitimate? We can’t say! But we can proffer a guess.

FOIAball also obtained data from the football team from September 2024 to April 2025. 

Those numbers shot up, with $4.9 million in deals in a single year.

(We will take a moment to flag our previous reporting on UCLA’s NIL efforts and note that $4.9 million figure matches, almost to the dollar amount ($4.85 million), the money its football-focused collective, Bruins for Life, raised through the use of a charity for at-risk youth. Probably a coincidence.)

That data did not include businesses involved in the deals. UCLA began withholding that information under FERPA, saying that information could be reverse-engineered to ID students. (Which, yes, we did that with the Jordan Chiles deal. Whatever.) 

So we can’t say what money came straight from UCLA-affiliated collectives. But we can say that of the 256 deals, 133 were filed under “Social Media, Appearances.”

Those figures are, again, all over the place. One deal, from Jan. 10, 2025, for “Social Media, Appearances” was $39.34. I’m not sure I’d post for that much, let alone leave my house. 

(That’s not true, I post all the time, for much, much less. You can help change my rates by becoming a paid subscriber to FOIAball. Only you can make sure I’m fairly compensated for my work. So upgrade today!)

In contrast, over a two-day span from June 26-27, 2025, the school reported 18 deals for “Social Media, Appearances” that totaled $1,733,670. 

Either someone coincidentally closed a bunch of clients that day, a lot of big firms had surplus FY25 ad budgets they needed to immediately offload, or, uh, Nico Iamaleava.

Without the business names, we can’t say what is and isn’t on the level. We can say we’ve checked all of Iamaleava’s social media and have not caught a single glimpse of a single ad campaign. 

But take that $4.9 million total. Strip away the very broad “Social Media, Appearances” category from it. Care to guess how much money wasn’t in that bucket? That would be $56,000. 

So maybe you can understand why the CSC, designed to stop these exact things, might be struggling to handle it.

Not that we are defending them. But on this matter, we understand its issue.

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