The NIL revenue cap is now in court
A new antitrust suit challenges the House settlement's revenue cap and the NIL Go clearinghouse, so athletes should start documenting every deal.
On June 9, two college football players, USC’s Talanoa Ili and Stanford’s Charlie Mirer, filed a class action in the Northern District of California arguing that the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap created by the House settlement, and the NIL Go clearinghouse that screens third-party deals, violate federal antitrust law and the NIL statutes of California and sixteen other states. If you are an athlete, an agent, or running a collective, the rules you are budgeting around may not survive the year.
The plaintiffs are not trying to unwind the settlement. They are attacking how it is being implemented, and that distinction matters. A win would not erase revenue sharing or send college sports back to 2024. It would most likely loosen or remove the cap and curb the College Sports Commission’s power to reject or reprice deals it decides sit above “fair market value.” So the realistic range of outcomes runs from the status quo on one end to a market with no ceiling and far less gatekeeping on the other.
The practical risk for athletes right now is not the cap itself but how NIL Go handles individual deals. Every time a deal is submitted, approved, repriced, or denied, that decision creates a record somewhere. If the cap and clearinghouse eventually fall, the athletes who can show what they were actually offered, and what they were pushed to accept instead, will be in a far stronger position than the ones who ran everything through texts and handshakes. The difference between those two numbers is exactly what a damages claim is built on.
The state-law angle is the part most people skip past. Seventeen states now protect NIL rights by statute, and several of those laws bar schools and conferences from limiting what an athlete earns from third parties. The lawsuit argues the cap and the clearinghouse do precisely that. Until a court decides whether a privately negotiated settlement can override a state statute, athletes in those states are living under two conflicting rule sets at the same time, and neither the school nor the conference can tell them with confidence which one wins.
This quarter, build a file. For every NIL deal you sign, are offered, or have rejected through NIL Go, keep the original offer, the submission, the clearinghouse’s response, and any revised terms, and note the date and dollar figure at each step. If you advise athletes, do the same across your whole roster. You are not betting on which way the case comes out. You are making sure that whichever way it goes, you can prove what happened. The cap may well stand, but the record you keep now is the only thing that turns a favorable ruling into money you can actually collect later.