Just a few hours before U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken issued her final approval of a settlement in a trio of antitrust cases against the NCAA , a number of staffers at the association’s national office exited their Indianapolis headquarters slightly ahead of the typical close of business. As they filed out in order to get to a colleague’s wedding later that night, a handful of them passed a scene that can only be found in college sports. There, behind closed doors of a conference room, was former Michigan Wolverines staffer Connor Stalions participating in a sprawling multiday Committee on Infractions hearing right in the middle of the building, with expensive suits filing in and out. Such scenes, the closest thing to a collegiate court room as you’ll find beyond the actual thing, are not entirely going away for good in the wake of the landmark House settlement . But they will be fewer and further between as a result of the agreement that is set to significantly upend college athletics. Though much of the attention in the run up toward the July 1 start date for the new enterprise has rightfully been focused upon the arrival of the revenue sharing and direct payments from schools to players, perhaps the bigger sea change athletes, administrators and coaches will notice from day to day will come in the realm of enforcement. Soon, it won’t be NCAA enforcement veterans arguing their case against schools before a cadre of faculty athletic reps, lawyers and athletic directors around a set of U-shaped tables. Rather, there will be no hearing at all upon reaching the denouement of a process that is typically measured in years and not months. Instead, perhaps as early as this July, a written notice will simply be sent out to those who have been found to breach some of the new regulations in place. It will bear the logo of the newly formed College Sports Commission overseeing the new process and will rather succinctly inform them of their fate (in an ideal world) just a few weeks after an infraction takes place. For most, in both theory and practice, it will be a welcome reset of an aspect of college sports. “One of the most frustrating things, especially in the last decade, has been the enforcement process,” one Power 4 athletic director says. “There’s a lack of trust in the system. We’ll see about [the future] with the CSC.” Enforcement has been the most opaque aspect of the House settlement process. A committee composed of various athletic directors from the five power conferences named in the antitrust cases has been working diligently for months, but not much has been fully committed—in writing, at least—to specifically what new guardrails are now in place. Some of that is by design—they’re attempting to build the plane and fly it at the same time, as the saying goes—with a new system designed to serve one purpose for many different parties. The new CSC was only recently incorporated in April and is tasked with oversight, implementation and overall enforcement of the settlement over the course of the next decade. CEO Bryan Seeley, who comes over from Major League Baseball and will assume commissioner-like powers to dole out future punishments, was officially named to his position just two hours after Judge Wilken issued her final approval of the case but technically doesn’t have a set start date prior to July 1 despite inheriting all of the problems at hand right away. “Everybody understands what the stakes are—they’re the highest they’ve ever been. We all recognize that nobody wants to exist in an unregulated, unsustainable environment,” Washington Huskies athletic director Pat Chun says. “Relative to enforcement, I’m probably optimistic because, knowing what’s been done in the past, this is backed by a court-approved settlement. There are things that we’ve all agreed upon. We recognize it’s going to get challenged and tested. But we believe in the merits of what’s been created. “Show me any type of company or organization or system that survives being unregulated. It does not happen in this country.” That is part of the reason why the NCAA is all but giving up, broadly, when it comes to the enforcement business, using the settlement as pretext to spin off investigating reports of rule breaking and the infractions process. Those in the national office will still be tasked with policing areas like academics, gambling cases and general eligibility, but the vast majority of the headline-generating cases involving money and benefits at the Division I level are being turned over to the CSC. In addition to Seeley’s pending arrival, several additional investigators are set to come on board over the coming months to assist the organization with one overriding directive: put a halt to those programs attempting to circumvent the new $20.5 million benefits cap and attempt to rein in the Wild West that name, image and likeness has descended into after being hastily implemented just four years ago. “Really optimistic and confident,” says Clemson athletic director Graham Neff, who is also a member of the implementation committee that spun up the CSC. “We need to exude that quite frankly. We have to have the right attitude, the right mindset here.” That general belief wanes the further out you get from those who have been hands-on with the initial discussions of how the system should work. Many administrators learned key details of the enforcement process just last week in Orlando during an annual industry convention, but there are still plenty of unanswered questions. “I’m inherently skeptical even if I understand some of the optimism going around,” says one FCS athletic director whose school is opting into the settlement. “History has said I’m right to be that way. Almost all of us try to follow the rules as they’ve been laid out, but there’s still plenty of instances where people are looking to find a way around a rule pretty much every time one’s created.” Enforcement under the CSC will broadly fall into two categories: one dealing with issues breaching the benefits cap and the other surrounding NIL payments to athletes outside said cap. Most involved in the process who spoke to Sports Illustrated indicated the first area is pretty straightforward and of a somewhat lesser concern in the grand scheme of things. An outside firm, LBi Software, was tasked with creating a software solution called CAPS (College Athlete Payment System) to manage all aspects related to revenue sharing and the settlement. This includes managing roster spots for every sport, tracking cap allocations of the overall $20.5 million figure and even monitoring payments going out to athletes. Schools have been working for months on how they’ll approach this, beginning on July 1, but are cognizant of the potential problem areas that could lead to an inquiry from the CSC. As an example, a licensing agreement with a Group of 5 football player could have a buyout attached to it, but it would need to be paid by a potential Power 4 school they’re transferring up to in the cap year it occurs. If the latter program doesn’t properly allocate funds at the appropriate time, it’s possible the athlete could be prevented from taking the field at the school he wants to go to because they don’t have room within their overall cap to pay the buyout. Another potential issue could come from bonuses. If a team puts in an extra payment for hitting a certain GPA after the semester, but then has to pay that bonus to every member of the squad when they hit that mark, it could put the program over the cap. If that happens, the school could be fined or administrators or coaches could be suspended. “The amount of education we have to undertake with players is going to be monumental. Same with agents and coaches and everybody else,” a Power 4 athletic director says. “I think the biggest concern is going to be the rollout. Somebody is going to get caught, what happens then?” The area far more rife with concern surrounds NIL Go, the new clearinghouse created by consulting firm Deloitte that recently went live and is tasked with managing deals that don’t impact a school’s cap (even if some may have been arranged by the school directly). Upon receiving an NIL deal or signing a contract worth more than $600, athletes will be required to log onto a website and input the particulars of what’s involved. On top of submitting a PDF (if there is one) of the language of a deal, they’ll fill out everything from the total compensation, who it’s coming from and what they are obligated to do in order to be paid, such as creating social media posts or meeting fans for autographs after a game. After an athlete clicks submit, however, this is where things get interesting. The platform is supposed to evaluate and analyze the deal to determine if it meets the “general range of compensation” allowed for those in a similar position. Naturally, deals for a star quarterback in Los Angeles will be calculated to be a bit higher level than those of a left guard in a small college town in the Group of 5. The bottom line is the system is ideally expected to rein in many of the agreements previously made with school collectives that sometimes reached into the seven figures and all but amounted to pay-for-play under the guise of NIL. Deloitte officials said at a recent presentation that roughly 90% of deals involving public companies for an athlete’s NIL would have been approved by the new system, but nearly 70% of those with collectives would have been initially denied. “It wasn’t that long ago where you couldn’t give our athletes a ride across campus and now you can pretty much buy them a vehicle if you wanted to,” East Carolina Pirates athletic director Jon Gilbert says. “I’m hopeful the new sports commission will help navigate tampering and other rules violations. But we’ve got to figure out if we can all work together for the greater good even knowing that we all want to win at the highest level.” If a deal is denied within NIL Go, players can either submit a revised deal that falls within certain parameters or they could cancel it altogether. If they still want to move forward with things, there remain two further options: enter an arbitration process which could still approve the deal, or take the money and face the enforcement process. Should they wind up going through door No. 4, it’s possible the CSC staff could eventually strip them of part of their eligibility to play. “On the enforcement side, I still want to wait and see,” Florida State AD Michael Alford says. “I’m very confident in the algorithms with Deloitte, and I’m very confident in the auditing system. What I want to see is the enforcement. That still has some questions I want answered. I’m for it. We all raise our hand and say we’re for it, but what’s the implementation going to be for that?” Much of that falls on the shoulders of Seeley, an Ivy League grad who ran many of MLB’s highest-profile investigations since arriving in the league office over a decade ago. While he’s comfortable leading that process, actually doling out punishments and making sure they fit the infraction will be his tallest—and most controversal—task. Seeley will have ultimate authority over what penalties to hand out, but not all of them have been fully finalized as of mid-June, even if most known avenues are somewhat similar to what the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions had at its disposal. This includes the possibility of issuing postseason bans to schools who violate the cap and even limiting the number of transfers a program may take if they’ve breached the rules. Eligibility could be at stake for some athletes and multimillion-dollar fines are a possibility for schools and even coaches. Suspensions are on the table, too, including for administrators and athletic directors who sign off on some of the numbers being inputted into the new system. “We’re providing rules. And we will be governed by those rules,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said. “And if we break those rules, you know, the ramifications will be punitive.” Every one in college athletics is anxiously awaiting just how punitive they will wind up being, even if they won’t have to wait around years from now for a closed-off conference room at NCAA headquarters to find out just how much. Bryan Fischer is a staff writer at Sports Illustrated covering college sports. He joined the SI staff in October 2024 after spending nearly two decades at outlets such as FOX Sports, NBC Sports and CBS Sports. A member of the Football Writers Association of America’s All-America Selection Committee and a Heisman Trophy voter, Fischer has received awards for investigative journalism from the Associated Press Sports Editors and FWAA. He has a bachelor’s in communication from USC.