I hope everyone is enjoying their Thanksgiving weekend.
For those of you who watch college football, there’s evidently a
“College Sports Commission Agreement” sneaking up under the radar, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is agin it.
Paxton’s office says the participation agreement would give the CSC “practically limitless power” over member schools, going far beyond the enforcement role envisioned under the House v. NCAA settlement that created the commission.
The agreement would require universities to:
Accept CSC’s authority to impose fines, penalties, and other sanctions with almost no meaningful right to appeal. Waive their right to challenge CSC enforcement decisions in court and instead submit disputes to an arbitration system built around the House settlement. Automatically comply with any additional policies the CSC adopts in the future, even if those rules are issued without prior notice.
Is this a commission contract or a Microsoft license agreement?
Paxton calls the arrangement a “power grab” that undermines the integrity of college sports by centralizing enforcement authority in an unaccountable body while pushing legal and financial risk onto public universities.
One of Paxton’s central objections mirrors concerns raised by Texas Tech University’s general counsel in an internal memo.
The CSC agreement includes a “nonassistance” provision that would:
Bar schools from cooperating with any lawsuit or legal action brought by their home state’s attorney general against the CSC. Trigger major penalties—such as loss of conference revenue and postseason eligibility—if a school “assists” its state AG in such litigation.
If you’re demanding non-cooperation with legal authorities, I’ve got to think your agreement is unenforceable from the git go.
For Texas public institutions, Paxton notes, the agreement is not just bad policy—it may be illegal.
Among the issues his office and Texas Tech’s memo highlight:
Texas law restricts state entities from entering binding arbitration, yet the CSC agreement would require public universities to funnel disputes into a private arbitration process and waive jury trial rights. Vague, open-ended fines and penalties could be treated as “unknown debt of the state,” which Bentley has warned would violate Texas law on state obligations. The document’s structure appears to bind universities to future CSC rules that may conflict with Texas statutes and constitutional provisions, creating ongoing legal exposure. Because of these conflicts, Paxton’s letter argues that Texas universities may be legally unable to sign as written, even if they otherwise support the House settlement and revenue-sharing framework.
The problem, of course, is that the well-meaning reforms designed to do away with traditional big college solutions to the problems of recruiting “student athletes” (bags of Kuggerands and lightly-used sports cars), namely the transfer portal, has taken control out of the hands of traditional power schools and put it into the hands of those same student athletes, and That Simply Will Not Do.
Given the history of college athletics, the only thing we can assume about the current “reforms” is that they shall soon require even more radical adjustments necessitating even more expensive “reforms”…