Athletic directors still run entire departments, coaches, facilities, fundraising, compliance, athlete welfare, competitive performance, dozens of university relationships. But the job changed underneath them. They’re now allocating constrained capital across sports, rosters, retention, acquisition, development, commercial partnerships, insurance, and legal exposure.

That’s portfolio management. Whether the department uses the word or not.

Every sport is a subportfolio. Inside each sport, every roster is another allocation. A dollar committed to one athlete, one position group, one coaching staff, one facility, one commercial initiative is a dollar that can’t go anywhere else. The question is no longer whether a program has enough money. It’s whether the institution is being paid for the combined risk it’s taking on.

Most athletic departments were never built to answer that.

They can tell you what was budgeted. What was spent. Whether a transaction cleared compliance. That all matters, and none of it is underwriting. A portfolio review asks a different set of questions:

• Where is capital concentrated?

• Which commitments ride on the same outcome?

• What single event could impair several investments at once?

• What does retention cost against replacement?

• Which revenue is actually available versus restricted or already spoken for?

• How much risk is sitting outside the institution’s line of sight?

The portfolio already exists. What’s missing is the system to manage it.

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The new capital stack inside athletics

The House settlement made the shift visible. NCAA rules now define an institutional benefits pool, set an annual cap, and require covered payments and benefits to be reported on a July 1–June 30 cycle. NCAA president Charlie Baker put the first-year cap near $20.5 million. Alongside it, the College Sports Commission oversees a framework spanning institutional revenue sharing, third-party NIL, and sport-specific roster limits.

But the settlement pool is one piece of the stack. Athletic departments now run across several pools that are economically connected and governed completely differently:

• Institutional athlete benefits — direct payments subject to the settlement cap and reporting.

• Third-party NIL — funded by brands, collectives, and donors, subject to clearing and valid-business-purpose standards.

• Acquisition capital — what it costs to recruit, transfer, onboard, and develop new roster participants.

• Retention capital — what it takes to hold continuity and keep priority relationships in place.

• Development capital — coaching, medical, performance, academic, and data spending meant to improve future outcomes.

• Program capital — scholarships and operating support across the sport portfolio.

• Commercial capital — sponsorship, ticketing, media, licensing, venue, data, and athlete-enabled revenue.

• Long-duration capital — facilities, debt, leases, guarantees, and public-private structures that eat future flexibility.

• Risk capital — insurance, compliance, litigation reserves, integrity monitoring, incident response.

These pools are not interchangeable. That’s the part that gets missed.

A dollar of announced sponsorship revenue isn’t a dollar available for roster spending. It may carry activation costs, contractual restrictions, revenue-sharing obligations, or long-term brand exposure. A donor commitment may be locked to one sport. A third-party NIL agreement a coaching staff is counting on may sit entirely outside institutional control. A facility commitment can drain cash-flow capacity years after the person who approved it is gone.

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And the new inventory is making these calls more material, not less. Illinois confirmed Busey Bank as its first jersey-patch partner across multiple sports; Sports Business Journal reported the broader deal at five years and $30 million. Ohio State confirmed JPMorganChase across all 36 varsity programs, with Front Office Sports placing the annual economics near $17 million. Different structures, same signal: departments are manufacturing new revenue to fund a fast-expanding set of obligations.

Some will go further, building revenue businesses with athlete participation around content, licensing, events, data, or merchandise. Those aren’t sponsorships, and they shouldn’t be underwritten like them. They carry operating, intellectual-property, governance, data, tax, and counterparty exposure that has to be priced separately from the roster capital they’re meant to support.

Gross revenue isn’t deployable capital. The portfolio manager’s job is to figure out what’s actually left after restrictions, servicing costs, contractual leakage, and downside risk. That number is almost always smaller than the headline.

The missing function is independent underwriting

The hardest part of a roster-capital decision isn’t a shortage of intelligence. It’s a shortage of distance.

Almost everyone at the table has a legitimate stake in the outcome. The coach wants the athlete who changes the season. The GM wants to close the roster gap. The fundraiser wants to protect the donor relationship. The collective wants to show relevance. The commercial team wants a marketable name. The athlete and the representative want maximum compensation. The AD wants to win and protect the whole department at the same time.

Every one of them can be completely rational and still produce a distorted portfolio.

Because the people closest to the decision are rarely objective about value, probability, or downside. Conviction gets baked into the forecast. Urgency shrinks the time horizon. The upside gets modeled to the decimal; the downside gets waved off as a generality.

Traditional athletics governance makes it worse. A head coach may be the best evaluator alive of how a player fits a system, and that tells you nothing about the player’s effect on liquidity, concentration, insurability, legal exposure, or the opportunity cost imposed on the other thirty programs. It runs the other way too: a finance office can model cash flow and completely miss competitive scarcity.

The answer isn’t to strip out judgment. It’s to challenge it from the outside.

That’s what underwriting does. It forces the institution to write the assumption down, price the downside, name the risk owner, and put the commitment up against every other use of that capital. It’s the one function in the building that doesn’t have a horse in the race — which is exactly why it can’t come from inside a department where everyone does.

Penn State shows the conflict in public

Penn State men’s basketball is a clean example, because both sides said the quiet part out loud.

The program finished the 2025–26 Big Ten season 3–17. In July, head coach Mike Rhoades said Penn State’s NIL support was “at the bottom” of the conference and described a financial environment fundamentally different from his competitors’. In a separate public interview, athletic director Pat Kraft rejected running the department as an “ATM machine,” stressing that new spending has to be backed by philanthropy and corporate sponsorship.

The temptation is to pick a side. That’s the mistake. The side you pick isn’t the point; the framework that reconciles the two is.

Rhoades is responsible for competing in one of the most expensive basketball markets in the country. From where he sits, thin roster capital is an obvious competitive disadvantage, and he’s right. Kraft is responsible for 31 varsity programs, hundreds of athletes, facilities, debt, fundraising, and a brand-new revenue-sharing structure. From where he sits, dropping eight figures on one basketball roster without durable support could weaken the whole enterprise, and he’s right too.

Both positions are internally rational. That’s precisely why the institution needs one objective framework to reconcile them — because two rational people pointed in opposite directions don’t resolve themselves through a budget meeting. The real questions:

• What level of investment would actually move expected performance?

• What’s the probability the incremental spend produces that result?

• Which revenue source supports it, for how long, and with what strings?

• What program, project, or reserve eats the opportunity cost?

• How much of the roster strategy depends on capital the department doesn’t control?

• What’s the exit if the competitive return never shows up?

That’s a portfolio decision. A budget debate can’t settle it.

Concentration risk: when conviction becomes fragility

College sports has always concentrated resources in football and men’s basketball. Concentration by itself isn’t a mistake; it can be a deliberate strategy. Unmeasured concentration is the mistake.

Departments should know their exposure across at least six dimensions: how much deployable capital sits in one or two sports; how much of a team pool sits in one position group; how much expected performance or revenue rides on a single relationship; how dependent they are on one donor, sponsor, media stream, or postseason outcome; how much capital is locked into commitments that can’t be repriced when the rules or leadership change; and how many commitments are exposed to the same eligibility, NIL-clearance, injury, gambling, employment, or litigation trigger.

The market pulls departments toward concentration; a star moves ticket demand, donor energy, media, recruiting. But the stronger the star thesis, the more the downside analysis matters. The question is never whether the institution believes in the athlete. It’s how much loss the institution has quietly accepted if the assumptions break.

You don’t need a complicated dashboard to see it: the largest commitment as a share of the deployable pool, the top five as a share, capital by sport and position, restricted versus unrestricted revenue behind it, fixed obligations over the next twelve months, and the capital exposed to a single trigger. The point isn’t one universal limit. It’s turning concentration into a decision instead of an accident. Most departments have never seen these numbers on one page, which is usually the first thing that changes when we build the map with them.

Gambling is an enterprise exposure

From January 2019 through May 2020, I worked in Football Operations at the XFL League Office, evaluating how strategic talent acquisition could translate into economic value while leading the development of the league’s enterprise-risk framework across gambling, insurance, and player conduct. That experience permanently changed how I viewed integrity risk, not as an isolated compliance issue, but as an interconnected operating and financial exposure capable of moving across an entire sports enterprise.

Gambling doesn’t live in a compliance manual. It’s an enterprise exposure.

The NCAA said in January 2026 that its enforcement staff had opened sports-betting integrity investigations involving roughly 40 athletes across 20 schools in the prior year. Its research across more than 20,000 athletes has examined betting behavior, harassment, and well-being. This isn’t reputational abstraction. A single integrity event can hit athlete availability, contest credibility, legal expense, insurance coverage, sponsorship relationships, confidential information, and leadership time — all at once.

And it gets more consequential as the economic relationship between schools and athletes gets more direct. Employment classification isn’t settled. The Third Circuit’s decision in Johnson v. NCAA let athletes pursue claims that they might qualify as employees under federal wage-and-hour law — it did not declare all college athletes employees. Organizing efforts remain fragmented: Stanford football players recently formed a player-led College Football Players Association chapter, while earlier Northwestern and Dartmouth efforts took different legal roads.

For a portfolio manager, the move isn’t predicting one legal outcome. It’s preparing for the liability stack that follows several. If athletes end up treated as employees in some structures or states, the enterprise inherits wage-and-hour rules, payroll taxes, benefits, workers’ comp, workplace safety, labor relations, and insurance obligations. A breakaway league or single-entity structure wouldn’t erase those exposures — it could consolidate them.

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That distinction is the whole game: the cash paid to an athlete is not the institution’s total economic exposure. A serious injury, an integrity investigation, an employment claim, or a coverage dispute can create a liability many times the size of the visible annual payment. The number on the deal sheet is the floor, not the exposure.

Gambling risk isn’t a reason to avoid paying athletes. It’s a reason to govern a commercial enterprise like one.

Retention and replacement are different underwriting problems

Retention gets reduced to “what does it cost to keep him.” Replacement gets reduced to “what’s the offer to the next guy.” Neither number captures the real exposure.

Replacement isn’t just the new commitment. It’s recruiting and transaction cost, onboarding, development, lost continuity, clearance risk, timing, performance variance, and the odds the new piece never reproduces the expected output — plus whatever roster spot or capital it displaces on the way in. Framed honestly, expected replacement cost is the acquisition commitment plus transaction cost plus onboarding and development plus the probability-adjusted performance shortfall plus lost continuity plus the cost of the displaced alternative.

The retention ceiling then has to account for that full replacement cost, the deterioration or availability risk on the person you’re keeping, the concentration the new commitment creates, and the flexibility you preserve by walking away. None of this is a formula for what a person is worth. It’s a framework for understanding the institution’s capital consequences.

The deeper question underneath it: has the department actually invested in development, or has it just funded repeated acquisition? A roster that keeps paying market-clearing prices for replacements can look aggressive while quietly destroying the value of its own development system. The reverse fails too — keeping familiar names at any price protects continuity and kills flexibility. A portfolio review is what makes that tradeoff visible before it’s locked in.

What building the XFL taught me

I saw most of these problems before college sports did, inside startup professional football.

The XFL’s leadership combined three distinct operating lenses. Vince McMahon supplied the capital, brand, and enterprise thesis. Commissioner and CEO Oliver Luck brought NCAA regulatory and athletic-administration experience. Doug Whaley brought an NFL general manager’s approach to personnel and roster construction. Working at the intersection of those disciplines showed me that building a sports enterprise requires more than assembling talent; it requires a system connecting football judgment, capital allocation, policy, and risk.

We weren’t managing a team. We were building an integrated football enterprise: talent acquisition, player administration, gambling controls, conduct policy, employment considerations, operations, media, and the systems tying them together.

The lesson was structural. Head coaches had real football authority, but conviction didn’t replace enterprise oversight. Talent acquisition didn’t run outside the capital plan. Player policy didn’t sit apart from employment law. Gambling controls didn’t belong to one department. A single-entity model forces the league to understand risks no single team or coach could price alone.

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College athletics is walking into the same collision: football judgment on one side, enterprise responsibility on the other. The modern AD can’t just aggregate the requests of thirty programs and call it a strategy. An athletics CFO can’t treat every roster decision as a line item divorced from competitive reality. The institution needs a process that joins the two.

My more recent work at Penn State drove home how hard that is. Following James Franklin’s dismissal, I served as Strategic Advisor to the Head Coach on a five-month contract, October 2025 through February 2026, supporting the football program through its leadership transition. The roster decisions in that window combined evaluation, compensation, retention, transfer risk, contract terms, development, timing, compliance, and limited capital. Each one was defensible on its own — and the combined portfolio could still go unstable.

That’s why operating experience matters here. Legal expertise alone leaves gaps. Athletics administration alone leaves gaps. Finance alone leaves gaps. The problem lives at the intersection, which is exactly where most institutions have no one standing.

The quarterly athletics portfolio review

Annual budgeting is too slow for this market. Roster needs, sponsorship inventory, NIL clearing, eligibility, legislation, injuries, litigation, and transfer decisions can all move inside a single quarter. Departments need a recurring process that pulls financial, personnel, commercial, legal, insurance, and performance information into one room.

Done right, that review answers six things: what capital is genuinely available and what’s already committed; where every commitment sits by sport, source, duration, and decision owner; what exposures are live across eligibility, injury, integrity, employment, insurance, and counterparty risk; where capital is concentrated and what single triggers threaten multiple commitments; how retention stacks against true replacement cost on the priority decisions; and how the portfolio holds up when you stress it — a revenue shortfall, a rule change, a key-person event, a sponsor pulling out, an insurance nonresponse. Every material action leaves the room with an owner, a deadline, and an escalation threshold.

That’s the framework. Here’s the part most departments underestimate: the framework is the easy half. The hard half is who runs it.

The room has to include the AD, athletics finance, a university CFO voice, legal and compliance, sport administration, commercial leadership, and advancement. Coaches and GMs supply the sport assumptions — but they can’t be the only people underwriting the capital assigned to their own programs. That’s the structural flaw in every in-house version of this: you end up asking the people with the strongest conviction to grade their own downside. It doesn’t work, no matter how good they are, because the incentive is wrong by design.

What the process actually requires is an independent challenge function — someone in the room with no recruiting target, no donor relationship, no internal budget, and no competitive prediction to defend. Someone whose only job is to price the downside and ask the question everyone else is too invested to ask. Almost no department has that seat on its org chart. That’s the seat we’re built to fill.

The portfolio already exists

Athletic departments don’t need capital-markets language for show. They need the discipline behind it — visibility across every commitment, explicit concentration tolerances, defensible retention and replacement analysis, scenario testing, insurance and legal review, clear decision rights, and a regular, honest reconsideration of where the next dollar should and shouldn’t go.

The athletic directors who lead this era won’t just raise more money. They’ll know exactly what the institution is exposed to before the capital is committed.

L.I.G. Sports Intelligence sits at the intersection of athletics, enterprise operations, risk, and capital strategy. We build the capital map, the exposure register, the concentration dashboard, and the quarterly portfolio-review process for athletic departments, foundations, conferences, and sports enterprises — and we hold the independent challenge seat while we do it. Not to replace the athletic director’s judgment. To make it more independent, more defensible, and more durable.

Intelligence before capital is committed.

About the author

Justin King is the founder of L.I.G. Sports Intelligence. His experience spans college football, startup professional football, athlete evaluation and development, player policy, enterprise risk, and sports-capital strategy. He worked in Football Operations at the XFL League Office from January 2019 through May 2020 and served as Strategic Advisor to the Head Coach at Penn State during the football program’s October 2025–February 2026 leadership transition.

Work with L.I.G.

Capital is moving faster than most athletic departments’ systems can evaluate it. Decisions are fragmented, concentration risk is difficult to see, and nearly every voice at the table is invested in the outcome.

L.I.G. Sports Intelligence provides the independent underwriting discipline those decisions require, identifying where capital is concentrated, where exposure is building, and where expected returns no longer justify the risk.

L.I.G. Consultation

Selected sources

NCAA Proposal 2025-10 · NCAA ER-2025-11 · Baker on the House settlement · College Sports Commission · SBJ on Illinois–Busey · FOS on Ohio State–Chase · Rhoades media availability · Kraft interview · NCAA on betting-integrity investigations · CRS on athlete employment status · AP on Stanford CFBPA chapter · ESPN on Whaley (XFL) · ESPN on Luck (XFL)

1. Michigan’s governance reset comes with a contract tail

Michigan is replacing athletic director Warde Manuel and rebuilding the department’s control system around it. The university’s review ran 350 interviews across nearly 300 witnesses and more than 20,000 documents, then flagged weaknesses in accountability, structure, oversight, and reporting. Six workstreams follow — compliance independence, athletics HR, investigative protocols, escalation, leadership structure, and athlete welfare. Manuel stays through December during implementation, on a contract that was extended through June 30, 2030. The public materials don’t disclose the buyout. So Michigan is now carrying three things at once: an executive transition, the cost of remediation, and a contract still owed to leadership that no longer runs the building.

The exposure: Governance failures never stop at legal spend. They turn into dead money, and we keep asking, “Who cares about the dead money?!”—duplicated leadership cost, insurance scrutiny, commercial decisions that stall while everyone waits for clarity. This is the whole reason underwriting exists: you price the termination rights and the remediation cost when you sign the contract, not after an investigation forces your hand. Michigan is paying for that answer now instead of having it earlier.

Sources: Michigan investigation update · 2024 contract extension · Axios Detroit

2. The Senate clock is the risk now

The Protect College Sports Act hit the final stretch before the Senate’s August 7 recess with no floor date. Front Office Sports reported July 23 that S. 4668 still faced negotiations with the Big Ten and SEC, live amendments, Republican opposition, and a crowded calendar. That’s the context for Senator Eric Schmitt’s July 17 line that supporters “probably” had 60 votes — a sponsor’s estimate, not a whip count. The bill cleared Senate Commerce 19–9 in June and reaches across antitrust protection, NIL, revenue sharing, athlete status, transfers, coaching movement, and media rights. But a committee vote isn’t law. Miss the August window and federal relief slips past another operating cycle.

The exposure: Timing is a risk you’re carrying whether you’ve named it or not. Don’t price contracts, roster commitments, or litigation reserves like federal protection is coming next month. Run both cases: S. 4668 passes after amendment, or you spend another year under the settlement, state-law, and litigation patchwork you’re in right now. If your plan only works if the bill lands on schedule, you don’t have a plan. You have a bet.

Sources: Senate Commerce · Associated Press · Front Office Sports

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3. Utah’s private-capital model needed a commercial unwind first

Utah’s private-capital strategy just produced its first visible transition cost. The university agreed to end JMI Sports’ exclusive multimedia-rights partnership — which only began in 2024–25 — so Crimson Brand Partners could take over Utah Athletics’ commercial operations. Utah credited JMI with sponsorship growth and marquee asset sales, and both sides called the split fair and mutually beneficial, but the announcement disclosed no payment or termination terms. Crimson Brand Partners, Utah’s joint venture with Otro Capital, is built to control sponsorships, ticketing, concessions, licensing, and the rest. Single-entity implementation in sports is more nuanced than many understand. The logic is vertical integration. The underwriting issue is breakage; a new platform doesn’t erase the legacy rights, the service obligations, or the cost of pulling revenue in-house.

The exposure: Model private capital net of what it costs to get there. Before anyone celebrates the uplift, inventory every existing agency, media, sponsorship, ticketing, data, and concession contract, put a number on the termination costs, and separate genuinely new revenue from business the displaced partner was already producing. Gross uplift isn’t incremental return. The deal that looks biggest on the slide is often the one carrying the most breakage underneath it.

Sources: Utah Athletics · Utah transaction announcement · Covington summary · Front Office Sports

4. Roster certainty now has a July 31 legal tail

Division I schools face a July 31 deadline to submit final waivers under the old eligibility rules while courts test the move to the NCAA’s new age-based model. The NCAA says athletes with eligibility left after 2025–26 get whichever framework is more favorable; athletes who used their fourth season in 2025–26 get no additional year. On July 9, an Ohio judge granted preliminary relief to a group of basketball players challenging that cutoff. Separately, the federal Campbell complaint seeks class-wide relief and argues the rule restricts competition and NIL earning capacity. Neither is a final nationwide merits ruling. Together, they make roster spots, revenue-share allocations, and NIL commitments contingent on outcomes the athletic department doesn’t control.

The exposure: Treat disputed eligibility as exactly what it is, a contingent roster liability. Before you commit incremental money to a player whose eligibility is being litigated, write down what happens if an injunction shifts or the eligibility disappears: repayment, replacement, termination. And the cost isn’t only legal. One conditional roster spot ties up money that could have funded a certain one. You’re not just risking a player. You’re risking the allocation.

Sources: NCAA implementation rules · Campbell v. NCAA complaint · Associated Press

One number to sit with

~3.5 years

That’s the term left between Manuel’s scheduled December 2026 exit and the June 30, 2030 expiration Michigan announced in 2024 — a governance call with a financial tail nobody’s put a public number on yet. (contract announcement)

The control system can change overnight. The contract underneath it can’t.

— Justin King
Founder, L.I.G. Sports Intelligence
Intelligence before decisions.

Advisory Call

Capital Notes is the weekly read from The Sports Capital Review: the decisions, structures, and risks shaping the business of sports. Independent sports intelligence for informational purposes. Not legal, investment, insurance, accounting, or compliance advice.

College sports is no longer waiting for a financial system. It is building one in real time.

This week: NIL Go disclosed a material pool of non-cleared transactions, federal legislation moved closer to a possible Senate vote, Michigan State and Kentucky offered a clearer look at the new corporate structure of athletic departments, and the College Sports Commission changed how it screens smaller Associated NIL deals.

1. NIL Go Now Has a Material Rejection Pool

The College Sports Commission’s July report turns NIL Go from a compliance abstraction into an observable execution market. Since launch, the platform has cleared 34,195 deals worth $355.24 million while not clearing 1,812 deals worth $89.85 million. During May and June alone, $112.89 million cleared, and $33.68 million did not. Only 41% of submissions were resolved within 24 hours; 63% reached resolution within seven days after all fields were complete. The report excludes resubmissions and deals still inside a revision window, and it measures only transactions submitted to NIL Go. Cleared volume is therefore neither total NIL market size nor a complete comparable set. What the data does establish is more useful: meaningful capital is being delayed, revised, or rejected inside the regulated channel.

L.I.G. Capital Implications: Treat NIL commitments in three buckets: cleared cash, contingent cash, and capital exposed to revision or rejection. A growing transaction database improves diligence, but it is not yet clean price discovery. Execution certainty must now be priced alongside athlete value.

Sources: CSC NIL Data Report · The Big West summary · Yahoo Sports

2. Congress Is Writing Balance-Sheet Rules for College Sports

The Protect College Sports Act is still a proposal, but it now belongs in institutional financial models. The Senate Commerce Committee advanced S. 4668 by a 19–9 vote. Sponsor Eric Schmitt said he believed the bill “probably” had 60 Senate votes—an estimate, not a confirmed count or scheduled floor action. The amended framework would extend the House revenue-sharing cap, preempt conflicting state rules, provide targeted antitrust protection, and permit pooled media-rights sales if 75% of current FBS schools participate. It would also limit how athletic departments with revenue above $80 million fund coaching compensation exceeding $500,000. Passage through both chambers remains uncertain. The correct posture is neither dismissal nor assumption: the bill is a live capital scenario with enough momentum to affect long-dated decisions now.

L.I.G. Capital Implications: Model passage and failure separately. One changes permissible funding sources, media-rights structures, and enforcement protection; the other preserves state-law fragmentation and litigation exposure. Any long-term coaching, media, NIL, or capital commitment should survive both cases.

Sources: Amended section-by-section summary · Senate Commerce Committee action · GovInfo record · Associated Press

3. The New Athletic Department Comes With Two Corporate Hats

Michigan State named Jon Palumbo interim athletic director while retaining him as CEO of Spartan Ventures, its new affiliated commercial organization. Spartan Ventures combines a nonprofit parent, a for-profit media subsidiary, and a nonprofit athletic foundation designed to monetize media rights, sponsorship inventory, and brand assets. Kentucky is following a parallel path through Champions Blue, its public nonprofit athletics holding company, with J Batt serving as both CEO and athletic director. These are not cosmetic reorganizations. They move commercial assets, employees, and decision-making authority into affiliated structures designed for faster transactions and access to outside capital. The open questions are equally material: who owns the revenue, approves related-party deals, controls university IP, guarantees obligations, and absorbs losses when a commercial strategy fails?

L.I.G. Capital Implications: A new entity can improve speed without improving discipline. Capital providers should map board rights, guarantees, intercompany agreements, cash waterfalls, IP ownership, conflicts procedures, and termination rights before treating structural separation as genuine risk separation.

Sources: MSU interim athletic director announcement · Spartan Ventures launch · University of Kentucky on Champions Blue · Kentucky names J Batt CEO and AD

4. NIL Go Eased the Price Screen, Not the Compliance Standard

Effective July 1, the College Sports Commission raised the threshold for Range-of-Compensation review of Associated NIL deals. Transactions between $600 and $15,000 generally avoid that pricing screen until an athlete exceeds $50,000 in total Associated deals during the academic year. The prior framework used a $2,500 per-deal exemption and a $15,000 annual trigger. The change reduces the routine valuation review, but disclosure and valid business purpose requirements remain. Associated deals must still activate an athlete’s NIL for goods or services offered to the public for profit. The CSC is also moving from confidence intervals to prediction intervals in its compensation model. The operational burden has shifted: compliance teams now need stronger aggregation controls, payor classification, and proof of commercial activation.

L.I.G. Capital Implications: A lighter price screen is not a safe harbor. The $15,000 and $50,000 thresholds create monitoring cliffs. Smaller contracts can accumulate into a larger compliance and collectability problem unless programs track total exposure and document actual commercial use.

Sources: CSC memorandum · NIL Revolution analysis · Colgate NIL guidance · Kutak Rock compliance summary

One Number to Sit With

$89.85 million

That is the cumulative value of NIL deals reported as not cleared through June 30, excluding deals that had been resubmitted or were still within a revision window.

It is the clearest disclosed measure of capital that failed to convert cleanly through the regulated channel.

The industry is getting better at moving money.

It is still learning how to price the risk around that money.

Justin King

Founder, L.I.G. Sports Intelligence

Intelligence Before Capital Is Committed.

Capital Notes is the weekly update from The Sports Capital Review. It examines the decisions, structures, and risks shaping the business of sports. If your institution has financial exposure to athletes, programs, media rights, facilities, or sports assets, subscribe for the next Capital Notes.

The Sports Capital Review is independent sports intelligence for informational purposes. It is not legal, investment, insurance, accounting, or compliance advice.

For decades, the sports industry understood when an athlete became a financial asset.

It happened near the end of the athlete’s competitive journey.

An NFL prospect preparing for the Draft purchased disability insurance. A projected first-round NBA pick hired financial advisors. An MLB prospect negotiated a signing bonus. Professional clubs evaluated long-term contractual risk.

Underwriting happened then because the market had already accumulated years of evidence.

Film. Production. Medical history. Athletic testing. Competitive performance.

The uncertainty had narrowed. The athlete had become an observable asset.

Today, that sequence no longer exists.

The money moved. The intelligence didn’t.

And that gap is no longer theoretical. It is already producing lawsuits, coverage disputes, and structural losses across college sports.

THE FINANCIAL TIMELINE HAS CHANGED

NIL. Revenue sharing. The transfer portal. Private academies. Elite club systems. Global development pathways.

Every one of these accelerated the athlete economy.

Capital now enters an athlete’s life years before professional sports.

Athletic departments deploy significant financial resources into roster construction. Collectives invest in retention. Families make six-figure development decisions. Brands begin partnerships while athletes are still developing. Insurance conversations begin sooner. Banks are exploring products tied to future athlete earnings.

The athlete is no longer simply developing.

The athlete is becoming an economic asset.

The financial timeline moved. The evaluation process largely stayed where it was.

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THE COURTS ARE ALREADY DECIDING WHAT THE INDUSTRY WON’T

If you think athlete-as-asset is a metaphor, the federal court system disagrees.

In 2024, the Third Circuit ruled in Johnson v. NCAA that college athletes are not categorically barred from being classified as employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The court didn’t declare athletes employees. It did something more consequential: it stripped away amateurism as a legal shield and sent the question back down with a test built on economic realities.

Read that phrase again. Economic realities.

A federal appeals court has instructed the industry to evaluate athletes the way markets evaluate economic relationships — not the way tradition evaluated amateurs.

The case is now back in district court, and the judge has ordered the parties to report on settlement efforts. Meanwhile, the House settlement was approved in 2025, and schools began sharing revenue directly with athletes. Duke has sued its former quarterback in a dispute that reads like an attempt to enforce a noncompete agreement. These are not eligibility questions. These are employment and contract questions.

Now follow the chain.

If athletes are employees, wages follow. Workers’ compensation follows. Collective bargaining follows. And the NCAA’s compensation rules stop looking like eligibility conditions and start looking like hundreds of competing employers agreeing to cap pay — the kind of arrangement antitrust law was written to destroy.

Every institution in college sports is carrying this exposure right now.

Almost none of them can tell you what it’s worth.

That is an underwriting failure. Not a legal one.

THE INSURANCE MARKET ALREADY RAN THIS EXPERIMENT. IT FAILED.

Here is the part of the story almost nobody in college athletics talks about.

The market already tried to price athlete risk without a valuation standard.

Loss-of-value insurance flooded college sports in the 2010s. Elite prospects bought policies designed to pay out if injury dropped their draft position. It sounded like underwriting.

It wasn’t. It was speculation wearing underwriting’s clothes.

Nobody could agree on how to measure the value that was lost. Policyholders and carriers fought over projections. Disputes ended up in court. Michigan tight end Jake Butt reportedly collected roughly $543,000 on his loss-of-value policy after an injury in his final college game. USC receiver Marqise Lee — a similar profile, a similar draft slide — collected nothing, and his claim dispute with underwriters landed in litigation.

Two elite prospects. Two policies. Two injuries. Opposite outcomes.

Not because one athlete was more valuable. Because the market had no independent standard for what “lost value” meant.

Carriers responded the way capital always responds to unpriceable risk. They cut capacity. Cover holders who once wrote eight figures were restricted to a fraction of it. The product bottomed out.

The lesson was never that athlete risk can’t be insured.

The lesson was that you cannot build financial products on top of valuations nobody agrees on.

And now the market is repeating the mistake at a larger scale. NIL income has created an entirely new exposure class: injury-related income loss, reputational harm, contract litigation, and Title IX disputes tied to the distribution of NIL opportunities. Actuaries are publicly warning that traditional insurance models were not built for this terrain. Collectives have faced high-value disputes without liability coverage. Universities are carrying board-level exposure for deals they don’t monitor.

The exposure exists. The intelligence to price it does not.

That gap has a cost. The question is only who pays it — and when.

RECRUITING WAS NEVER DESIGNED FOR THIS ECONOMY

Recruiting answers one question.

Can this athlete help us compete?

That question still matters. But it is no longer enough.

Today’s marketplace requires another question.

Should we invest?

Those are fundamentally different disciplines.

Recruiting identifies talent. Underwriting evaluates investment. Recruiting measures athletic ability. Underwriting measures uncertainty. Recruiting helps acquire athletes. Underwriting helps allocate capital.

A recruiting department can tell you an athlete runs a 4.4.

It cannot tell you what happens to your capital position if that athlete is reclassified as your employee, tears an ACL in year two, and holds an NIL portfolio your institution never evaluated.

That is not a knock on recruiters. It is a recognition that the job changed underneath them.

WELCOME TO THE ERA OF SPORTS CAPITAL MANAGEMENT

Something much larger is happening beneath the surface.

Athletic departments aren’t simply managing teams anymore. They’re managing capital.

Scholarships. Revenue-sharing pools. NIL allocations. Roster spots. Transfer investments. Development resources. Retention budgets. Legal exposure. Insurance exposure.

Every one of those decisions represents capital deployed against an athlete asset.

Whether they call it that or not, athletic departments, collectives, agencies and institutions are already practicing Sports Capital Management.

The difference is that most are doing it without a standardized underwriting discipline.

Athletic directors are no longer just responsible for competitive success. They are allocating finite institutional resources against assets whose legal status is being litigated in real time.

General managers aren’t just acquiring talent. They’re making portfolio decisions.

Families are making investment decisions. Brands are making investment decisions. Insurers are evaluating financial exposure. Lenders are modeling future earnings.

Every stakeholder is interacting with the same athlete.

Every stakeholder carries risk.

Very few are speaking the same language.

THE ATHLETE LIFECYCLE HAS BECOME ONE CONTINUOUS UNDERWRITING EVENT

One of the biggest misconceptions in sports is that underwriting begins when an athlete approaches professional sports.

That made sense when financial exposure arrived late. It no longer does.

Today, underwriting begins whenever meaningful capital enters the athlete’s journey.

A soccer player choosing between a local club and an academy. A tennis player transitioning into full-time development. A baseball player entering national showcase circuits. A football player selecting a developmental environment before recruiting accelerates the process.

The athlete doesn’t suddenly become valuable at eighteen or twenty-two.

Value is created — or destroyed — over time.

Every developmental decision compounds. Every environment changes future value. Every competitive level matters. Every market decision matters.

The athlete isn’t experiencing separate chapters.

The athlete is moving through one continuous underwriting event.

THE HIDDEN COST NOBODY MEASURES

College athletics has spent more than $1 billion on coaching buyouts since 2010.

We measure those losses because they appear on financial statements.

But what about the losses that never receive a line item?

Poor recruiting decisions. Misallocated NIL resources. Overvalued athlete investments. Undervalued retention decisions. Transfer mistakes. Uninsured exposure. Litigation nobody modeled. Opportunity cost.

Those losses rarely appear in annual reports.

They may ultimately cost institutions far more than the buyouts do.

Every expensive roster mistake started as someone else’s “good evaluation.”

Every coverage dispute started as someone’s assumption that the risk was priced.

The market doesn’t suffer from a shortage of opinions.

It suffers from a shortage of independent intelligence.

THE PROBLEM ISN’T COACHES

This is not an argument against coaches. Nor recruiters. Nor collectives, agents, or families.

It is a recognition of organizational reality.

Coaches are hired to win. Recruiters are hired to acquire talent. Collectives are built to support athletes. Agents represent clients. Families advocate for their children.

Every participant carries incentives. Every participant develops blind spots.

That’s not corruption. That’s human nature.

It’s also why every mature financial market eventually created independent underwriting.

Commercial real estate doesn’t ask the seller to determine the property’s value. Private equity doesn’t rely solely on the company’s own projections. Banks don’t ask borrowers to establish their own creditworthiness. And insurance markets — as college sports just spent a decade proving — collapse when no independent standard of value exists.

Independent intelligence exists because incentives influence judgment.

Sports has reached that point.

ATHLETE ASSET UNDERWRITING™

This is where the industry must evolve.

Athlete Asset Underwriting™ is not about predicting who becomes a professional athlete.

It’s about improving the quality of decisions while uncertainty still exists.

It asks different questions.

What is this athlete worth today? How durable is that value? What assumptions support the projection? Where are the greatest risks? How scarce is the position? What is the replacement cost? What is the legal and insurance exposure attached to this asset? How is the athlete developing — not only physically but also mentally, emotionally, and professionally?

Critical thinking. Comprehension. Self-awareness. Adaptability. Decision-making. Leadership. Coachability. Character.

As financial exposure moves earlier, these characteristics become investment variables. Not coaching observations.

Because the athlete is no longer evaluated only on present performance.

The athlete is being evaluated on future value.

INTELLIGENCE MUST BECOME CONTINUOUS

The future of athlete evaluation isn’t one report before the NFL Draft.

It’s continuous intelligence across the athlete lifecycle.

Youth development. Academies. High school. Recruiting. College. NIL. Revenue sharing. Employment classification. Professional opportunities. Long-term career planning.

The athlete becomes one continuously evolving asset.

The intelligence should evolve with it.

L.I.G. SPORTS INTELLIGENCE EXISTS FOR THIS

L.I.G. Sports Intelligence wasn’t built to replace coaches. Or scouts. Or athletic directors, financial advisors, or insurance professionals.

It exists because the economics of sports changed — and the courts and insurance markets are now forcing the issue.

As financial exposure moved earlier, the need for independent athlete intelligence moved earlier too.

Our mission is simple:

To provide independent Athlete Asset Underwriting™ that helps athletes, families, athletic departments, collectives, agencies, insurers, lenders and investors make better decisions before capital, opportunity and careers are committed.

Better intelligence doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.

It improves the quality of the decisions made within it.

FINAL THOUGHT

Every mature market that allocates capital eventually develops independent underwriting.

Commercial real estate did. Private equity did. Insurance did. Credit markets did. Investment banking did.

Sports has reached that moment — and the evidence is no longer hypothetical. It’s in federal court dockets, settlement orders, and a decade of failed insurance products.

The next decade won’t be defined by who recruits the most talent.

It will be defined by who consistently allocates capital more intelligently.

That’s the future of Sports Capital Management.

And Athlete Asset Underwriting™ is the discipline that makes it possible.

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Every market that commits capital eventually develops independent underwriting. Sports has reached that moment. The only question left is who builds the standard — and who pays for not having one.

About the Author

Justin King is the Founder of L.I.G. Sports Intelligence, where he is pioneering Athlete Asset Underwriting™, an independent discipline focused on evaluating athlete value, development trajectory, market position, and risk before critical financial, roster, and career decisions are made. His work sits at the intersection of sports intelligence, Sports Capital Management, and strategic advisory for athletes, institutions, and organizations that deploy capital into sports assets.

L.I.G. Consultation

The way athletes are evaluated has not.

For decades, roster decisions were primarily framed as competitive decisions:

Can the athlete play?

Does he fit the scheme?

Can she help us win?

Is he worth the scholarship?

Those questions still matter. But they are no longer sufficient.

Institutions can now directly share revenue with athletes under the framework created following the House settlement. The new model established an annual cap tied to athletics revenue, introduced direct financial benefits to athletes, and replaced sport-specific scholarship limits with roster limits for participating Division I programs. Third-party NIL agreements are also subject to new reporting and fair-market-value review requirements.

That means every roster decision now carries more than competitive consequences.

It carries financial consequences.

When a program recruits, retains, compensates or replaces an athlete, it is allocating limited capital. The roster is no longer only a collection of players assembled to compete.

It is also a portfolio of athlete assets competing for scholarships, revenue-sharing dollars, NIL resources, coaching attention, development infrastructure and institutional investment.

College athletics has entered the capital-allocation business.

The problem is that most programs are still using a recruiting evaluation model to make what has become a financial decision.

Those are not the same thing.

The Roster Is Now a Capital Portfolio

A portfolio manager would never evaluate an investment based only on whether the underlying company appeared talented.

The manager would also consider:

• Current value

• Projected value

• Downside risk

• Market demand

• Replacement cost

• Scarcity

• Durability

• Concentration

• Time horizon

• Opportunity cost

Athletic departments must begin applying similar discipline to roster construction.

That does not mean reducing athletes to numbers on a spreadsheet. It means recognizing that the decisions being made around them now involve significant financial exposure—and that poor evaluation harms both the institution and the athlete.

Every dollar allocated to one player is a dollar that cannot be allocated somewhere else.

Every roster spot held by one athlete affects the opportunity available to another.

Every retention payment creates an opportunity cost.

Every transfer acquisition carries integration, performance and replacement risk.

Every high school commitment represents a projection of what the athlete may become several years from now.

These decisions have always mattered.

Now they are priced.

When compensation enters the decision, discipline must enter the evaluation.

Recruiting Evaluation Is Not Financial Underwriting

Traditional recruiting evaluation is designed to answer a limited set of questions:

Can the athlete perform at this level?

Does the athlete fit our system?

Can we recruit the athlete?

Can we develop the athlete?

Those questions remain critical. But financial decision-making requires another layer.

Underwriting asks:

What is the athlete’s present value?

How durable is that value?

What assumptions must become true for the investment to produce the expected return?

What could impair the athlete’s development, availability or market position?

What does the broader market say about the athlete’s leverage?

How difficult and expensive would it be to replace the athlete?

What level of confidence should decision-makers place in the projection?

A talented player may still represent a poor allocation of capital.

A less celebrat

ed player may represent exceptional value.

A productive player may have limited future upside.

A developmental athlete may possess traits that make the future value significantly greater than the present production suggests.

A recruiting grade helps determine whether an athlete can play.

An underwriting process helps determine what level of institutional investment the athlete’s complete profile can justify.

That distinction is becoming one of the most important in modern college sports.

The Evaluation Problem Inside College Athletics

College athletics does not suffer from a shortage of opinions.

It suffers from a shortage of independent evaluation.

Coaches, personnel staff members, and administrators are operating within a system in which their professional security is often tied to their ability to acquire and retain talent.

That does not make them dishonest.

It does mean they are not always in a position to provide a completely disinterested assessment.

A coach who recruited an athlete may be incentivized to remain confident in the original evaluation.

A position coach may view a roster need differently from the person responsible for managing the overall budget.

A recruiting staff may be rewarded for commitments and rankings before the long-term outcome of those acquisitions becomes clear.

A head coach operating under short-term pressure may value immediate production differently from an athletic director responsible for the department's sustainability.

A collective may prioritize retaining a popular athlete without independently assessing whether the financial commitment aligns with the athlete’s projected contribution and market value.

An agent may emphasize upside because the agent’s compensation is tied to the transaction.

A family may overvalue an opportunity because it validates years of sacrifice.

Each party sees the athlete through the lens of its own responsibilities, incentives and risks.

The result is not necessarily corruption.

It is evaluation distortion.

The people closest to the decision may also have the most to gain, protect or explain once the decision is made.

That is precisely why other financial markets use independent analysts, appraisers, auditors, rating agencies and underwriting professionals.

The purpose of an independent intelligence layer is not to replace the decision-maker.

It is to improve the quality of information available to the decision-maker.

Replacement Cost Changes the Value Equation

Two athletes with similar production may have dramatically different value because they do not have the same replacement cost.

Consider a position with limited supply, high developmental difficulty, and significant market demand.

Even if the athlete is not currently elite, retaining that athlete may be more economically rational than entering the transfer market and attempting to purchase an uncertain replacement at a premium.

On the other hand, a productive athlete at a position with abundant supply may carry less leverage than the statistics suggest.

This is where traditional evaluation frequently falls short.

Performance is assessed in isolation.

Underwriting evaluates performance in context.

Replacement cost should account for:

• The depth of available talent

• Positional scarcity

• Development time

• Scheme specificity

• Transfer-market pricing

• Internal alternatives

• The probability of successfully acquiring a replacement

• The cost of a failed replacement

• The competitive impact of losing the athlete to another program

The question is no longer simply:

How good is the player?

It is:

What would it cost—in money, time, development and competitive opportunity—to replace this player’s expected value?

That is a capital-allocation question.

Positional Scarcity Must Affect Investment

Not every position carries equal value in every market.

The value of a position changes based on:

• Supply

• Demand

• Scheme

• Conference

• Recruiting cycle

• Transfer availability

• Development difficulty

• Immediate roster needs

• Competitive environment

A program may have five athletes with higher overall performance grades than its starting left tackle.

That does not mean any of those athletes carry more market value.

Scarcity creates leverage.

The fewer credible alternatives are available, the more costly it becomes to lose, replace, or evaluate the athlete incorrectly.

This is why statistics alone cannot determine value.

Production measures what happened.

Asset value considers what the production means within the market.

A disciplined program must understand both.

Retention Is an Investment Decision

Retention has become one of the most consequential and potentially emotional areas of roster management.

Programs are now forced to determine:

Who must be retained?

Who can be replaced?

Which athlete is likely to increase in value?

Which athlete has reached a ceiling?

Which athlete’s market price exceeds the program’s internal valuation?

Which loss would create the greatest competitive disruption?

Which investment is being driven by actual value, and which is being driven by fear?

The fear of losing a player can push a program into an undisciplined commitment.

So can public pressure, recruiting reputation, donor influence, a coach’s personal attachment, or the perception that another program is willing to pay more.

But another buyer’s willingness to pay does not automatically establish sound value.

Markets misprice assets every day.

College athletics will be no different.

A disciplined retention process must separate:

• Emotional value from economic value

• Past production from future projection

• Market price from internal value

• Popularity from replaceability

• Recruiting status from roster contribution

• Competitive need from organizational panic

Programs that cannot make those distinctions will overpay some athletes, undervalue others, and repeatedly operate from urgency rather than strategy.

What Athlete Asset Underwriting Should Answer

A disciplined athlete underwriting process should provide decision-makers with a clear, defensible view of the athlete before capital is committed.

At minimum, it should answer:

1. What is the athlete’s current competitive value?

Not reputation.

Not recruiting ranking.

Not social-media perception.

What does the athlete currently provide based on verified performance, traits, role and level of competition?

2. What is the athlete’s projected value?

What can the athlete realistically become?

What development must occur?

How long is that development likely to take?

What evidence supports the projection?

3. How durable is the athlete’s value?

Is the value dependent on a single trait, system, coach, or temporary market condition?

Does the athlete possess characteristics that are likely to translate across environments?

4. What are the material risks?

Where could the projection fail?

The answer may involve development, academics, role fit, positional value, market timing, retention exposure, decision-making, or other nonmedical risk factors.

5. What does the market say?

How much demand is there for the position?

What alternatives are available?

How does the athlete compare with those alternatives?

What leverage does the athlete or institution actually possess?

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6. What is the replacement cost?

How difficult would it be to replace the athlete’s expected contribution?

What financial, developmental, and competitive resources would replacement require?

7. What is the appropriate level of investment?

Should the program recruit, retain, compensate, develop, replace, or pass?

Underwriting should not merely describe the athlete.

It should support the decision.

8. How confident should the institution be?

Every projection contains uncertainty.

A credible underwriting process must clearly communicate the confidence level, assumptions, and variables that could change the recommendation.

The absence of certainty is not the problem.

Unpriced uncertainty is.

The Need for an Independent Intelligence Layer

Coaches should continue to coach.

Scouts should continue to evaluate.

General managers should continue to build rosters.

Athletic directors should continue to set institutional priorities.

But when millions of dollars, roster spots and long-term competitive outcomes are involved, the decision should not depend exclusively on the people whose employment, reputation or previous evaluations are connected to the outcome.

College athletics needs an independent source capable of evaluating the athlete without needing to justify the recruitment, preserve the relationship, protect a ranking or close the transaction.

That independent source should not ask:

How badly do we want this athlete?

It should ask:

What does the evidence support?

That is the role L.I.G. Sports Intelligence is building to serve.

Introducing Athlete Asset Underwriting™

L.I.G. Sports Intelligence has developed and continuously refines an Athlete Asset Underwriting™ methodology designed to assess athlete value, market position, durability, development trajectory, and risk before making financial, competitive, or career decisions.

The methodology combines:

• Film-based athletic evaluation

• Market intelligence

• Positional value

• Developmental projection

• Athlete risk analysis

• NIL readiness

• Replacement-cost considerations

• Independent decision support

The objective is not to create another ranking.

The objective is to produce a clearer view of the asset, the exposure and the decision.

For athletes and families, that intelligence can improve recruiting, development, NIL and career choices.

For athletic departments, it can support recruiting, retention, compensation and roster construction.

For agencies, insurers, lenders and other entities with financial exposure to athlete performance or future earnings, it can provide the athletic intelligence layer that traditional financial models may not fully capture.

The same central question applies to every buyer:

What are we actually underwriting before we commit our money, opportunity or future to this athlete?

College Athletics Must Catch Up to Its Own Economics

College athletics has already accepted athlete compensation.

It must now accept the discipline that compensation requires.

You can't run a multimillion-dollar athlete market with a model that only determines scholarship offers. School leaders need to adopt the decision-making approach of professional sports team owners, who make independent personnel decisions. While they still evaluate players, owners with significant financial stakes often rely on independent underwriters for additional insight to avoid reactive and poor decisions.

You cannot treat retention as a capital decision while relying solely on internal advocacy.

You cannot manage a roster portfolio without understanding scarcity, replacement cost, value durability, and downside risk.

And you cannot claim to allocate resources strategically if no independent process exists to challenge the assumptions underlying the allocation.

The athlete economy has changed.

The intelligence used to evaluate athlete assets must change with it.

College athletics does not merely have a recruiting problem.

It has a capital-allocation problem.

Athlete Asset Underwriting™ is the missing discipline.

L.I.G. Sports

About Blue Chip Academy

Blue Chip Academy is the media and education platform of L.I.G. Sports Intelligence, providing analysis on athlete value, risk, recruiting, NIL and the changing economics of sports.

About L.I.G. Sports Intelligence

L.I.G. Sports Intelligence provides independent Athlete Asset Underwriting™, strategic advisory and decision intelligence to athletes, families, athletic departments and organizations with financial or competitive exposure to athlete value.

Intelligence before capital is committed.

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