I opened Twitter yesterday and half the NIL feed was celebrating. Congress finally moved on the Protect College Sports Act. The Senate Commerce Committee is advancing a bill that caps agent fees on endorsement contracts at 5%, requires state registration, prohibits deceptive practices, and gives athletes harmed by agent misconduct a private right of action against the person who represented them.
I'm glad the bill exists. I want to be honest with you about what it does and doesn't do before your family reads the same headline and assumes the problem is solved.
What the bill actually changes
The current agent take on a college endorsement deal runs 10 to 15 percent. Some are higher. If your son signs a $60,000 collective deal, that's $6,000 to $9,000 walking out the door before your family sees the first payment. The bill would knock that ceiling to $3,000.
It also puts a state registration requirement on the agent and gives your kid an actual path to sue if the agent behaves badly. Both of those are structurally good. They add friction and consequences to a role that has, for the last four years, had almost none of either.
What the bill does not touch
Here is the part I want you to hear from someone who reads these for a living. The bill regulates the agent. It doesn't regulate the contract.
Everything on the page in front of your kid — the exclusivity clause that quietly locks out three product categories for four years, the morality clause that gives the brand veto power over your kid's public life, the indemnification paragraph that puts your family's assets in play if the brand ever gets sued for how your kid was used in an ad — all of that stays exactly the way it is today. A capped-fee agent can still hand your family a contract that costs you more, over the life of the deal, than the agent fee ever did.
I read one last month where the endorsement number in the announcement was $85,000. The actual language on performance and buyback provisions cut the guaranteed floor to $22,000 if the kid missed one appearance window. Nobody in that room caught it before the pen moved. The agent's take, at any percentage, was the smallest thing that got lost that day.
Three questions to carry into the room this week
If your kid is inside 30 days of signing, ask these out loud, in the room where the contract is sitting.
First. What am I locked out of, and for how long. Not the sponsor. The product category. If the deal is with a hydration brand, you should be able to point at the exact paragraph that says whether the next two Octobers include or exclude a competing energy drink offer that hasn't landed yet.
Second. What does the brand get to do if my kid disappoints them. Read the morality clause slowly and read what "brand-damaging" actually means inside it. If the definition includes "conduct in the sole discretion of Sponsor," that isn't a definition. That's a leash.
Third. What happens to us financially if the brand gets sued because of an ad my kid appeared in. If the answer is "we could be on the hook," you have an indemnification problem, and it is fixable in the negotiation. It just has to be caught before the signing table, not after.
The frame I'm carrying into this fall
The bill is good news. It isn't the news.
The agent fee was never the biggest bill your family was going to pay on a bad NIL deal. The contract was. Congress is legislating the piece it can see from a distance. The piece that costs your kid the actual money stays with the family, and with whoever they trust to read it before it's signed.
That is the reason I'm publishing here.
Talk soon.
— Keeno