The revenue-sharing model introduced to bring financial restraint to college athletics appears to have done anything but.

Just one year after the landmark House v. NCAA settlement established a $20.5m annual revenue-sharing cap for Division I schools, new research suggests the biggest programmes are spending far beyond that figure by combining direct payments with lucrative third-party Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals.

According to Opendorse‘s annual NIL report, quoted by Front Office Sports and others, the average Power Four institution offered athletes an estimated $13.5m in external NIL compensation on top of the $20.5m schools are permitted to distribute directly, pushing total player packages beyond $34m across all sports. The findings reinforce a growing belief across college athletics that the revenue-sharing cap has become less of a spending ceiling than a starting point in the increasingly competitive race for elite talent.

“Once the cap was instituted,” the report noted, “the insatiable drive to stay competitive only seemed to grow.”

The House settlement, which reshaped the financial landscape of college sports in 2025, allowed schools to share up to $20.5m annually with athletes, but did not prohibit players from earning additional compensation through legitimate NIL agreements with third parties. As a result, rather than relying solely on university-funded revenue sharing, athletic departments have increasingly worked alongside collectives, corporate sponsors, multimedia rights holders and affiliated businesses to assemble compensation packages that extend well beyond the official cap.

Football has been the primary beneficiary. Opendorse estimates many leading Power Four football rosters alone are now valued at more than $20m, before basketball and other sports are taken into account. Looking ahead, the report projects the most expensive football rosters could approach $40m, while elite men’s basketball programmes may spend between $10m and $12m on player acquisition and retention.

The settlement did include safeguards designed to prevent schools from disguising recruiting inducements as NIL opportunities. The newly created College Sports Commission introduced the NIL Go platform, requiring Division I athletes to submit third-party NIL agreements worth more than $600 for review. The commission evaluates whether contracts reflect fair market value and a legitimate commercial purpose, or whether they amount to prohibited pay-for-play arrangements.

Even as schools continue to assemble increasingly expensive roster packages, the NCAA and the Power Four conferences recently secured an important legal victory over the future of NIL enforcement, as U.S. magistrate judge Nathanael Cousins rejected a challenge to the College Sports Commission’s interpretation of the House settlement, allowing it to continue applying heightened scrutiny to NIL deals involving school-affiliated entities, including multimedia rights holders and corporate sponsors. The ruling preserves one of the settlement’s key enforcement mechanisms, and the watchdog has been active, but questions remain over how effectively it can restrain spending.

According to its published data, hundreds of millions of dollars in NIL agreements have been approved since NIL Go launched, while hundreds of other deals worth millions of dollars have been rejected for failing to satisfy the commission’s standards. The vast majority of submissions, however, have received clearance, with most reviews completed within a matter of days. Yet even those oversight mechanisms have not prevented schools from finding creative ways to maximise athlete compensation.

Many institutions anticipated the implementation of the House settlement by accelerating or ‘front-loading’ NIL agreements before the College Sports Commission began reviewing transactions, allowing significant sums to be distributed outside the new regulatory framework.

More broadly, the report suggests NIL itself continues to expand at a remarkable pace. Opendorse estimates the overall NIL marketplace has now surpassed $4bn annually, representing roughly 50 per cent year-on-year growth as commercial partnerships, collective funding and revenue sharing increasingly overlap. The result is a financial landscape that looks markedly different from the one lawmakers and administrators hoped to create.