SBJ College: For NIL, is a contract a contract?

And so the college football offseason has begun.

Hard to believe the campaign that began in Dublin five months ago is now over. But if we know anything from the last few years, off-field issues are only going to heat up over the coming weeks.

Cheers to the end of another great season. Thanks to everyone who read this newsletter and all our other reporting along the way. The support is always appreciated.

Another week, another legal proceeding is resolved.

Duke and QB Darian Mensah and his representation, Young Money APAA Sports, reached a settlement in their dispute over the player’s contract Tuesday.

The path is now clear for Mensah to enter the transfer portal and, more than likely, end up at Miami. But the settlement between Duke and its now ex-QB marks another milestone in the battle over whether NIL contracts and the deals players are signing are actually enforceable.

The school released the following statement Tuesday following the resolution of legal action it took against Mensah:

“We are committed to fulfilling all promises and obligations Duke makes to our student-athletes when we enter into contractual agreements with them, and we expect the same in return. Enforcing those agreements is a necessary element of ensuring predictability and structure for athletic programs. It is nonetheless a difficult choice to pursue legal action against a student and teammate; for this reason, we sought to resolve the matter fairly and quickly.”

We’ve seen a similar saga play out this offseason with Demond Williams, with the Washington QB ultimately returning to the Huskies rather than breaking his contract. The biggest difference here is the Big Ten has standardized contracts run through the conference office. The ACC does not.

Contracts that involve the league office include teeth around buyout figures, so much so that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze for Williams to leave Washington. That isn’t the case with Duke.

More broadly, if the contracts are unenforceable, and all it takes is a higher bidder to buy players out for under a deal, what’s really the point of the contract?

College sports leaders keep pleading for standardization and governance. Contracts, theoretically, should help. Yet if schools are going to simply ignore the deals athletes have signed (see Dabo Swinney’s rant accusing Ole Miss of tampering last week), the blame for a broken system falls squarely on the administrators and coaches gaming it on a weekly basis.

The Mensah saga is seemingly over, but it’s hard to imagine this is the last episode like this.

Miami fell short in last week’s national title game, but the Canes have been on the rise for the better part of four years.

Is it a coincidence that this upswing started with the advent of NIL? Probably not.

During my travels over the last few weeks, I caught up with Miami booster John Ruiz, whose LifeWallet company, among others, was at the forefront of signing players to NIL deals during the early days of legalized athlete compensation.

Ruiz told me he estimated he’d dumped $20 million or more into the program, most of it directed toward football. That investment played out this season, as the Canes played their way back to the national championship.

Here are a few other thoughts from one of the original big money people playing in the NIL space, just ahead of Miami’s CFP loss. Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length:

SBJ: As we’re chatting, it’s a couple days out from the CFP national title. What’s it been like seeing Miami get back to this place?

John Ruiz: “There was a vision back several years ago, and it was a rebuilding process. Coach [Mario] Cristobal said it best: ‘It’s going to take several years of recruiting classes and bringing in players that signed up for the mission.’ Miami football was always known for [its] swagger.

“You may have seen that I flew Jimmy Johnson to the game in Dallas. I thought that was special, because what’s very ironic is that I went to the University of Miami between 1984 and 1987. Jimmy Johnson started coaching in 1984, right after Howard Schnellenberger won the national championship, and it was sort of eerie.

“I was in a fraternity, and there was a homecoming event, and we had sort of a gig with my fraternity, and I ended up right next to Jimmy Johnson, which was back in 1984 and never having any imagination that Jimmy Johnson would be on a plane with me 30-something years later.”

SBJ: How many athletes have you had marketing LifeWallet on the football team?

JR: “We had a total of 161 at one point. I would say at least 145 of them were football players. These students, we met them, we saw ’em in person. They were having to perform. I shook their hands. They were involved with us day in and day out.”

SBJ: Miami was really one of the first schools to jump on NIL. Considering that coincided with Cristobal building the program, what were some of the things that you felt like allowed you guys to do that? Was it your support, or was it things that AD Dan Radakovich was doing for NIL infrastructure?

JR: “Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time with the right experience. For whatever reason, I ended up being at the right time at the right place. And because I happened to be a lawyer, I felt comfortable navigating uncharted waters, creating really the first of its kind in the entire country platform that checked all the boxes, dotted all the I’s and crossed all the T’s in the world of NIL.

“When it was fresh, where you were navigating with all these different rules and regulations, state laws, federal laws, NCAA team rules, there’s a lot that was going on. To be able to thread the needle at that point in time, for our company — and at the same time the players — it was beneficial for the university that we were able to do that in a timeframe where it was very difficult to navigate through that without being super careful.

“It’s like walking through landmines. You don’t know where they are, but you feel that you have a better view of where you’re not going to blow up.”

SBJ: Having seen Miami football in its heyday, what’s it like to see this team playing for a national title in their home stadium and all that comes with this happening in Miami?

“For me, it’s amazing. I have three kids that went there, but I think larger than that, Miami, there’s a buzz ... the unity that it brings to West Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade County and the Keys and then some folks that I’ve seen that are in other states in the United States [is amazing].

“... In my personal opinion, the University of Miami are the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL. You see people wearing the orange and green everywhere. There’s a lot of support. I feel that when the University of Miami is at the top of their game.”

After four-plus days in South Florida, there is plenty to unpack from the College Football Playoff national title game.

Here are a few things that were leftover from my notebook last week:

CFP sticking at 12 teams — like we all expected

The Friday news dump came largely with a whimper.

After all the grandstanding and discussion over the last year, including this past weekend, the CFP is going to remain at 12 teams for the 2026 season.

Shocker? Not exactly.

Things had been headed that direction for the better part of a month. And while there were some who felt optimistic about the dialogue between SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti, the two remain at odds.

Sankey and his cohort prefer a “5+11” format leaving the bulk of the system open for at-large bids. Petitti wants a 24-team automatic qualifier heavy field.

Until those two find a middle ground, there’s nothing new here.

For all of you who were hoping that 2026 would bring less CFP meetings and headlines about expansion, I have news for you — we get to do this all over again. Yeehaw.

What’s going on with the revenue sharing cap?

Between my trip up to Washington, D.C. for the NCAA Convention and in Miami for the CFP in back-to-back weeks, I heard plenty of discussion about the revenue sharing cap.

Is it working? Is anyone following the rules? Should there be a cap at all?

The reality is the system remains a work in progress. College Sports Commission CEO Bryan Seeley and his colleagues held an informational session during the NCAA Convention to help gather feedback and update administrators. The meeting was productive and a nice chance for Seeley and his team to appear before people dealing with their system firsthand.

By the time I landed in South Florida, the rhetoric had picked up. Take Miami AD Dan Radakovich’s CFP Media Day comment:

“I don’t think there should be a cap. I can’t tell [Ohio State AD] Ross Bjork what to do at Ohio Stadium, building another club or suites to make money for his program. I don’t care what he’s going to pay Ryan Day. We don’t need that. What we need is disclosure.

“If you are going to this school, I don’t need your agent telling me, ‘Oh, you’re making this when you’re really making this.’ That’s what really has to happen, because we’ve never been able to rule ourselves into competitive equality. Schools who are going to invest are going to invest differently. ... We could go around the mulberry bush here an awful long time, but if we just let market forces work [it could be better].

“Now, if you don’t have a cap, you better have disclosure, because without that it doesn’t work. But I think over a period of time you would be able to get a good level of water here.”

Radakovich’s point is fair. If the cap isn’t holding and schools are simply looking to circumvent it at every turn, should there be a cap? Should everyone spend whatever they so desire?

That’s working out great in MLB right now (*ahem* looking at you, L.A. Dodgers), but the argument has some validity in college sports.

If there is a silver lining for enforcement, it shouldn’t be too long until we see the CSC actually investigating schools for trying to circumvent the cap, among other things. If they can bring the hammer down — and whatever they decide doesn’t immediately get struck down by a school-friendly state judge — maybe this thing has a chance after all.

The CFP continues to grow as an industry event

As much as football is at the center of the happenings during national title weekend, the CFP has become increasingly popular as an industry event.

The 10 FBS commissioners were in town for respective meetings as part of the CFP governance structure. Beyond that, more folks are starting to treat this like a Final Four or Super Bowl week.

I joked with my colleague Austin Karp in the press box in the minutes before the championship game about the seemingly four zillion people we ran into on the sidelines ahead of Indiana’s win over Miami. Just a sampling of those in town for the contest were:

• Mark Cuban (an Indiana alum)
• HBSE’s David Blitzer and Josh Harris
• Fox Sports’ Eric Shanks, Jordan Bazant and Urban Meyer
• CAA’s Mike Levine, Howie Nuchow and Alan Gold
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio
• Roc Nation’s Michael Yormark
• Media agent Sandy Montag
• WWE’s Nick Khan
• The CW’s Jason Wormser
• Rappers Fat Joe and DJ Khaled; and actor Danny Ramirez

Independent of the pregame in Miami, the American Conference and CUSA held meetings with their ADs around the game. TV executives, consultants and more also flocked to the high-end hotels on Miami Beach for meetings throughout the week.

Any major event, particularly around America’s second most popular sport, is going to draw its share of decision makers. But the CFP’s growth in becoming a who’s who in sports business has been noticeable over the three championship games that I’ve attended since joining SBJ.

• This year’s CFP championship game reveals three lessons for college football, such as the growing power of the Big Ten in college football.
• But in this week’s SBJ Media newsletter, Austin Karp reports that while the Big Ten may have more CFP championships in recent years than the SEC, it’s still trailing when it comes to viewership.
• Athletic departments at FBS schools signed more than 60 deals since the NCAA in 2024 ended the ban on “commercial sponsor advertisements on football fields for regular-season games,” writes SBJ’s David Broughton.
• The NCAA’s Division I Cabinet on Friday afternoon decided to permit D-I programs to “sell ad space on uniforms, equipment and apparel starting Aug. 1.” This decision paves the way for jersey patch sponsorships, a concept that LSU has already gamed out.
• Per Legends, CFP title game-day merchandise sales at Hard Rock Stadium set an all-time record and were 18% higher than the previous record (Michigan-Washington 2024).
• The ACC is moving its football championship game from 8pm ET to the “noon Saturday window on championship weekend” -- a move that will put the conference “front and center for its TV window after years of competing with the Big Ten for evening viewership.”