Cracking the College Sports NIL Fiduciary Code of Conduct

We just put out a piece on SportsEpreneur about athletes finally getting a seat at the table — testifying, organizing, pushing for real bargaining power instead of just an invitation to speak. Good effort, real attempts being made. But it got me thinking about something underneath the whole conversation, and I want to think out loud about it here.

Everybody in this NIL world is talking. Compliance people are talking rules. Kids are talking money. Schools are talking brand. Sponsors are talking reach. Networks are talking content. Nobody’s talking the same language, because nobody’s operating off the same code. And when there’s no shared code, the whole thing runs on a scarcity mindset — everybody assuming there’s not enough to go around, so grab what you can before someone else does. That scarcity mindset is exactly what makes it easy for one party to take advantage of another party. Not because anyone sets out to be a bad actor. Because nobody built the guardrails.

Where My Code Came From

Before I ever held my professional licenses, I learned the basics of “The Code” on the playground — share what you have, be a team player, look out for the guy next to you. The Air Force reinforced it and gave it a name: Integrity First, Service Before Self, Excellence in All We Do. Integrity is the bedrock. Everything else sits on top of it. Excellence matters, but service before self is the piece that actually keeps you honest when nobody’s watching. That’s the missing code in NIL right now. Everybody wants to win. The question is at what cost, not monetarily speaking, but to the Integrity of all the parties involved.

A code of conduct isn’t a law. Nobody goes to jail for violating one. But a code is the thing that shows you value something bigger than the win in front of you — and right now, college sports doesn’t have a real one for this. It has rules written piecemeal, state by state, conference by conference, after something goes wrong. Coding is no different. For a program to run, it needs rules — a language every party accepts. Without that, the program fails.

What is Being Sold?

Before you can build any kind of code, you have to answer a basic question nobody seems to be asking out loud: what is the product?

Is it athletic performance — the actual game, the stats, the wins? Is it brand awareness — a logo next to a name? Is it the message — an athlete saying something a sponsor wants said? Or is it the audience itself — access to a following that took years to build? Those are four different products. A jersey deal, a message-driven campaign, and straight performance-based pay should not be valued, structured, or disclosed the same way. Right now, most NIL deals blur all four together into one number, and that’s exactly where things get convoluted fast.

And it’s not just the athlete and the brand. Who owes what to whom? Does the school owe the athlete a duty beyond eligibility and a scholarship? Does the athlete owe the school anything if he transfers mid-season after the school invested in him? What’s the sponsor’s duty when the campaign underperforms — or overperforms and the athlete never sees the upside? What’s the coach’s duty to the program when he leaves for a bigger contract two years into a recruiting class he built his pitch around? None of that is documented in any kind of standard way. It should be.

Talking the Talk

Universities love to talk about their code of conduct. Michigan’s football program is a recent example — a school with as storied a tradition and as loud a “this is who we are” identity as any in the country, and yet you still saw real breaches play out in public, coaches facing real consequences for real violations of the standards the program claims to stand for. I’m not picking on Michigan specifically. I’m using it because it’s recent and it’s well known. Does being a “Michigan man,” or whatever the equivalent phrase is at any program, actually mean something enforceable, or is it a recruiting slogan that only holds up until winning gets hard enough to look the other way?

That’s the test for any code of conduct, mine included. Does it hold when it’s inconvenient? If not, it was never a code. It was branding.

The Gambling Problem Nobody’s Squaring

This is the part that bothers me most, because it’s not subtle once you see it. Half the ads during a college or pro game now are from a former professional athlete telling you to bet on the games he used to play. The athletes in those ads have actually played the sport at the highest level — they understand matchups, injuries, fatigue, locker room dynamics in a way the guy on the couch never will. We’re fine with that. But a current athlete betting on his own performance gets removed from his program. Are we seriously saying the guy with real, current, inside knowledge of his own team has less of an advantage than a retired player doing a TV spot? That doesn’t track.

Pete Rose ran into this exact wall decades ago. Betting on yourself, even if you bet to win, blows up the integrity of the competition because nobody can verify your intent at the moment. That’s a real, defensible reason for a hard line. But here’s the actual fix: stop pretending the line is about “gambling bad,” and start being honest that it’s about information asymmetry and single-factor manipulation. A guy missing a field goal on purpose for a prop bet payout is a completely different problem than a guy simply having an edge because he plays the game. Same logic as a hedge fund manager shorting a stock he has inside knowledge about, or a PE-owned betting platform sitting on data nobody else can see. Single-factor prop bets are where the real manipulation risk lives, and that’s the piece worth restricting hardest, not blanket-banning every athlete from ever having a stake in his own outcome without ever explaining why.

And none of this gets explained to these kids ahead of time, in writing, before they’re scrolling the same gambling ads everyone else is scrolling. It gets enforced after the fact. That’s backwards.

The Patchwork Problem

Then there’s the part that reminds me of the tax code. An athlete from North Carolina plays a game in Florida. NIL rules in NC say one thing, Florida says another. Is he suddenly in breach of a duty he didn’t know existed the moment he crossed state lines for an away game? Multiply that by every conference, every state legislature passing its own version of NIL law, every school operating under a different compliance department’s interpretation, and you’ve got a system that’s nearly impossible for an 18-year-old, let alone his parents, to actually track. Add federal rules trying to catch up on top of that, and you’ve got the exact kind of convoluted mess that nobody can explain cleanly, which means nobody can follow it with confidence either.

Where the Code Almost Exists

Here’s the part that surprised me when I actually went looking: nobody has built this yet. Not one state NIL law uses the word fiduciary. Not one. A handful of states require financial literacy workshops — five hours here, a workshop there — and most require an athlete to disclose a deal to the school within some window of days. That’s the scaffolding. It is not the code.

The clearest confirmation of the gap doesn’t come from a critic on the outside. It comes from the American Football Coaches Association, an organization that sits inside this industry, saying it plainly this year: there are no standardized disclosure requirements, no limits on percentage-based fees, and no uniform fiduciary duty requiring representatives to act in the athlete’s best interest. They went further and put a number on it — some college “agents” are reportedly taking commissions as high as 20 to 30 percent, against the 3 to 5 percent that’s standard for professional agents. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the entire margin between a kid keeping most of what he earned and a kid losing nearly a third of it to someone who was never required to act in his interest in the first place.

There is a federal law that was supposed to be in this lane — the Sports Agent Responsibility and Trust Act, passed back in 2004, built to protect student-athletes from deceptive agent practices. It still exists. It still applies. It was also written two decades before NIL existed, for a completely different problem, and it shows. The closest thing to fiduciary language most agents actually operate under isn’t NIL law at all — it’s old-fashioned state agency law, the same general doctrine that governs any agent representing any client for anything. That doctrine creates some duty, technically. But it was never built for an 18-year-old signing a six-figure deal with cameras and recruiters and a scholarship all hanging in the balance. It’s a hand-me-down legal framework being asked to do a job it was never designed for.

So here’s where I land on it: the infrastructure isn’t missing because nobody’s thought about it. It’s missing because every piece that exists right now is either too old, too general, or too voluntary to actually function as a code. Financial literacy workshops teach a kid what a contract is. They don’t require anyone signing that contract with him to act in his best interest. Disclosure rules tell the school what happened. They don’t require anyone to flag it before it happens. That’s the whole difference between a rule and a code, and right now, NIL only has the rule.

Who’s Closest to Getting It Right

A few states have built pieces of scaffolding worth naming, even if none of them have actually built the wall:

California requires athletes to disclose any deal over $500 to the school within 72 hours of signing — fast, specific, the kind of timeline that actually matters before a kid gets in too deep. Florida and Georgia both mandate a five-hour financial literacy and life skills workshop, at least giving an athlete a baseline before he’s handed a contract. Oklahoma’s version of that workshop goes further, covering debt management and budgeting, not just “here’s what NIL means.” Tennessee requires the workshop and pairs it with one of the more specific lists of prohibited endorsement categories on the books. North Carolina gives schools real discretion to block conflicting deals, which at least closes one obvious loophole.

None of these are a fiduciary standard. None of them require anyone — agent, school, sponsor — to act in the athlete’s best interest before money changes hands. They’re closer to a syllabus than a code. But they’re the closest thing on the board right now, and they’re worth crediting, because they’re the early shape of what a real code could eventually borrow from: fast disclosure windows, mandatory education before signing, and schools with actual teeth to block a bad deal. Put those three pieces together, attach an actual duty to them, and you’d be most of the way to something real.

What the Code Could Actually Look Like

Every other serious profession has built this kind of infrastructure already. Financial services have it. Physicians have it. Plumbers, Builders, and HVAC techs work under licensing standards and a code of ethics for their trade. NIL is one of the only multi-billion-dollar spaces left where a teenager can sign a six-figure deal with no equivalent professional standard guiding the people around him.

Here’s roughly what I’d want to see, the same SMARTER discipline I’d apply to any contract:

Specific duties, spelled out for every party — athlete, school, coach, sponsor, network — so everyone knows exactly what’s owed to whom. Measurable terms, so a deal’s success or failure isn’t a vibe, it’s a number everyone agreed to upfront. Accountability, named, on both sides, with real consequences for a breach instead of a quiet settlement. Recorded and disclosed — not every dollar amount made public, but the bones of the deal: who’s funding it, what it’s actually buying, and why. Ethical guardrails that flag conflicts of interest before they become headlines, not after. And repeatable structure, so the next kid isn’t reinventing this from zero with whatever lawyer his family could afford to find on short notice.

Speaking of which — who’s actually giving these kids legal advice before they sign? In most of these deals, that’s still an open question, and it shouldn’t be. Same with taxes. The federal tax code isn’t simple, and then you stack fifty states’ rules on top of it. Confusing for anyone, let alone a kid coming out of high school. And where’s the school in all this? It’s a huge opening for a college entrepreneurship program, because these are real businesses with real business questions. Should I incorporate? Do I pay estimated taxes, and if so, when and how much? Look at how it works everywhere else: when a business owner hires a contractor, he passes the tax burden down to that contractor — but not before the standards get fortified. Deadlines, insurance, liability, all of it. So what happens when an athlete gets hurt mid-deal — does he have anything like disruption insurance to fall back on? Injury alone opens a massive can of worms, and it’s exactly why this needs a fiduciary level of standard, one that protects every party to the deal, not just one.

Trust, But Verify

Reagan’s line still holds up here. Trust is earned on all sides — schools, sponsors, athletes, agents — but it has to be verified, not assumed. Transparency is what builds that trust in the first place. Not because every party is acting in bad faith. Most aren’t. But because a system built on goodwill alone, with this much money moving through it, is exactly the kind of system that eventually gets exploited by the one party willing to skip the goodwill part.

This isn’t unsolvable. It’s actually a pretty solvable puzzle once you frame it the right way: define the product, define the duties, define the code, and let intent get spelled out in writing before the money moves instead of explained after something goes wrong. Every other profession figured this out. NIL is still scrambling to find its footing. The pieces are all sitting right there — it’s just a matter of someone finally laying them out as infrastructure instead of leaving it to catch up after the fact.

The Code, Recapped

If you strip away the examples — Michigan, Pete Rose, the field goal nobody should ever be allowed to throw — the actual code I’m proposing is short enough to fit on an index card:

Integrity first. Every deal, every relationship, every governance decision gets built on honesty before it gets built on what’s profitable or what wins.

Define the product. Performance, brand awareness, message, or audience access — name which one is actually being sold before a number gets attached to it.

Define the duties. Athlete to school, school to athlete, sponsor to athlete, coach to program — spelled out, in writing, before the money moves.

SMARTER terms. Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Recorded, Ethical, Repeatable — applied to every deal the same way, not reinvented contract by contract.

Disclosure over secrecy. Not every number made public, but the bones of every deal — who’s funding it and why — visible enough that nobody’s operating blind.

Service before self. When a code and a win are in conflict, the code wins. That’s the whole test.

Six lines. Not a law. A standard anyone in this business should be willing to be held to.

Who’s Actually in the Room

Part of why this still feels like the wild west is that there’s no single body holding the pen — there are several, often working at cross purposes, plus a growing number of advocacy groups trying to give athletes their own seat. Worth knowing who’s actually building toward something, even imperfectly, because a few of these are doing real work in the right direction:

NCAA — still the central governing body for college athletics and its own bylaws on NIL and athlete conduct. ncaa.org

College Sports Commission (CSC) — the newer enforcement body created out of the House v. NCAA settlement, now handling third-party NIL deal review through the NIL Go platform. collegesportscommission.org

Protect College Sports Act of 2026 — bipartisan Senate legislation (Sens. Ted Cruz, Maria Cantwell, Eric Schmitt, and Chris Coons) aimed at a federal framework for NIL, transfers, governance, and revenue sharing. commerce.senate.gov

White House Council on College Sports / “Urgent National Action to Save College Sports” Executive Order — pushing toward a uniform national standard ahead of an August 2026 effective date. whitehouse.gov

Athletes.org (AO) — describes itself as “the players association for college athletes,” organizing for collective representation and negotiation. Worth calling out for actually trying to build athlete-side infrastructure, even with the legitimate criticism that it’s still finding its footing on independence from school administrators. athletes.org

National College Players Association (NCPA) — a 501(c)(3) that’s pushed athlete health, safety, and NIL representation reforms for over two decades, longer than almost anyone else in this space. ncpanow.org

College Football Players Association (CFBPA) — a smaller, athlete-led advocacy voice pushing specifically for football players’ interests and representation. cfbpa.org

State legislatures — every state with its own NIL statute, the actual source of the patchwork problem, and arguably the body most overdue for a shared standard instead of fifty separate ones.

None of these are perfect, and a few have real conflicts of interest worth watching closely. But credit where it’s due — there are people in this fight genuinely trying to build the missing infrastructure, not just talk about it. The code I’d want to see doesn’t replace any of them. It’s the shared language that would let all of them actually be in the same conversation instead of six different ones happening at once.

This piece grew out of our SportsEpreneur coverage of efforts to build real bargaining power for college athletes, not just a seat at the table.