A note before this one
This is a special edition, on one subject, and it comes with a request: read the piece linked below, even if you have already seen the CSC's compensation report.
Most of you are at the table when a deal gets made. Some of you build the board and make the offer. Some of you represent the player and make the call. Some of you are the player, or the family deciding with him.
On Oct. 30 the College Sports Commission published a compensation report that is being presented as a guide to what happens at that table. It counts a small part of the money. Within a day it was in headlines, in donors' inboxes and in front of parents. The people quoting those numbers will not be the ones held to them. Everyone at the table will.
We wrote this for all of you. It works from the CSC's own figures, it says plainly who we are, and it reports what the general managers, personnel directors and agents on our network told us about how they are reading the CSC's report.
Nobody has a clean answer to what a player is worth. The people who have to agree on that number deserve a straight read of the figures being used to describe it.
What the CSC's numbers add up to
Build a Power Four football roster from the CSC's data, slot by slot, and it costs $15.8 million. Sports Illustrated's August survey of conference medians puts Power Four rosters at $22 million to $33 million.
Do the same for an SEC basketball roster and it costs $1.5 million, with the sixth man at $83,000 and the last six players at nothing. On3 priced 2025-26 SEC rosters at $8.5 million to $22 million.
The CSC's arithmetic holds up. Its data counts only the part of each deal that passed through the CSC.
The call in December
In the second week of December, a general manager at a Power Four program will have an agent on the phone about a redshirt-sophomore edge rusher, asking $900,000 for one season. On the GM's screen will be the CSC's report, forwarded by someone in the building with the subject line "CSC says."
The CSC's data says the median revenue-share payment to a paid Power Four defensive lineman is $150,000, and the median cleared NIL deal is $26,500. The GM knows better. The agent knows better too. The people who do not are the ones the numbers will hurt, starting with the edge rusher's parents, who will see the $150,000 median in a headline and wonder what their son's agent is doing.
What the people at the table told us
The CSC's chief executive, Bryan Seeley, said the report was issued "to help people make better informed decisions." Since the release, the general managers, personnel directors and agents on our network have told us the same thing in nearly the same words: the data describes a market they do not recognize, and they are not pricing from it.
The GM and the agent will set the price. The player and his family will hear the CSC's numbers anyway, as though they were the market. They are the ones least able to tell the difference.
If someone shows you a CSC number
Staffs. A median from the CSC's report is not a price. When someone forwards "CSC says," check it against what you paid for the same position last winter.
Agents. Expect the CSC's median to come up on the call. It counts only the money that passed through the CSC, not the deal your client will sign.
Athletes and families. The number in the headline is not your number. Ask your agent what players like you are actually being paid.
David Antoline is Chief Operating Officer of UpNext, which builds roster and representation tools for college programs and agencies. Every CSC figure here comes from the CSC's public pages.
Since Oct. 30, what CSC number has someone put in front of you, and who sent it? Reply to this email or write [email protected].
