Nebraska Football Players Preparing for Arbitration Fight Over Rejected NIL Deals

Nebraska’s football schedule says the team is scheduled to open 2026 against Ohio on Sept. 5—but some Cornhuskers may be digging in for a bigger fight before that.

A group of 18 Nebraska players are challenging the College Sports Commission in arbitration over its rejection of their name, image and likeness deals, according to a Tuesday afternoon report from Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports.

Per Dellenger, the players’ deals turned away by NIL Go—the commission’s clearinghouse—are worth over $1 million combined.

The CSC was created as a result of House v. NCAA, a 2020 class-action lawsuit against the NCAA that resulted in a $2.75 billion settlement in June 2025. On Tuesday, the body released its quarterly data, in which it indicated that it cleared 21,025 agreements worth $166.5 million while turning away 711 worth $29.3 million.

“The CSC rejected the Nebraska deals because they violated the policy against what is called ‘warehousing’ where an entity ... purchases an athlete’s NIL rights for future endorsement and commercial opportunities,” Dellenger wrote.

“It is not within the rules to submit a deal that doesn't have any information about who the ultimate entity is that's going to activate the NIL—basically, who the sponsor is or what the student-athlete’s obligations are,” CSC CEO Bryan Seeley said Tuesday, per Sports Illustrated’s Bryan Fischer. “I think one thing schools were feeling pressure to do in the transfer portal was to guarantee these deals with maybe their multimedia rights entity or another entity affiliated with them, with the idea that, later on, they'd figure it out who the sponsors would be that could actually activate these deals and pay for these deals.”

Accordingly, per Dellenger, 18 Cornhuskers agreed to deals with Playfly Sports—Nebraska’s multimedia rights partner—which the CSC turned away. These players are then said to have retained counsel from the law firm Husch Blackwell.

Crucially, Nebraska has a law on the books—Nebraska Revised Statute 48-3603—which prevents the punishment of an athlete “because such student-athlete earns or intends to earn compensation for the use of such student-athlete's name, image, or likeness rights or athletic reputation.”

Clearly, three powerful forces—Nebraska’s players, the CSC and the state’s law—are on a collision course. The outcome could have significant reverberations across college sports, and soon—as Dellenger noted, House v. NCAA will ensure the case is resolved within the next six weeks.

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