College Sports Commission reveals it mistakenly overstated worth of approved NIL deals by $40M-plus

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The College Sports Commission sent out a correction Friday, saying it had overstated the amount of name, image, likeness deals it has cleared by more than $40 million in a data set it made public a day earlier.

The commission blamed a clerical reporting error in data provided by Deloitte, which helped develop the platform called NIL Go.

The most jarring of the errors: The total value of deals cleared was $35.42 million instead of the $79.8 million previously announced. The $79.8 million is the total amount of all deals in the system, including those that are still pending.

The CSC also said that 6,090 deals had been approved, not the previously reported number of 8,359, which is the total number of deals in the system to date.

“We take full responsibility for this reporting error,” Deloitte said in a statement. "We have taken additional measures to avoid any future recurrence and are fully confident in the NIL Go platform.”

The platform was created as part of the House settlement, which allows schools to pay athletes directly for their NIL, while also offering them a chance to make money from outside groups. The CSC is using NIL Go to analyze the outside deals worth $600 or more.

The CSC is releasing figures periodically in what it has said is an effort for transparency as it undertakes the difficult task of sorting through thousands of business deals made by athletes, whose eligibility is at stake if the contracts aren't deemed to be within the guidelines.

The mistake offers a window into the enormity of the task for the CSC, which opened July 1 and last month was operating with fewer than a half-dozen full-time employees.

The CSC said most deals are being cleared within a week, but acknowledged frustration in the length of time it takes in some cases.

“The CSC is working diligently to speed up wait times and regrets the frustration caused by these initial delays in the process,” it said in a statement. “As with any new system of this scale, some early delays and growing pains are inevitable.”

The commission did not report errors in other statistics it released Thursday, including the 332 deals that had not been cleared and 75 that had been resubmitted.

It also said there were 2,003 deals pending, about half of which were awaiting more information and the other half of which were under active review.

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