'This is a startup': Meet the man in charge of policing the new world of college sports

Last Monday morning, Bryan Seeley began his first official day as Employee No. 1 at the College Sports Commission by doing some online shopping.

The revenue share era of college sports has arrived. Paychecks from schools will start to land in players' bank accounts this week. The endorsement deals that the CSC will need to vet are already pouring in. As he attempts to run an organization responsible for bringing order to a chaotic industry, Seeley has a long to-do list: hire a staff, establish investigative processes, determine fair punishment standards and build relationships across hundreds of schools and dozens of sports.

Seeley finished the previous week by returning his office equipment to Major League Baseball after a decade of rebuilding and overseeing their league investigations department, which handled high-profile issues such as gambling, sexual misconduct and sign-stealing scandals on his watch. At his new job he's back to square one, which means his top priority last Monday was scrolling through Wirecutter, a product recommendation website, for advice on buying a new laptop.

"This is a startup," Seeley told ESPN during an interview at the end of his first day. "It's not like I'm walking into nothing, but in many ways this is a true start-up."

The former federal prosecutor with degrees from Princeton and Harvard estimated it would take two to three years to work through the kinks of this new system before anyone could fairly judge if the CSC was successfully fulfilling its mission. Despite the pressure to put down rails to steer a train that is already moving at full steam, Seeley is approaching the job with patience.

His job description is simple but far from easy. Seeley and the CSC must enforce a new set of rules that dictate how players can be paid. The rules are now backed by a negotiated class action settlement, which in theory should help Seeley avoid some of the legal pitfalls that made life difficult for his predecessors at the NCAA. But he and his new bosses acknowledge their high-stakes start-up works only if Seeley can earn and keep the cooperation of the coaches, administrators and players he has been asked to police.

To earn the trust of the largely skeptical group of schools he has inherited, Seeley says he will need to quickly create a justice system that is transparent and easy to understand. He plans to start by listening to their concerns rather than by flexing the substantial power of his new post. "If anybody thinks he's going to come in guns blazing, that's just not his style," said Jean Afterman, a New York Yankees executive who credits Seeley with restoring "integrity" to MLB's investigation team. "He's going to listen to everybody."

And that, more than his impressive rsum, is why the leaders of college sports say they believe a soft-spoken outsider who doesn't like the limelight can be the sheriff they need to fix their broken industry.

"I don't think what's been going on the last few years in college sports has been good for college sports, has been good for student athletes, has been good for schools, and I think the House settlement is a vehicle to get to a better place," Seeley said. "And I view that as part of my mission to help get us to that better place."

In a private room at the Grand Hyatt San Antonio Riverwalk in April, Seeley took his seat for a 7 a.m. Saturday interview at a rectangular table across from ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey.

The three power brokers were in Texas to watch their leagues' top basketball teams compete that evening in the NCAA men's Final Four, but first they wanted to size up the candidate who might soon join them among the most influential leaders in their business. Seeley, who says he is awake most mornings by 5:30, was unfazed by the early interview. He joked he had only one coffee. "From the moment that he walked into the room, he gained instant control," Phillips said. "It's very difficult to do, with our group in particular."

In his previous life as a federal prosecutor, Seeley shared tables with murderers, corrupt government officials and CEOs. He faced off with some of the biggest stars in professional sports during his time at MLB. He learned to control those rooms with a common sense demeanor and meticulous preparation.

"This is not the job for a thin-skinned person," Seeley said. "Let me say that. I've had jobs throughout my career that required a lot of thick skin." Before that morning, Seeley had already made a distinct impression in one-on-one Zoom interviews with all four power conference commissioners. Sankey says he was struck by the detailed questions Seeley had about the House Settlement agreement, the legal document that will form the foundation of the CSC's authority. "A few of them were so specific -- paragraph such-and-such and line whatever: 'What's your view of this?'" Sankey said. "He was the only individual who had that kind of clear preparation."

Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, the only power conference leader absent from the interview in San Antonio, said he knew what to expect from Seeley. They had worked together during Pettiti's nearly six years as MLB's chief operating officer from 2015 to 2020. Pettiti had a front-row seat as Seeley rebuilt baseball's investigation process and installed a staff to implement it. He saw many parallels to the role as CSC's first CEO.

"When I found out he was interested in the position, I knew he brought a very rare combination of skills," Petitti said. "It seemed like the perfect fit. I know the work ethic and how he deals with people. I've seen him do it." The commissioners all acknowledge that Seeley will need help. They've made emphatic public promises that coaches and school officials are eager to abide by new regulations.

Those promises, of course, are easy to make right up until the moment your school is on the wrong end of an investigation. Though schools are expected to soon sign association documents that could prevent them from challenging CSC rulings through the court system, Seeley is still stepping into an industry that has a century-old history of clamoring for stronger rules, but fighting back whenever the NCAA attempted to enforce them. "We're going into this new age of college athletics, and we need to change behavior," Yormark said. "We need to change mindset and approach. Bryan faces a huge role in doing that." Seeley said any culture changes in college sports will take time and a track record that shows there are real consequences for breaking the rules in the CSC's era of enforcement.

"This is historical, transformational change," Sankey said. "It doesn't mean everyone is ready or it's easy. The middle of change is always messy. He's stepping into that with all of us and it's not just his responsibility.

"He's not bearing this burden alone. This burden of making a new system work, it's on commissioners, presidents and chancellors and on athletic directors and coaches."

Seeley has built his career by convincing people to talk to him.

As deputy general counsel for the MLBPA players' union, Jeff Perconte was a frequent adversary during Seeley's time working in baseball. When Perconte was preparing players for an interview while they were under investigation, he would tell them Seeley wasn't going to scream at them, bully them or try to lie to them. He never used his powerful position to become a crusader.

"It would've been easy for him to go into cases with a black-and-white view: 'This is a bad guy. We're going to hammer him.'" Perconte said. "Bryan was consistently able to see the gray, which I think is one of the biggest compliments I can give to a lawyer who is in that kind of a position of power."

Perconte says Seeley built trust by skipping the table-pounding theatrics and posturing that can often surround labor disputes. Afterman, the Yankees' assistant general manager, said Seeley was always more interested in understanding a problem than rushing to its solution.

He developed his skill for meticulous preparation while prosecuting white-collar crime as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., according to Michael Atkinson, who worked with Seeley on several cases including a crowning achievement known as "Operation Five Aces."

Together, they unwound a complicated web of shell companies to uncover more than $30 million in bribes that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials accepted from contractors in what the U.S. Justice Department referred to as "the largest domestic bribery and bid-rigging scheme in the history of federal contracting cases." Seeley helped convince a key witness to wear a wire during the investigation and eventually obtained guilty pleas that landed several CEOs in prison.

Atkinson said he and Seeley often invited the attorneys for their targets into the office for a discussion before pressing charges in a good faith effort to make sure they understood both sides of the story. That transparency, he said, went a long way in getting high-powered, first-time offenders to cooperate.

Seeley first cut his teeth as a prosecutor in Washington D.C.'s Superior Court, where he was assigned to cover one of the city's most violent and chaotic districts, according to former colleague Chris Kavanaugh. The Ivy Leaguer should have been out of his element, but Kavanaugh says Seeley was able to gather information and convince witnesses to testify in his cases by spending time in the neighborhood and getting to know the people who lived there.

"It takes a special person to be able to connect with everybody from the person on the street at 3 a.m. all the way to the commissioner of a professional sports league," Kavanuagh said. "That doesn't come quickly or easily. But what allows him to do that? He leads with empathy."

Seeley said he views empathy as an important tool in his new role, and agreed that his early days in D.C. made that skill a cornerstone of how he approaches his work.

"I'm not a raconteur or a salesperson. I can't slip into that skin," he said. "But I think I can communicate authentically and honestly with people."

Seeley's job will also require him to navigate some substantial gray areas within the new limits on player payments.

The CSC now oversees the two main channels schools can now use to steer money to their athletes: direct revenue share payments with a clear, hard cap starting at $20.5 million, and additional name, image and likeness (NIL) deals with no true limit and an untested set of guidelines that are supposed to stop endorsements from becoming a thinly-veiled way for a team to pad its payroll.

While those additional deals will need to be funded by third parties, many of the richest schools have already established internal marketing agencies that are designed to facilitate opportunities for their players. Finding creative ways to direct "above-the-cap" third-party payments to players is the new frontier of the recruiting arms race.

The creation of the CSC alleviates a giant headache for the NCAA, which has been heavily criticized for its enforcement impotence for generations. NCAA president Charlie Baker told ESPN that "there will be work ahead to define each organization's role when it comes to enforcement," and the NCAA plans to focus on all members, regardless if they opt into the settlement, including on issues such as eligibility, sports betting and recruiting calendars.

Seeley said he has had daily phone calls in the past few weeks with the team at Deloitte that has been hired to assess those third-party NIL deals to make sure they are for a "valid business purpose" through a program called NIL Go. He plans to make his first two new hires in the coming weeks but says the ultimate size of CSC's staff will depend on how many deals are flowing through the NIL Go system and how many allegations of wrongdoing his office receives.

He said his team will need to adapt as the new iterations of cat-and-mouse spending games become more clear, but he added they won't be attempting to reinterpret or stretch beyond the specific rules agreed to in the House settlement.

"We're going to look at the spirit of things in terms of interpreting what the rules are, but ultimately the settlement language is the starting place for all those interpretations," Seeley said. "And it's often the ending place."

If the CSC is unable to stop third-party NIL from being used as a de facto salary addition, they risk losing the faith of the teams and coaches they police. But if they're overly restrictive or punitive, they might invite legal challenges that could leave the organization impotent.

In the two weeks between when Seeley was announced as the CSC's new CEO and his first official day on the job, a state lawmaker in Michigan proposed a bill that would make it illegal to punish players if they decided not to share the details of their third-party NIL deals with CSC. Elsewhere, the University of Wisconsin sued the University of Miami in a case that could set important precedent for how well the new system can root out claims of tampering.