Your Best Player Just Left. His Contract Says He Owes You. Good Luck Collecting.

Florida Atlantic University filed lawsuits against four former football players last week over NIL contract buyout clauses. The contracts were worth between $18,000 and $69,000. The players left for Purdue, West Virginia, UConn and Florida State.

This is what the transfer portal looks like at the Group of 6 level. You develop a player. A bigger program takes him. And the only thing standing between your investment and nothing is a liquidated damages clause that no judge in the country has ruled on.

FAU's case landed in Palm Beach County Circuit Court on May 18. Wide receiver Asaad Waseem — 66 catches, 699 yards, five touchdowns in 2025 — signed a 15-month deal worth $69,000. Running back Gemari Sands was making $1,000 a month. Their contracts required each departing player to pay half the remaining value of the deal.

One of those defendants already has representation. Darren Heitner, the sports attorney whose newsletter commentary on the Sorsby and other NIL cases is quoted later in this story, posted on X late Friday that his firm, Heitner Legal, represents Tyler Stolsky. "We will initially be focusing on the possibility of a resolution and will reserve comment until further notice," Heitner wrote.

That clause is now the subject of litigation in courtrooms from Ohio to Florida to Georgia to Oregon. The amounts range from $10,000 to $1 million. The legal arguments are piling up. And the attorneys who work in this space say the same thing: most of these provisions are built on sand.

What the Lawyers Say

The legal test for liquidated damages is the same everywhere. Were actual damages hard to estimate when the contract was signed? Is the amount a reasonable forecast of the loss? A state-by-state analysis by Kaufman & Canoles found the same core standard across every jurisdiction examined: "reasonable estimate = potentially enforceable; punishment/penalty = likely unenforceable."

If the answer to both is yes, the clause holds. If the amount looks like punishment, it is a penalty — and every jurisdiction rejects penalties.

Darren Heitner, the sports attorney who publishes the Newsletter, Image & Likeness, called the Sorsby case "the first meaningful judicial test of liquidated damages provisions" and wrote that "the arguments against the liquidated damages clause are really strong." His assessment of the contract itself was blunt: "This wasn't an NIL licensing deal. This was an employment contract dressed up to comply with NCAA rules."

That is the core argument. And nobody has refuted it in court yet.

The most detailed challenge is playing out in the Brendan Sorsby case. Cincinnati is suing the former quarterback for $1 million after he transferred to Texas Tech. His legal team — which includes Jeffrey Kessler, the attorney behind House v. NCAA and Tom Brady's Deflategate defense — filed a motion to dismiss in April that goes beyond the dollar amount.

Sorsby's attorneys argue the contract was never really about his name, image and likeness. Cincinnati acquired only non-exclusive NIL rights. It paid him double during football season and nothing when he wasn't playing. It could terminate the deal if he didn't meet football-related requirements. The motion contends the arrangement was "the only way the NCAA allows" Cincinnati to pay Sorsby "for playing football" — and that the $1 million clause is "nothing more than an unreasonable and disproportionate penalty" compared to the $875,800 he was paid.

Ron Slavin, Sorsby's agent, called the lawsuit "misguided" and described the clause as "nothing more than an unlawful penalty under Ohio law."

When Damon Wilson II left Georgia for Missouri after two weeks and one $30,000 payment on a $500,000 deal, UGAA demanded $390,000. Wilson's countersuit called the figure "a penalty provision masquerading as a 'liquidated damages' provision" that "makes no effort to reasonably quantify damages that are difficult to ascertain." His attorneys allege he signed the term sheet "without counsel present and with UGAA employees telling him that time was of the essence."

Attorneys Brian Socolow and Alexander Loh of Loeb & Loeb, analyzing the Duke-Darian Mensah case that settled in January, wrote that the settlement "left the broader legal framework unresolved." Duke claimed its $8 million deal with Mensah was "simply paying for an exclusive license to use his publicity rights." But the litigation itself revealed that Duke valued Mensah specifically as "a talented quarterback who could strengthen a competitor." If the real concern is losing a player's on-field production, the contract is not about NIL. It is about football.

Heitner thinks the Sorsby judge will rule accordingly. "If Judge Barrett dismisses UC's liquidated damages claim, and I think that the judge will do just that," he wrote, "the era of untested liquidated damages provisions in school-direct NIL contracts may be coming to an end."

Most experts expect these disputes to end in negotiated settlements rather than courtroom rulings. That is the pattern so far — Duke and Mensah settled in a week, Washington and Demond Williams resolved without a lawsuit, and the Arkansas-Iamaleava dispute has gone quiet with no public filing.

Settlements resolve individual cases. They do not create legal precedent. And right now, there is none. No court has ruled on the merits of an NIL liquidated damages clause. Not one.

The G6 Problem

The legal uncertainty hits differently depending on the budget.

Cincinnati paid Sorsby $875,800. Duke paid Mensah roughly $4 million a year. If those programs lose a buyout case, they absorb it and move on.

FAU's biggest NIL deal in these lawsuits was $69,000. Gemari Sands was making $1,000 a month. The money is different. The stakes are not.

Power 4 programs use buyout clauses because they can afford the investments and want to protect them. Group of 6 programs use them because they have no other tool. When a player at UAB or FAU or Troy develops into a productive starter, a Power 4 school with 10 times the NIL budget can take him through the portal. The liquidated damages clause is the only contractual mechanism that creates any friction in that process.

UAB learned this firsthand with Iverson Hooks. Hooks was the Blazers' leading receiver in 2025 — 72 receptions, 927 yards, seven touchdowns. He transferred to Oregon. His NIL contract with Blazer Impact, UAB's primary NIL collective in Birmingham, included a termination clause requiring the player to pay back "100% of all Licensing Fees and Endorsement Activity Fees that were paid to Licensor under the Agreement through the date of termination, or 100% of the total Licensing Fees and Endorsement Activity Fees that were scheduled to be paid to Licensor under the remaining term of the Agreement, whichever amount is more."

That "whichever is more" structure is among the most aggressive language publicly reported in any NIL contract. Whether it was enforced, waived or covered by Oregon has not been disclosed.

The tension is structural. If courts rule these clauses are unenforceable penalties, Group of 6 programs lose their last retention tool against Power 4 poaching. If courts enforce them, the athletes at the lowest-paying programs are the ones who bear the legal risk — the kid making $1,000 a month at FAU, not the quarterback collecting $4 million at Duke.

Michael LeRoy, a professor at the University of Illinois who studies athlete compensation, told the AP that initial expectations about NIL "has been a spectacular miscalculation." Nobody anticipated the scale of money now flowing through college athletics — or the legal fights that would follow.

FAU's Daniel Cornely, director of the university's MBA Sport Management program, pointed to the other side of the problem. "Right now, we have non-certified agents working with student-athletes, giving advice that may or may not be helpful or correct," Cornely said. "NCAA athletes need to be educated properly on what the terms mean when finalizing a deal."

Clay Hughes, a Birmingham attorney at SMGB Law, wrote on LinkedIn that buyout clauses “can trap athletes in agreements that no longer serve their best interests.” For many young athletes, he noted, signing an NIL contract is “their first real exposure to complex legal agreements.” Without careful review and proper guidance, “what initially appears to be a life-changing opportunity can quickly turn into a costly burden.”

The state-by-state variation adds another layer. Florida, where FAU filed, generally enforces liquidated damages when actual damages are hard to determine — but rejects clauses that function as punishment. Ohio, where the Sorsby case is pending, requires amounts not be "disproportionate." California's Assembly Bill 692, effective Jan. 1, 2026, bans employment contracts requiring repayment when an employee leaves before the term ends. If courts ever classify athletes as employees, that law could void NIL buyout clauses statewide. A Seyfarth Shaw analysis of the Wilson case flagged a related risk: consolidating NIL funding under a university "could trigger Title IX obligations," given that an estimated 80-90% of collective agreement beneficiaries are male athletes.

What Happens Next

The Sorsby ruling will be the first judicial opinion on whether an NIL liquidated damages clause survives scrutiny. No timeline for a decision has been announced.

A pivotal hearing in the House v. NCAA settlement is scheduled for May 27 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins. It will address how NIL deals are regulated under the new revenue-sharing framework — and could reshape how future contracts are written.

An executive order signed in April titled "Urgent National Action to Save College Sports" includes provisions that would prohibit "collectives or other entities or methods used to facilitate third-party, pay-for-play payments" and create a national student-athlete agent registry. The deadline for those rules is Aug. 1.

The legal landscape is shifting fast. The courts have not caught up. And the programs with the least money and the most to lose — the ones where $69,000 is a significant NIL deal and $1,000 a month is real money — are betting their rosters on contract language that no judge has said will hold.