Washington quarterback Demond Williams Jr. receives the belt for offensive player of the LA Bowl against Boise State Broncos, Dec. 13, 2025, in Inglewood, Calif. (Dean Rutz / The Seattle Times)
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By
Jon Wilner
Bay Area News Group
The Hotline mailbag publishes weekly. Send questions to wilnerhotline@bayareanewsgroup.com and include “mailbag” in the subject line. Or hit me on the social media platform X: @WilnerHotline. Some questions have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Explain the mechanism that Washington used to compel quarterback Demond Williams to return because the consequences were too onerous to ignore, like LSU losing out on $4 million in NIL for 2026 or however it’s phrased. — @dukestainer
Who tampered with Demond Williams? What’s the scoop? Please find out. — @demai_j
LSU is the prime suspect, for two reasons: The Tigers need a quarterback, and coach Lane Kiffin recruited Williams during his prep career in Arizona. In fact, Williams committed to Kiffin (at Mississippi) before flipping his pledge to then-Arizona coach Jedd Fisch in the summer of 2023. When Fisch left for Washington four months later, Williams followed.
That said, there’s no public proof of LSU’s guilt at this point. Whatever discussions took place between Williams’ inner circle and the school pursuing his services were, of course, private. Fisch didn’t know; nor did Williams’ agent, Doug Hendrickson, who also represents Fisch. (If you missed the news, Hendrickson terminated his relationship with Williams on Thursday.)
And to be clear: We don’t know all the factors that motivated Williams to reverse course and honor his agreement with the Huskies. But the financial piece obviously played a major role in the decision and is worth addressing, in part because there are much broader implications.
The contract that helped keep Williams in Seattle is effectively preventing the entire industry from collapsing on itself.
How so? It all starts with the Big Ten, which created a template for revenue-sharing contracts between its member schools and their athletes. The schools aren’t required to use the contracts, but many do, including Washington.
Now, keep in mind that Williams didn’t sign an employment contract. The athletes are not employees in the legal sense and therefore cannot be prevented from leaving for another university. Instead, the revenue-sharing agreements, per terms of the House v NCAA settlement, are for NIL. The schools are paying athletes for the use of their name, image and likeness. They are in-house marketing deals.
The key piece in the contracts crafted by the Big Ten is a clause that gave Washington the right to retain the revenue-sharing/NIL amount if Williams signed the agreement and then left for another program.
The exact wording in the contract states the athletes grant their school the “irrevocable” rights to their NIL.
In other words, Williams signed an NIL deal with Washington for $4 million. Had he then departed for Baton Rouge, or anywhere else, the Huskies would have been owed $4 million.
Williams certainly could not pay that amount, and any school desiring his services wouldn’t want to pay that amount on top of whatever financial agreement it reached with Williams.
The wording of the contract is designed to prevent exactly what Williams and his handlers tried to do: Disregard a signed agreement.
The Big Ten was smart to craft enforceable NIL contracts. Without them, Williams likely would not have reversed course and dozens, if not hundreds of Big Ten athletes would face zero consequences for reneging on signed NIL deals with their schools.
“The stakes are enormous,” an industry source said. “If we can steamroll signed contracts, we don’t have anything. The players would have month-to-month deals.”
It would be mass chaos … on top of the mass chaos that already exists.
Washington was, in many regards, the test case, and athletic director Pat Chun offered crucial insight in his public statement on Williams’ return:
“It is critical in this post-House, revenue-sharing environment that contracts with student-athletes are not only enforced but respected by everyone within the college sports ecosystem.”
The degree to which schools will “respect” the in-house NIL deals is up for debate. With Williams, at least one school did not. But the deals appear enforceable enough legally to have caused Williams to reverse course.
Presumably, he is not alone.
Within the Big Ten, at least, those NIL contracts are written in a manner that’s likely preventing dozens of players from ignoring their signed revenue-sharing agreements.
Instead of mass chaos, there is merely basic chaos.
And we should add a final note of context: SEC commissioner Greg Sankey had plenty to lose in the Williams saga.
Sankey has been a staunch proponent of schools abiding by the revenue-sharing and NIL rules and the enforcement decisions made by the oversight body, the newly-created College Sports Commission.
Had one of his schools swiped a Big Ten athlete under contract (with tampering as the mechanism), Sankey’s credibility on the issue would have been severely undercut and his relationship with Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti might have been damaged.
