By Marc Isenberg

A school cuts a sport. Pundits and so-called insiders point to the usual suspects: NIL, the House settlement, the transfer portal, agents and lawyers. Fans repeat it. Administrators nod along — especially if it gets them off the hook.

The real story is bigger. Higher education is under intense financial pressure — declining enrollment, federal cuts, softer donations, families questioning the ROI of a $40,000-to-$80,000 cost of attendance. As Harvard economist Roland Fryer put it in a recent CBS interview, “the market is finally starting to work and students and families are voting with their feet.” Universities will need to adapt to a world where the demographic and economic assumptions of the last twenty years no longer hold. The pressure is hitting athletic departments. Cutting a sport is awful — for athletes losing scholarships, for the broader Olympic ecosystem.

But the macro pressure isn’t the whole story. Within it, athletic departments made specific choices that compounded the difficulty. Many of the people now making cuts are practicing a quiet form of self-preservation: they lived off the largesse for years when they should have been preparing.

College sports at the highest levels was always financed in significant part on a near-perfect business model: big revenue paired with suppressed player costs. With that subsidy largely evaporating, the system has to fund non-revenue programs in some other way — and the institutions that should have been preparing weren’t.

Four failures stand out. Together they explain most of what we’re now living through.

Failure 1: Overspending and mounting debt

Athletic department spending has expanded for many decades on the assumption that revenue would keep growing. Coaching salaries have skyrocketed. Facilities became luxury arms races — locker rooms with waterfalls, weight rooms with theater seating, recruiting lounges styled like five-star resorts. When dollars flowed to coaches and capital projects, it was “competitive necessity.” Now the bills are coming due, with little margin to absorb them.

As many have observed, college sports doesn’t have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. The new House settlement revenue-sharing payments — $20.5 million per school in 2025-26, rising to $32.9 million by 2034-35 — and millions more in donor-funded NIL payrolls are real costs. But they’re additions to a long-standing pattern, not the cause of it.

Failure 2: No real plan for the pay-for-play era

For decades, the NCAA’s strategy was largely defensive — preserving the existing amateur model with severe punishments for benefits as small as free meals or rides home. The posture held until the courts forced it open. The strategy then shifted to waiting for federal legislation that hasn’t come and likely won’t. The legislation being pushed isn’t really a plan; it’s a bailout: federal preemption that would shield schools from antitrust liability, block state laws, and put the NCAA back in the enforcement business. That might be great for institutions. But it’s not fair for the athletes the system claims to serve. No one built the structures that would actually work once amateurism ended. No labor framework. No transfer-portal governance. No coherent NIL system.

Athletes are now finally getting paid for the value they create, and schools didn’t model what that would cost. Revenue-sharing payments. NIL collective competition. Roster construction through the portal. With no hard salary cap, programs at the top are bidding against each other for elite talent. Prices climb every cycle, with no obvious ceiling. This isn’t an argument that athletes are overpaid — it’s that the institutions didn’t prepare for the market they helped create.

Failure 3: Using NIL as a disguise for pay-for-play

College athletes generating revenue should be paid what they’re worth. What’s not defensible is the institutional fiction wrapped around the payments.

Most “NIL” deals at the highest levels are not, in any honest sense, about name, image, and likeness. They’re pay-for-play arrangements through booster collectives that compensate athletes to help programs win. Everyone in the system knows this. The fiction is maintained because calling the payments what they are would trigger employment law, tax consequences, and the collapse of the “college model” framing the NCAA has spent decades defending.

For a university — an institution whose entire purpose is the pursuit of truth — to participate in this fiction is a particular kind of failure. It’s also a self-serving one. The fiction protects schools from the legal and financial consequences of acknowledging what’s happening. It doesn’t protect athletes. Without employment status, athletes lack the workplace protections, healthcare continuity, and collective bargaining rights the relationship would otherwise entitle them to. The fiction transfers the legal risk onto the people with the least power to manage it.

Failure 4: Refusing to bargain in good faith

The fourth failure connects all the others. Roughly the top three percent of college athletes — in FBS football and Power Six men’s and women’s basketball — are fully professionalized. Media rights are sold accordingly. Coaches are paid accordingly. Facilities are built accordingly. The only category not treated accordingly is the athletes who generate the value.

Every other professionalized American sport resolved its labor questions through collective bargaining. MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL all sat down with their workforce and negotiated the rules. The NCAA refused. The 60-plus lawsuits, the fragmented state laws, the ad-hoc settlements — that’s what happens when the standard mechanism is taken off the table.

Bargaining in good faith would not destroy college sports. It would professionalize the part that’s already professional, leave the rest as it is, and resolve the legal chaos through the standard mechanism. What the NCAA called principle was strategic delay. The bill is now coming due.

The blame game

So, here we are. The top of the college sports food chain — Big Ten and SEC schools — should be okay. Everyone else is facing tough decisions, in some cases dire ones. UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham, on Gabe Feldman’s *SportsWise* podcast, named the trajectory: “I do think we’ll get to a bifurcated system… that will have two pay-per-play models. One is you will be paid to play your game and others you’ll have to pay if you’re going to play your game.”

In a bifurcated system already producing cuts, the people inside the system blame the people outside it. Athletes (notably kept out of NCAA membership), lawyers and agents. The story being pushed — that pay-for-play and athlete compensation are causing programs to be eliminated — is total nonsense. It’s also useful nonsense: if athletes get the blame, administrators don’t have to accept responsibility for cutting programs that cost a few million dollars while spending tens of millions more on the player-acquisition arms race.

This isn’t the first time. For decades, Title IX took the blame when schools cut men’s wrestling, gymnastics, and swimming — even though the Department of Education has long said schools shouldn’t comply with Title IX by cutting men’s sports. Schools cut anyway, then pointed at the law as if it forced their hand. Pay-for-play is the same move with a new villain.

The framing travels because it has help. Sports media, often working with deep institutional ties, repeats it without much challenge. The NCAA’s Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committees, who appear to be selected for alignment with administrative priorities, parrot the same talking points. The result is a feedback loop where everyone except the people making the spending decisions is responsible.

The data refutes the false story.

UCLA announced in 1993 that it would cut three varsity programs — men’s gymnastics, men’s swimming, and women’s gymnastics — to take effect after the 1993-94 academic year. NIL didn’t exist. The House settlement wouldn’t be filed for thirty more years. UCLA had produced multiple Olympians in those sports — and the cuts came anyway.

Since 1990, NCAA Division I membership has grown by 58 schools — and yet eight men’s sports are sponsored by fewer schools today than thirty years ago. Wrestling has 37 fewer D-I teams. Swimming 25. Gymnastics 24. Tennis 22. Men’s gymnastics dropped from 212 programs in 1969 to 17 by 2013.

In 2020–21, 110 D-I teams were cut in a single academic cycle. Roughly two dozen were eventually reinstated, often only after multimillion-dollar alumni fundraising campaigns.

None of these decisions had anything to do with athletes being compensated.

The pattern continued in 2026. Arkansas — an SEC athletic department reporting $195.8 million in revenue and $184 million in expenses — eliminated its men’s and women’s tennis programs to save $2.35 million. The cut leaves Arkansas at 17 sports, one above the 16-sport FBS minimum. The money wasn’t gone. It was being redirected. [Twenty-two NCAA tennis programs — nine at the Division I level](https://frontofficesports.com/why-college-tennis-programs-are-disappearing/) — have been eliminated this season alone, including Saint Louis, Illinois State, North Dakota, and Gardner-Webb.

The real takeaways

Where do universities go from here — in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years? Nobody knows exactly, but the principles are clear. Any durable resolution has to be three things at once: fair, legal, and durable.

Fair means the workforce that generates the revenue has a seat at the table.

Legal means it survives challenge. The current patchwork of state laws and ad-hoc settlements is a holding pattern, not a framework.

Durable means it survives political turnover and changes in court composition. A federal college sports bill imposed unilaterally — passed without genuine buy-in from the parties whose conduct it would govern — fails this test. Whatever Congress passes today, a different Congress can change tomorrow. Frameworks that prove durable across decades are built through negotiation among the parties with skin in the game. Every other professionalized American sport learned this. The NCAA hasn’t.

Schools will keep facing hard choices. Athletic departments will need to do what businesses under pressure do: discipline costs, focus on what they can sustain, stop spending money they don’t have, and stop entering arms races they cannot win.

The real issue

Athletes didn’t cause cuts that began in 1993 and continued through Arkansas in 2026. Neither did agents or lawyers. Blaming them is simply not true — but there’s apparently effective PR behind the lie. The schools that face this honestly will adapt. The rest will keep blaming athletes. The math won’t care.

If you enjoyed this piece, please subscribe to Truth in NIL, like it, share it, and share your thoughts. Disagreement welcome. That’s the point.

Twitter: @marcisenberg

Marc Isenberg writes Truth in NIL, bringing transparency to the business of college sports.

By Marc Isenberg

The NCAA Manual states early on that its “basic purpose” is to “maintain intercollegiate athletics as an integral part of the educational program and the athlete as an integral part of the student body and, by so doing, retain a clear line of demarcation between intercollegiate athletics and professional sports.”

Apologies if you just did a spit take. It’s obviously outdated. That fiction is dead and, if we’re being honest, college sports should embrace pro-sports governance.

Revenue-generating college athletes are now well paid, which is long overdue. How they get paid is a mess. Athletes are compensated for their “name, image, and likeness” — not for their athletic ability, because paying them for that would make them professionals. The NCAA and its members still live in the “line of demarcation” fantasy because avoiding labor issues is the whole point.

Meanwhile, conferences have been redrawn around television markets, not academic affinity. In the revenue sports, the educational mission is sacrificed to a professional enterprise — though education remains available to any athlete who pursues it.

Don’t blame the NCAA national office. The association has been steadily defanged. The national office runs the championships (which it does extraordinarily well) and lobbies Congress (a costly distraction that works against the athletes’ interests). The governance authority that matters — over money, conference structure, athlete compensation — sits with the schools and conferences. They wrote the rules. They redrew the conferences. They refuse to govern themselves collectively.

The parity is real — within the Power conferences. Indiana football won a national title. Vanderbilt won 10 games for the first time in program history. Illinois had its best two-year run in a generation. Inside the Big Ten and SEC, the competition is genuine.

The dividing line is also real — and it has never been sharper. Full-share Big Ten members received $76 to $80 million per school in fiscal year 2025. The SEC’s vested members averaged $72.4 million. In college sports right now, there are haves or and have-nots. The gap isn’t closing — it’s compounding. The system is built to compete within conferences, not to cooperate.

That’s not parity. The haves are competing with each other. Everyone else is begging donors to keep them in the food chain. (Spoiler: it won’t end well.) Professional leagues engineer real parity on purpose: salary caps, drafts, revenue sharing, luxury taxes, and a collective bargaining agreement that redistributes money from the haves to the have-nots. Caps, drafts, and enforced parity require collective bargaining — there’s no legal way to do them otherwise. College sports has none of that — the haves don’t want to share, and no mechanism exists to make them. Anti-socialism is something close to American consensus — among voters, economists, and owners alike. Pro sports is the quiet counter-example. Structured correctly, redistribution generates extraordinary wealth.

This isn’t an argument against capitalism. It’s an argument that some things work better when we do them collectively. Healthcare. Education. Retirement security. Public safety. The list of domains where shared structure outperforms pure competition is long, and serious capitalists have always known it. The question isn’t whether to use collective mechanisms. It’s where.

Sports is one of the easier cases. The product is, by definition, a competition between teams — which means no single team can produce it alone. Every game requires a viable opponent. Every season requires a viable league. Every long-term franchise value — ticket sales, merchandise, media rights — depends on a sport that fans believe is worth watching. Team success over individual accomplishment isn’t a slogan; it’s the structure of the enterprise. Pro leagues organized around that reality and produced extraordinary wealth. College sports organized around the opposite — every program for itself, no shared structure, no negotiated agreement — and is now watching the consequences arrive in real time.

I’m not pushing for pure market freedom for college athletes. Appropriate guardrails — ones that promote parity and stability — are good for the overall business. I want them fairly compensated and I want them protected: healthcare, retirement, real bargaining rights, a structure that holds up over a career.

NIL deals pretending not to be employment contracts. Annual free agency with no continuity. The top programs raiding talent from mid-majors. NIL agents operating without meaningful regulation. None of this is stable — not for athletes, not for schools. This is a free market headed toward anarchy.

The NFL, NBA, and MLB share revenue because the owners — all billionaires — learned something it took them decades to accept. The Yankees need the Royals. Without competitive balance, you don’t have a pennant race, a national TV deal, or eventually a league. The system holds together because of two things: a strong commissioner with real authority, and a negotiated agreement with the workforce. Neither works without the other. Together, they produce a league that doesn’t eat its own.

College sports has neither. The result is predictable: haves and have-nots, no mechanism for cooperation, a workforce the membership refuses to recognize. The irony is sharp — pro leagues, with no pretense of higher purpose beyond increasing ownership wealth, have become more ethical actors than the institution wrapping itself in educational mission.

The Pac-12 is the cautionary tale — a storied conference dismembered because the Big Ten decided that corporate takeover was better than traditions that produced fewer billions. The same instinct will likely take the ACC and Big 12 next.

The response is the saddest part. The dominant reaction isn’t retreat — it’s spending more. The schools losing are trying harder to win—with money they don’t have.

There is a worse response still: the SCORE Act. Endorsed by the Power conferences, it would grant antitrust immunity, codify athletes as non-employees, and preempt state NIL laws. This is backwards. Pro leagues receive antitrust immunity because they bargain collectively — the bargaining is the price of the protection. It should never pass.

And while Congress debates, private equity is moving. With donor money tapped out and athletic department deficits widening, schools and conferences are being pitched on PE capital as the way to stay in the game. It will be framed as a partnership. It’s a bailout. PE extracts on a timeline indifferent to the asset’s long-term health. It’s coming because college sports has confused spending with strategy, and someone noticed.

The way out requires the membership to govern itself cooperatively. Federate by sport, not by school. Football — and probably men’s and women’s basketball — are professional enterprises. Govern them as such: a strong commissioner, a negotiated agreement with athletes, revenue sharing, luxury taxes. For the other 95%, return closer to what the NCAA Manual claims to describe — regional affiliation, a fair exchange of an athletic scholarship for athletic services, real NIL rights, and an actual line of demarcation between the professional enterprise and the rest of college athletics.

That’s not radical — it’s a recognition of what’s already true. Pro sports already exist inside college sports; we just haven’t built the structure to govern them.

The billionaires figured this out. Eventually. The question is whether college sports figures it out before private equity does it for them.

If you enjoyed this piece, subscribe to Truth in NIL, share it with someone who needs to read it, and push back in the comments. Disagreement welcome. That’s the point.

Twitter: @marcisenberg

Marc Isenberg writes Truth in NIL, bringing transparency to the business of college sports.

Seth frequently tweets, “Please be kind.” I’ve tried to take that to heart in responding to his tweet on college sports — pay-for-play, free agency, and why he believes collective bargaining isn’t the answer.

This is offered in that spirit. We both care deeply about college basketball and want the sport to thrive. We disagree on what that entails.

We agree on one thing: college athletes should earn what they’re worth. There was a time Seth didn’t believe that. He changed his mind, and it matters.

Where we differ is simple: Seth accepts annual free agency and opposes collective bargaining. I believe the only durable path forward is collective bargaining. You can pay athletes market rates without annual roster turnover, with structure and even collectively-bargained salary caps. Professional leagues solved this decades ago.

Seth’s views aren’t his alone. They mirror conversations I have constantly — and not just private ones. Public comments, media quotes, press conferences: the ecosystem repeats some version of the same argument. His tweet is worth engaging point by point.

This isn’t a broken system. It’s a system refusing to acknowledge what it is.

“This isn’t a broken system. It’s a system refusing to acknowledge what it is.”

The “Money Laundering” Framing

One line from Seth’s tweet is worth unpacking:

“It’s a money laundering shell game with no enforcement and no proper scrutiny.”

Davis is one of the most thoughtful voices in college basketball, now publicly in favor of players getting paid. Which is exactly why this line stopped me.

Money laundering disguises proceeds of crime. A shell game defrauds a victim. Neither applies here. Boosters fund these deals willingly. Athletes are finally receiving a share of revenue they generated for decades without one.

Money flowing to coaches, administrators, conferences, media partners, apparel companies, facility bonds? Business. Money flowing to the people generating the product? Laundering.

“Money flowing to coaches, administrators, conferences? Business. Money flowing to the people generating the product? Laundering.”

Same pattern with “making a killing.” Athletes aren’t making a killing. They’re earning what the market says they’re worth — the same standard applied to every other participant.

That framing has to change before an honest conversation about structure can begin.

The Cap That Isn’t a Cap

What we have isn’t free agency. It’s a workaround.

Seth calls the current moment “disruption.” I’d call it a predictable market response to decades of compensation restrictions meeting the enormous value of elite college athletes. Once courts weakened the legal shield, money was going to find players. That’s what markets do.

The question isn’t whether players should be paid. It’s whether a billion-dollar industry should run without a labor framework.

The House settlement created a revenue-sharing cap. Boosters and collectives are funding compensation above that cap — every day, at every P4 school with a serious program.

It’s a cap nobody enforces, running alongside a private market nobody regulates. What else would you expect when you impose a compensation structure without a negotiated agreement between the people paying and the people being paid?

A cap without bargaining isn’t a cap. It’s a suggestion.

“A cap without bargaining isn’t a cap. It’s a suggestion.”

What Collective Bargaining Actually Delivers

One of Seth’s core arguments:

“The players have no incentive to create a CBA which would limit their freedom of movement and/or compensation.”

I’d frame it differently. A CBA wouldn’t limit the market — it would legitimize it.

Freedom of movement and collective bargaining aren’t opposites. Every major pro league has both. Players move within negotiated rules. Assuming a CBA means less freedom assumes players wouldn’t bargain for what they already have. They would — and for more.

Market rates survive a CBA. Pro salary structures reflect market value. A CBA establishes the rules everyone operates under, so the market runs in the open.

Current earnings are a snapshot, not a system. Money is flowing because schools are panicking, collectives are spending, and enforcement is nonexistent. Which isn’t stable.

The NCAA is pushing hard for the next phase — federal antitrust protection via the SCORE Act, hard caps, and enforcement it controls. If any of that arrives, players will have no seat at the table.

That’s when a CBA matters. Not when you’re winning. When the rules are being rewritten against you.

Why Multi-Year Deals Matter

Multi-year agreements would reduce transfers — which is good for the sport, good for programs, and good for athletes.

The annual transfer cycle isn’t a fact of nature. It’s what happens when nobody — player or school — can make an enforceable commitment past a single season.

A real obstacle worth naming: schools don’t want to guarantee money to unproven 18-to-20-somethings. That’s legitimate. Nothing stops schools from offering multi-year NIL deals today — a few do, most don’t. They want roster flexibility in case a highly-paid athlete underperforms. So they offer one-year deals, the athlete transfers when a better offer appears, and everyone complains about transfer rates.

Classic Catch-22.

A CBA doesn’t force multi-year deals. It changes the incentives around them. Every pro league handles this through bargaining: partial guarantees, rookie scales, injury protections, restricted free agency windows. Schools get risk management. Athletes get real security.

The current setup delivers the worst of both: schools get no stability, athletes get no security, and the sport gets non-stop roster churn.

Negotiated contract lengths, qualifying offers, graduated movement rules — none of that restricts players unfairly. It restricts chaos.

You can’t claim to protect the educational mission of college sports while running a system that forces every year into a new contract negotiation.

The Broader Picture: What We Should Actually Be Building

Davis is focused on the narrow issue of athlete compensation. The real question is bigger: a system that stabilizes the game and makes sense financially for everyone.

One-year contracts are fine if the only goal is maximizing how much money flows to athletes right now. There’s more to consider. And worth noting: elite players are staying in college longer rather than turning pro — a win the sport should be building around.

For athletes, a real framework would offer:

• Employment or employment-like protections, including healthcare and injury coverage

• Agent regulation — critical, almost absent today

• Contract length and stability

• A meaningful education — optional, not mandatory, but available when athletes and their families choose it

• Lifelong network — alumni bonds, mentors, and career pathways

• A real voice in the rules governing their working lives

For schools, the same framework would deliver:

• A product fans actually want — roster continuity, developed players, rivalries

• A sustainable business model instead of perpetual escalation

• Real governance and enforceable salary caps — because both sides bargained them

Two paths get us there.

One is collective bargaining. Both sides come to the table, negotiate a framework, agree to live by it.

The other is Congress granting the NCAA antitrust protection — low-probability, and even if it passed, temporary. A future Congress can reverse it. Athletes can strike, organize, or litigate around it.

Collective bargaining is the only durable solution. It’s how every major pro sport operates. College sports doesn’t need to invent something new — it needs to adopt what works.

The NCAA’s Hail Mary

Fifteen years of signals — O’Bannon, Alston, Johnson, the transfer rule collapse, the House settlement, NIL collectives operating as payroll departments. Each one a chance to acknowledge what the business actually is.

Instead, the NCAA is running one more play: a federal bill with antitrust protection. The SCORE Act and its variants aren’t reform — they’re a legal shield to freeze the model, lock in non-employee status, and push compensation back into structures the NCAA controls.

Davis calls a CBA “legally improbable.” It’s difficult because the NCAA spends enormous resources keeping it that way. “Improbable” describes their effort, not a fact of nature.

Fifteen years of warnings, and the answer is still: let’s ask Congress to make the lawsuits stop.

That’s not leadership. That’s stalling.

The Bottom Line

Seth is right about the outcome. But until we fix the system, the outcome won’t hold.

Perpetual free agency isn’t the framework. Roster churn, unenforced caps, and no collective bargaining aren’t the cost of paying players — they’re the cost of not building a structure around them.

A CBA isn’t a threat to the market. It’s what makes the market work.

The current arrangement holds together only because we’re in a moment of maximum leverage and minimum enforcement. That moment is closing.

Collective bargaining isn’t the threat to college sports. Refusing to bargain is.

If this piece landed with you, subscribe to Truth in NIL, share it with someone who needs to read it, and push back in the comments. Disagreement welcome. That’s the point.

Twitter: @marcisenberg

Marc Isenberg writes Truth in NIL, bringing transparency to the business of college sports.

By Marc Isenberg

College sports spent decades insisting it wasn’t a business, while an entire cottage industry was building one around it. Some companies filled genuine gaps. Others collected fees from a system that didn’t know what it was worth. The NCAA and its members were focused on the wrong things: preserving amateurism, enforcing compliance, and denying the commercial reality in front of them. The market moved on without them.

The problem: a system that invokes amateurism to avoid its most unwanted expense—paying athletes. The result is a $2 billion valuation for a company that figured out what the system was actually worth.

The buyer is TPG, the San Francisco-based private equity (PE) firm with $303 billion in assets under management. The asset is Learfield — described by one of its own executives as “an extension of college athletics” — which packages, sells, and broadcasts the sponsorship, licensing, and media rights of college athletic programs, and increasingly serves as the NIL dealmaker between brands and athletes. It owns no teams and employs no athletes. It monetizes the ecosystem those athletes created.

This is a PE-to-PE deal. Learfield was already owned by Fortress Investment Group and Charlesbank Capital Partners. TPG believes Learfield is attractively priced at $2 billion and that the combination of an expanding market and their management will produce strong investment returns. The schools that signed these deals didn’t just give away future earnings — they sold them to someone who knew exactly what they were worth.

For many schools, these arrangements made sense at the time: predictable income, reduced payroll, a partner focused on commercial revenue.

The challenge is that the economics have changed, and the terms haven’t.

The more relevant question is whether institutions are positioned to participate in the value they’re creating, or continue to outsource it.

Most athletic departments operate in the red—spending too much, piling on debt, collecting student fees, cutting non-revenue sports—and outside parties offer short-term solutions. Fast forward a few years, and these companies have significant value.

The Strategy Was Always the Language

For decades, the NCAA pushed a simple message:

College athletes are amateurs. Education is the compensation. Paying them would destroy the model.

It worked—even as TV contracts grew into the billions and entire commercial ecosystems formed.

The debate stayed stuck on whether athletes should be paid at all. Not how much. Not what share. Whether.

That wasn’t accidental. It was the strategy. “Student athlete” wasn’t just a label. It was the legal and economic foundation the whole system was built on.

The System Was Always Visible

It took a cartoon to name the business model.

In 2011, South Park devoted an entire episode to the NCAA’s exploitation of college athletes. It wasn’t just satire — it was a precise description of the cottage industry this piece is about. Cartman — the show’s gleefully cynical antihero — tours a university athletic department and asks the real question: “When we sell their likeness…how do we get around payin’ them?”

The answer: “There are good reasons why our student athletes cannot be paid.”

Cartman’s punchline: “I ain’t arguing. If they got paid, then how would we make all our money?”

Federal courts would eventually agree. Coordinated restrictions on athlete compensation by competing institutions are the legal definition of a cartel. Courts have ruled it violates antitrust law, and the NCAA has responded by lobbying Congress for an exemption that would make it legal.

In 2009, Ed O’Bannon filed a class action alleging his likeness had been used in a video game without compensation. EA settled for $40 million; the NCAA went to trial and lost. Alston followed, reaching the Supreme Court in 2021, which ruled unanimously against the NCAA — Justice Kavanaugh writing separately that amateurism “raises serious questions under the antitrust laws.” The House settlement followed: direct revenue sharing between schools and athletes for the first time.

The NCAA conceded nothing it wasn’t forced to.

O’Bannon filed the case. South Park named the business model. The courts kept ruling.

Where the Money Goes

What the courts uncovered, the numbers confirmed.

For the vast majority of college athletes, the scholarship model is a fair trade: quality education, elite training, and real opportunity. This argument is about the narrow group whose labor actually funds the system: revenue-generating athletes in football and basketball.

Their sport built a $2 billion commercial rights layer, and Learfield isn’t the only player. Playfly, JMI Sports, and Van Wagner are all signing long-term deals with major programs.

Schools handed over their commercial rights and took guaranteed checks. In any other industry, giving away that much upside wouldn’t last.

Private equity optimizes for maximizing shareholder value, preferably in the form of a lucrative exit. Athletic departments optimize for competitive success, and treat breaking even as an accomplishment. Fewer than half of Division I programs are truly self-sustaining without student fees or institutional subsidies — a figure administrators cite as sustainability rather than what it actually is: structural failure.

Athletic departments were never designed as pure commercial enterprises. They exist to fund competitive programs, create opportunities for athletes, serve the campus community, and generate institutional goodwill.

Many schools made a deliberate choice to keep some distance from pure commercialization. When the revenue gap grew too large to ignore, they outsourced the problem rather than build the capability internally. Most never closed that gap.

The irony is hard to miss. The NCAA insists it isn’t optimizing for shareholder value or exits, yet the biggest commercial innovation in college sports has been to partner with companies built around doing exactly that. Meanwhile, Learfield and its competitors compounded their advantages: deep pockets, specialized teams, proprietary data, and scale no individual school can match.

Avoiding these arrangements may not be realistic. But athletic departments can — and should — negotiate them on better terms. The schools that fare best will come to the table knowing what they’re giving up and what they should be getting in return — the rights, the data, the duration, and the equity upside they should demand to participate in. That requires partners whose interests are aligned with the school’s, not the deal’s.

The Poverty Plea

The same institutions that handed commercial control to outside partners then turned around and told athletes there was nothing left to share.

The pattern: plead poverty, spend freely, resist labor, cut deals in the dark.

The NCAA has never voluntarily offered athletes a dollar above an athletic scholarship. Every gain — cost-of-attendance stipends, NIL rights, revenue sharing — was forced through litigation and legislation. California’s Fair Pay to Play Act opened the door in 2019; other states followed. And through all of it, the NCAA still operates as a nonprofit.

The House settlement is the latest example of change arriving uninvited. Schools are now navigating revenue sharing mandates they had no hand in designing and no infrastructure to execute.

The NCAA’s response has been two workarounds. The first: NIL, structured to look like endorsements rather than compensation. The second: a Congressional antitrust exemption to shield the model from courts that have consistently ruled against it. Neither addresses whether athletes are fairly represented in the arrangements built around their labor. Both are designed to ensure we never really find out.

The Language Kept Changing

The arrangement never did. Every time the courts, the states, or the market challenged the model, the NCAA added another layer of language to protect it — “amateurism,” then “student-athlete,” then “NIL,” and now, if the lobbyists succeed, a federally protected antitrust exemption. Different words. Same outcome: athletes without a union, without equity, and without a seat at the table where the value they create gets divided.

The NCAA and its members can call this amateurism. The market called it a $2 billion asset. The courts have called it a cartel. The exemption the NCAA is lobbying for — even if it passes — is only as durable as the political majority behind it. The clock is running.

It’s not just private equity. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have built NIL marketplaces, compliance platforms, and data firms around college sports. Each layer claims to add value. Each layer extracts a fee. Schools, athletes, and fans sit at the center of an ecosystem increasingly designed around everyone else’s returns.

The next phase won’t be defined by whether college sports is a business. It will be defined by who understands how to operate it as one.

Navigating this shift requires a clear understanding of how value is created, structured, and retained — not just by the intermediaries, but for the schools, the athletes, and the sport itself.

The goal isn’t to vilify the businesses built around college sports. Some are adding real value. The question is whether the arrangements are equitable — for the schools that provide the platform, the athletes who generate the product, and yes, the third parties who help monetize it. That’s not an unreasonable standard. It’s just one the system hasn’t met yet.

If you enjoyed this piece, please subscribe to Truth in NIL, share it with someone who needs to read it, and engage in the comments — disagreement is welcome.

Twitter: @marcisenberg

Within hours, more than 1,000 Division I men’s basketball players had entered. Last year, 2,320 — more than 40% of all Division I players — entered the portal. Seventy percent couldn’t find a new school or transferred down.

Yes, it’s a mess. Yes, it can be improved — preferably with collective bargaining. But that’s a fight for another day.

And yet, every spring, coaches and boosters convince themselves they’re one portal class away from a championship. Schools chase upgrades they can’t afford. Rosters get blown up. Budgets get blown. And when it doesn’t work out, everyone whines.

The portal isn’t the problem.

Unrealistic expectations and financial indiscipline are the problem.

To be clear: revenue-generating college athletes deserve to be paid their fair share.

The problem is market inflation. Major programs keep bidding prices up with no end in sight, forcing mid-majors to choose between overspending and watching players they developed — and desperately want to retain — leave for significant paydays. That’s the reality smaller schools need to accept and plan around — not fight, and certainly not overspend.

In a classic Saturday Night Live sketch, Steve Martin and Amy Poehler play a couple drowning in debt—spending money they don’t have, baffled by why it keeps happening—when a financial expert appears on television with the answer.

The title of his book: “Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford.”

Length: one page. Cost: $0.00.

The lesson for college sports is similar.

Five Rules for Managing College Athlete Free Agency

Rule 1 — The Golden Rule: Don’t Buy Players You Cannot Afford

Every other rule flows from this one. Know what you can spend. Spend it wisely. Stop there. The portal will always offer something shinier than what you have. That’s a test of discipline, not a reason to overpay.

2. Set a player payroll that fits your reality

Determine what your athletic department can responsibly spend on player compensation. Base that number on your own revenues — not on what other schools are spending.

3. Pay players what they’re worth—but don’t overpay

Markets reward smart decisions and punish bad ones. Paying athletes is not the problem. Paying irrationally is.

4. Accept That Players Will Leave — and Wish Them Well

At the level where schools are paying players above a scholarship, everyone understands the market. A better offer somewhere else isn’t betrayal — it’s economics. Mid-majors can’t always compete with elite program money, and that’s okay. Wish them well. Move on. Go find the next one.

5. Have the Conversation

Everyone understands the bargain now, including college players. This is a business. Players are expected to perform relative to their compensation — and when they don’t, coaches will find ways to make a change. That’s the dark side of college sports. It’s also how every competitive business manages underperformance. Produce or move on.

College sports is far from perfect. Athletic departments don’t need to make it worse by making bad financial decisions.

And the playbook already exists:

“Don’t Buy Players You Cannot Afford.”

Marc Isenberg

The first two articles in this series traced how the NCAA built and defended amateurism, and why the model is now collapsing. This article turns to solutions: a framework that treats revenue-generating athletes fairly and builds the institutions college sports currently lacks.

If schools can fire players, athletes deserve employee rights.

ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla recently tweeted: “The sad reality is that in order to survive in college basketball, in the next few weeks, you have to fire the highly paid, unproductive players the way coaches are fired. I think everyone is OK with that.”

Respectfully, it may work that way — but I’m not okay with that.

Coaches manage rosters like professional teams. The athletes remain classified as students.

As long as college athletes are classified as students rather than employees, they cannot be fired, even highly paid ones. Firing implies an employment relationship the NCAA has spent seventy years denying.

The “student-athlete” construct does more than limit compensation. It structurally subordinates athletes within the college sports system. They have no legal right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act — no right to collective bargaining and no meaningful voice in NCAA governance.

The NCAA responded in a tweet of its own: “For over a decade, schools in the power conferences have been required to provide four-year scholarships, and in 2024 the NCAA mandated all Division I schools do the same. Schools cannot reduce or cancel scholarships for athletics reasons, including injuries, performance, or roster management decisions.”

In theory, that protection sounds reassuring. In practice, it often proves meaningless.

Many coaches cannot keep an unproductive player on scholarship. The NCAA’s statement is a noble one, made in writing. But it may someday serve as a useful exhibit should an athlete argue he or she was effectively fired.

Schools and collectives control the NIL and revenue-sharing arrangements that now represent most athlete compensation — financial levers that can pressure a player to transfer when he no longer fits a coach’s plans. The result is effectively the same as being cut — except the athlete faces it without the legal protections and union representation professional players rely on.

For decades the NCAA defended its model with five claims: that athletes are students, not employees; that participation is extracurricular rather than vocational; that all athletes are treated equally regardless of revenue; that fans support college sports because of amateurism; and that most athletic departments lose money. Each contains just enough truth to be useful — and not enough to survive legal scrutiny.

My view on athlete compensation is straightforward: college athletes should receive what the marketplace says they deserve. No more, no less. For most athletes, that will still mean a scholarship. Scholarships carry real value. But in revenue sports generating billions through media rights and sponsorships, the market will inevitably produce something more. When institutions refuse to acknowledge that reality, markets find workarounds.

The NCAA allowed NIL while maintaining the fiction that pay-for-play did not exist. Predictably, collectives emerged to channel money toward athletes. That outcome was not a scandal. It was the market responding to incentives.

The NCAA now faces a choice: acknowledge the professional economics already present in college sports or continue trying to manage them through litigation and lobbying. Defending amateurism to the bitter end is no longer a sustainable strategy.

A Professional Economy Without Governance

College sports today operates as a professional economic system without the institutions that make professional sports function.

NIL and revenue-sharing agreements increasingly function like employment contracts — even though they were never designed to serve that role. Employment contracts exist within a legal framework built over decades: clear expectations around termination, grievance procedures, and dispute resolution. NIL agreements operate in a murkier space.

All NIL deals must pass scrutiny through the NIL Go clearinghouse, which evaluates whether agreements reflect legitimate market value. Because those determinations are inherently subjective, the clearinghouse can become institutional cover. If a school decides it no longer wants to pay a player, the deal simply fails review. Responsibility shifts to the process, leaving the athlete to challenge it in court.

The requirement that payments qualify as legitimate NIL is itself the fiction. Everyone involved understands what these transactions represent. The clearinghouse exists to preserve the pretense.

Agent Regulation Gap

For genuine NIL marketing deals — endorsements, appearances, and brand partnerships — agent commissions of 15 to 20 percent are common and not unreasonable. In professional sports, agents charge similar rates on endorsement deals.

The difference is that agent fees on playing contracts are regulated by players associations, capped at roughly 3 percent in the NFL and 4 percent in the NBA. College athletes have no equivalent protection. Because most NIL compensation functions as pay-for-play rather than genuine marketing, athletes are effectively paying marketing commissions on what amounts to employment income.

If the NCAA acknowledged that most collective deals are pay for play, the path forward would be clear: a uniform playing contract benefiting both schools and athletes, with agent fees capped at 3 to 4 percent. Acknowledging pay for play does not automatically trigger employment law. The NCAA simply chooses not to acknowledge it.

Agents and lawyers play a vital role in college sports. The problem is not their presence — it is the absence of standards. There are no uniform credentialing requirements, no ethics rules, and no oversight body ensuring that those representing athletes possess the skills and integrity the role demands. In professional sports, unions negotiated those standards. In college sports, every athlete is on their own. 

The Only Durable Solution

What universities face today is not simply a compensation problem. It is a governance problem.

Athletic departments operate in a professional sports economy without the institutions that make it stable. There is no collectively bargained rulebook, no standardized contracts, no neutral dispute-resolution system, and no credible enforcement authority. Major policy questions — compensation limits, NIL rules, eligibility disputes — are increasingly settled through litigation.

That is not governance. It is chaos administered by courts and state legislatures.

Right now, formal employment status for college athletes remains a nonstarter for the NCAA and many of its members. The most plausible solution is a voluntary framework — collective bargaining without formal employee classification — that establishes compensation rules, creates a hard cap, and resolves disputes through arbitration rather than litigation.

Under the House settlement, schools will share roughly 22 percent of designated revenue with athletes — beginning at $20.5 million per school in 2025–26 and increasing annually. Scholarships themselves can be worth $40,000 to $80,000 per year, compensation that remains meaningful for most athletes.

But in the NFL and NBA, players receive roughly 48–50 percent of league revenue through collective bargaining agreements. The NCAA understands that a negotiated system would likely increase athlete compensation significantly. That is one reason it continues lobbying Congress for antitrust protection rather than negotiating directly with athletes.

A negotiated framework would produce predictable results. Football and basketball players at major programs would earn more. Compensation at smaller programs would likely stabilize. The gray-market collective economy would shrink.

Two institutions would make such a system possible: a players association representing revenue-sport athletes and a commissioner with genuine authority over FBS football and Division I basketball — rather than a “buck stops nowhere” system where no one has power and few are held accountable.

The current system is chaotic and counterproductive. Schools spend more than they can sustain. Fans watch a sport that increasingly resembles professional leagues but lacks the governance structures that make them stable.

For decades the NCAA defended amateurism successfully because the system worked, financially and politically. Resistance was not stubbornness; it was rational strategy. But that strategy has reached its limit.

If the NCAA continues trying to control everything — unable to build consensus and unwilling to address athlete compensation honestly — courts and state legislatures will continue writing the rules of college sports by default.

The choice between collaboration and perpetual litigation should be obvious. Yet the NCAA and its members continue searching for a third option: federal legislation that would allow them to avoid negotiating with the very athletes who generate the industry’s revenue.

Employer power should not exist without employee protections.

Marc Isenberg writes Truth in NIL, a publication focused on bringing transparency to the evolving business of college sports.

Marc Isenberg

“An association of companies that limits payments to employees and punishes violators would usually be considered a labor cartel…these restrictions primarily affect the low-income athletes — most of whom are Black or from other minorities — who dominate big-time college football and basketball.”

— Gary Becker, Nobel Prize-winning economist (1930–2014), University of Chicago. From “The NCAA: A Cartel in Sheepskin Clothing,” Business Week, 1987 — nearly four decades before the courts agreed.

For its first century, the NCAA ran college sports with near-total control — no judicial interference, no pay for play, the power to create and enforce its own rules. For most of those eight decades, the underlying arrangement made genuine sense: scholarship value was real, television revenue was modest, and coaching salaries were roughly in line with what university professors earned.

That changed in the mid-1980s. The Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in NCAA v. Board of Regents deregulated college football television rights, allowing conferences and schools to negotiate their own broadcast deals. Revenue exploded. Coaching salaries followed. Facilities became arms races. The economics professionalized — but the labor rules did not.

What the NCAA built was both a monopsony (a market where employers control what workers get paid) and a cartel, coordinating among competitors to suppress labor costs in ways that would be per se illegal in almost any other industry.

The NCAA built a billion-dollar business on capped athlete compensation. The bill is now coming due.

Since O’Bannon and Alston, it has been on an epic losing streak — in court, in public opinion, and increasingly among its own member institutions.

The Amateurism Narrative

The NCAA built its defense around a mythic past that served the status quo — a world where amateurism ruled, athletes were humble servants of education, and administrators were guardians of virtue. Fabricated. Self-serving. And for decades, dominant.

The economics tell the real story. The Big Ten’s media deal exceeds $7 billion. The SEC’s exceeds $3 billion. The NCAA’s March Madness television contract pays roughly $1.1 billion per year. Power Four coaches now earn $4–12 million annually, roughly 50 to 100 times what a university professor earns. The athletes who made it all possible received a scholarship and were told the money would corrupt them.

Once courts ruled the NCAA could not operate above antitrust law, the momentum became impossible to stop. The NCAA’s greatest asset, essentially free labor generating billions, has become its greatest liability.

The Original Lie

The “student-athlete” designation was coined in the 1950s to defeat a workers’ compensation claim filed by the widow of a college football player killed on the field. It was a liability shield — and the foundation of college sports economics for the next seventy years. Courts accepted it. Congress looked away. The money flowed.

A Cartel by Any Other Name

An athletic scholarship has genuine value. For athletes from families without the means to afford college, it was life-changing. The collegiate model has tremendous merit.

The NCAA’s strategic bet was on the 98 percent. With more than 500,000 student-athletes, the overwhelming majority play sports that generate no meaningful revenue, and for them the arrangement is genuinely fair. Its most recognizable PSA said it simply: “Almost all of us will be going pro in something other than sports.” Accurate, and strategically useful. Public sympathy stayed focused on the 98 percent while the claims of revenue-generating athletes — a small minority — were drowned out.

None of it mattered as long as the NCAA held the legal high ground. Ed O’Bannon’s lawyers changed that, finding a viable antitrust claim and turning it into a playbook. Every major challenge since has followed the same blueprint.

A Century of Dividends

The control held for a century. Every right college athletes now have beyond the scholarship was a hard-fought win, not NCAA generosity. Cost-of-attendance stipends came only after O’Bannon forced the issue. NIL became legal only after state laws and the Supreme Court’s unanimous Alston decision left the NCAA no legal ground to resist. Every expansion required litigation, legislation, or both.

The Losing Streak

The NCAA’s legal dominance lasted nearly a century. O’Bannon in 2009 was the first crack. Alston in 2021 was the watershed — Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence questioned whether any NCAA compensation restrictions could survive antitrust scrutiny. Then came the $2.8 billion House settlement. College athletes who don’t like an NCAA ruling now know to get a lawyer on the phone. The NCAA went from near-unbeatable to frequent loser.

Outside legal spending exceeded $235 million between 2020 and 2023, up from under $10 million a decade earlier. That investment has become ruinously expensive. And it still isn’t working.

The Present Lie

Few college athletes have meaningful commercial NIL value. Building a personal brand that consistently drives sales takes time, strategy, and sustained effort. Most cannot do it. Much of what is labeled NIL today functions less like marketing and more like compensation for playing.

When NIL became legal in 2021, the NCAA insisted it could not constitute pay-for-play. Four years later, that claim is difficult to take seriously. Opendorse data suggests booster-funded collectives account for roughly 80 percent of NIL compensation. Deloitte analysis shared with athletic directors suggests roughly 70 percent of those deals would fail a fair-market-value test. The takeaway: athletic administrators complain loudly about NIL and the financial pressure it creates. It hasn’t stopped schools and their benefactors from finding creative ways to pay athletes more than their competitors. The complaints and the checkbooks tell two different stories.

So What’s the ROI Today?

The investment paid off enormously right up until O’Bannon. It paid off slightly less after that. Alston changed everything. The House settlement can still work — but some collectives are already going well above the revenue-sharing cap, with no enforcement mechanism and no end in sight.

The lobbying campaign to restore the model has produced no legislation. The House settlement changed the math permanently. Schools must pay $2.8 billion in back pay to athletes who competed between 2016 and 2024, share revenue starting at $20.5 million per school in 2025–26, rising to nearly $33 million annually within a decade. Delaying reform was rational for decades — but it made the eventual reckoning larger. The ROI of defending amateurism was enormous — until it wasn’t.

The Price of Chaos

Athletes getting paid is a good thing. But the system delivering those payments is a mess. NIL operates as an unregulated market. The transfer portal has created annual free agency with none of the labor infrastructure that makes free agency work in professional sports. Inexperienced athletes have no players association to protect them.

The financial strain is real. According to Moody’s, roughly 90 percent of athletics programs are not self-sustaining, requiring subsidies that divert funding from other university operations. Many schools charge mandatory student fees to cover the gap — often without students knowing. This is not a functioning market. It is a spending arms race: higher costs, little competitive change.

The path out is straightforward: collective bargaining that brings athletes to the table as partners, and commissioners with genuine authority over FBS football and Division I basketball. The NCAA won’t pursue this willingly — the current revenue-sharing arrangement is far cheaper than what collective bargaining would require. That is the subject of the next article.

NCAA vs. Everybody

The result is a system that serves almost no one well. And yet the sport remains remarkably resilient. Nothing in American sports compares to March Madness. Fans are not going anywhere.

The institutions managing that passion are struggling to govern the system they built. The old system was deeply unfair to a small percentage of revenue-generating athletes — but it was far more stable. The new system is fairer, more unstable, and in desperate need of a framework that actually works.

Marc Isenberg writes Truth in NIL, a publication focused on bringing transparency to the evolving business of college sports.

Truth in NIL publishes at the intersection of college sports, money, and athlete rights. Subscribe to get the next article in this series — and everything that follows.

If you found this article interesting, please subscribe to Truth in NIL Substack, post comment, hit “like” and forward to friends and colleagues interested in the business of college sports.

Marc Isenberg

Every March, the NCAA tournament begins — the most valuable event the NCAA directly controls, worth roughly $1.3 billion a year through 2032 in television rights alone.

Stephen Colbert once put it plainly: “The NCAA basketball tournament has everything I like: corporate sponsorship, unpaid labor and blind partisan allegiance.” A joke. But like many good jokes, it contains a lot of truth.

Over the next three weeks the NCAA will celebrate March Madness while repeating its most familiar message: college athletes are students first, preparing to go pro in something other than sports.

That message is increasingly difficult to square with the economics of modern college sports.

At the top of the food chain — FBS football and Division I men’s and women’s basketball — the money is unmistakably professional.

Television contracts are measured in billions. Coaching salaries reach into the eight figures. Entire conferences realign around media rights.

And the athletes who make all of it possible? They are still being told they are amateurs.

Big-time college football and basketball became professional enterprises in every meaningful way.

The only place the model remained amateur was the labor.

The NCAA was founded in 1906 at the urging of President Theodore Roosevelt. For most of the twentieth century, when television money was modest and coaches were paid like university administrators, the amateur model made genuine sense. That world is gone. The economics changed. The legal environment changed. The NCAA’s insistence that the old model still applied sits at the heart of today’s crisis.

What the NCAA Actually Is

The NCAA is a membership organization — more than 1,000 schools that set the agenda, approve the budget, and pass the rules. The NCAA is then charged with enforcing those same rules against the very institutions that wrote them.

Unlike a professional sports commissioner, the NCAA president has no real power to act in the best interest of the game. The Power Four conferences — and the television money behind them — are the real power in college sports today.

Ten Blunders. One Result.

The system didn’t collapse overnight. Here are the ten miscalculations that turned a flawed but functional system into the chaos we see today. The common thread: a failure to adapt, modernize, and conform to a changing legal and economic reality.

1. Keeping the “Collegiate Model” Status Quo

The NCAA’s foundational principle was simple: college athletes are amateurs, not professionals. No pay for play. Severe punishments for those caught violating the rules.

NIL exposed the charade. Athletes are now paid — and they deserve to be. But the NCAA still insists these are legitimate name, image, and likeness deals, not pay for play. We understand why: the NCAA doesn’t want to concede its original lie that some college athletes are, in fact, employees in addition to being students — and the alleged harm this would bring to college athletics.

2. Professional Revenue With Amateur Labor

As television money grew, the NCAA pursued revenue aggressively while insisting athletes remained amateurs. Coaching salaries climbed into the eight figures. Facilities became arms races. The NCAA embraced capitalism for revenue.

And amateurism for labor.

3. Regulating a Professional Market With Amateur Rules

Once billions entered the system, economic incentives inevitably followed. Whenever the NCAA imposed compensation limits, markets found ways around them. Bagmen existed because markets exist. NIL collectives exist for the same reason markets always do — to navigate around restrictions.

4. Ignoring NIL Until O’Bannon Forced the Issue

The writing was on the wall long before 2009. Television revenue was exploding and athletes were increasingly visible commercial figures. The NCAA resisted even modest reforms until the O’Bannon lawsuit forced the issue into federal court.

5. Appealing Alston to the Supreme Court — and Losing 9–0

A unanimous antitrust ruling is not a close call. It is a declaration. Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence suggested the NCAA’s entire compensation framework might violate antitrust law. Under former president Mark Emmert’s “leadership,” the NCAA chose to take Alston to the Supreme Court — and accelerated the collapse of the amateur model.

6. Creating NIL Rules with No Enforcement Power

The NCAA insisted NIL could not be pay-for-play. Those restrictions collapsed almost immediately. NIL Go, the transparency system designed to enforce them, was abandoned by major conference collectives before it had a chance to function. Rules without enforcement authority are not rules. They are suggestions.

7. Surrendering the Sport’s Structure to Television Networks

Conference realignment followed media markets rather than geography or tradition.

Kickoff times were scheduled for broadcast windows rather than academic life.

Television networks have no obligation to act in the sport’s long-term interest. Their incentive is simple: maximize broadcast value. Non-revenue athletes who don’t charter private jets paid the price in absurd travel schedules and academic disruption.

8. Opening the Door to Private Equity Without Protecting Athletes

The cost of operating major athletic departments has spiraled. Revenue sharing, NIL obligations, facilities arms races, and coaching salaries have pushed many programs into deficit. Private equity has rushed in as a solution — and conferences and schools are exploring these arrangements. But if the goal is to demonstrate that college athletes are students and not employees, inviting outside investors to help underwrite college athletics is probably not the best way to make that argument.

9. A Governance Structure Incapable of Governing

More than 1,000 schools across three divisions cannot reach consensus quickly. When decisive action was required, the system produces delay — and eventually chaos.

10. Choosing Lobbying Over Reform

The NCAA hired former Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker largely for his political experience, hoping Congress would grant an antitrust exemption. Years later, no such legislation exists. The organization needed structural reform.

Instead, it hired more lobbyists and lawyers.

Ten Blunders Add Up

Ten blunders identified here. There are undoubtedly many more. But they all lead to the same place: an unstable, chaotic, unsustainable system.

College athletes are finally getting paid — and that is genuinely worth celebrating. But the system delivering those payments is broken. Transfer rates are high. Education is increasingly an afterthought.

The NCAA, once all-powerful, has lost control of the enterprise it built. There are no real rules. There is no real authority. Every dispute either gets swallowed quietly or ends up in court.

And the NCAA’s solution? Spend more money lobbying Congress so that maybe they get their dream: a federal antitrust exemption that would allow the NCAA and its members to do what courts have already ruled is illegal. The organization that spent a century insisting government should stay out of college sports is now begging government to save it.

That is not a plan. It is a Hail Mary thrown by an organization that has run out of ideas.

None of this happened overnight.

None of it was inevitable.

The next article examines the NCAA’s century-long successful defense of amateurism — the propaganda, the legal battles, the lobbying campaign — and why those same strategies backfired over the last fifteen years.

Truth in NIL publishes at the intersection of college sports, money, and athlete rights. Subscribe to get the next article in this series — and everything that follows.

If this was useful, forward it to someone who follows college sports — an athlete, a parent, a coach, a fan who wonders how we got here.

Part II drops next week. The NCAA had a near-perfect record defending amateurism for a century. Then the cracks appeared.

Marc Isenberg   Twitter: @MarcIsenberg

Marc Isenberg writes Truth in NIL, a publication bringing transparency to the evolving business of college sports.

A new Substack bringing transparency to the evolving business of college sports — NIL, labor rights, money, and the forces reshaping the athlete economy.

College sports is changing faster than at any point in its history. NIL, revenue sharing, and the transfer portal have created a marketplace that is difficult to navigate — even for experienced professionals. The goal of Truth in NIL is simple: plain-English explanations of complicated issues, written for the athletes at the center of it.

Why Truth in NIL

The name draws inspiration from Truth in Lending and Truth in Advertising — regulatory frameworks designed to bring transparency to markets where consumers lack clear information. College sports has created a similar environment: one that rewards those who understand it and disadvantages those who don’t. Truth in NIL exists to level that playing field.

Topics we cover:

● NIL contracts and collective economics

● The transfer portal and roster movement

● Labor law and athlete rights

● NCAA governance and proposed legislation

● Federal and state policy

● Athlete finances and wellbeing

My Perspective

I am an athlete advocate — I view college sports through the lens of the people who play it, not the institutions that profit from it.

Big-time college football and basketball have outgrown the amateur model. The revenue is professional. The coaching salaries are professional. Pretending otherwise serves institutions, not athletes.

The athletes generating the bulk of that revenue are disproportionately Black. Asking them to subsidize rowing, golf, and tennis is extraction dressed up as tradition.

Most non-revenue college sports should look more like Division III — regional schedules, need-based aid, sustainable costs. That’s a future article. The short version: it shouldn’t require football and basketball players to bankroll a professional-scale operation for sports that were never meant to operate that way.

For revenue-generating athletes, fairness requires real contracts, real protections, and a real seat at the table.

What’s Next

The first series — launching this week — is a three-part examination of the labor question in college sports: employer power without employee rights, the NCAA’s long campaign to keep athletes outside the legal structures that would give them power, and why collective bargaining is the only fix that actually works.

A Working Draft of a Larger Project

Truth in NIL is part of something bigger — a forthcoming booklet for athletes and families navigating college sports. My co-author is Debbie Spander, a sports attorney and agent who will also be a regular contributor to this Substack.

Consider this Substack the working draft.

Marc Isenberg

Truth in NIL

Truth in NIL brings transparency to the evolving business of college sports. Subscribe to receive future posts.

Follow us:

Twitter/X: @MarcIsenberg  ·  @DebbieSpander

Instagram: @marcsisenberg  ·  @dspander