The four biggest NCAA failures shape college sports today
How we got here — and why athletes, lawyers and agents aren’t the cause.
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.