Its problem is that the structure surrounding that value no longer provides order.

That distinction matters.

The sport is not in trouble because fans stopped caring, traditions stopped mattering, campuses stopped filling, rivalries stopped resonating, or Saturdays stopped feeling different from Sundays. If anything, the opposite is true. The sport remains valuable because those things still matter.

The trouble is that the structure surrounding them has weakened.

The old order rested on assumptions that no longer hold. Amateurism could no longer explain the money. The NCAA could no longer command national legitimacy. Conferences could no longer be treated as regional associations. Athletes could no longer be governed as though they had no economic rights. NIL could no longer be separated cleanly from recruiting and retention. The transfer portal could no longer be treated as a side issue. The playoff could no longer expand without affecting the calendar. Media contracts could no longer be separated from governance. The NFL pathway could no longer be treated as external to the college game.

Each pressure point exposed the same underlying problem.

College football has become a national commercial enterprise without a national constitutional structure capable of governing it.

That is the problem this series has tried to address.

Not how to make college football professional football.

Not how to restore an amateur model that no longer exists.

Not how to maximize revenue at any cost.

The question is how to preserve college football by governing it honestly.

I. What Must Be Preserved

Any serious reform must begin with preservation.

College football is not valuable merely because it is football. The NFL already supplies professional football at the highest level. College football is valuable because it is something else.

It is regional.

It is institutional.

It is emotional.

It is inherited.

It connects schools to alumni, students to campuses, towns to teams, and generations to memories. It gives meaning to places that would otherwise be interchangeable in a national entertainment market. It makes a November rivalry game feel different from a neutral-site television product. It makes the regular season matter in a way few American sports can match.

Those features are not incidental.

They are the product.

If reform destroys them, it will not have modernized college football. It will have liquidated it.

That means the sport must preserve:

• the centrality of the regular season;

• rivalry games;

• regional identity;

• campus atmospheres;

• meaningful conferences or scheduling associations;

• traditional postseason anchors;

• broad-based athletic obligations;

• and the connection between teams and institutions.

Preservation does not mean freezing the sport in time.

It means understanding what gives the sport its value before redesigning the machinery around it.

A reform that treats tradition as nostalgia will misunderstand the business. A reform that treats the business as illegitimate will misunderstand the present. The task is to hold both truths at once.

College football is a commercial enterprise.

It is also a cultural institution.

A durable system must govern both.

II. What Must Be Abandoned

Preservation also requires abandonment.

Some parts of the old system cannot be saved because they are already gone.

The sport cannot return to a world in which athlete compensation is treated as inherently suspect while coaches, administrators, conferences, networks, apparel companies, and postseason organizers operate in open commercial markets.

It cannot return to a world in which the NCAA’s invocation of amateurism settles every legal and moral question.

It cannot return to a world in which conferences are stable regional associations simply because their names say so.

It cannot return to a world in which players have no practical mobility, no market leverage, and no voice in the rules that bind them.

It cannot return to a world in which television money can reshape the sport while governance pretends nothing fundamental has changed.

Those assumptions are gone.

A serious reform project should stop trying to revive them.

The old model did many things well. It created a sport of enormous cultural power. It connected institutions across regions. It supported broad athletic departments. It produced memories, rivalries, rituals, and communities that remain worth defending.

But the old model also depended on contradictions that eventually became impossible to maintain.

The answer is not to deny the contradictions.

It is to build a better structure.

III. The Constitutional Problem

The central claim of this series is that college football’s crisis is constitutional.

That does not mean the sport needs a literal public constitution. It means the sport needs a settlement of authority: who has power, where that power comes from, what limits it, who is represented, how disputes are resolved, and what purposes the system exists to serve.

Right now, those questions are unsettled.

The NCAA has some authority, but not enough. Conferences have leverage, but not enough legitimacy. Schools have local control, but not enough collective capacity. Courts can force change, but not design the whole system. Congress can create legal conditions, but should not write the sport’s operating manual. Athletes have rights and leverage, but not yet a stable representative structure. Media partners supply money, but should not become the sport’s constitution. The NFL benefits from the pipeline, but should not govern the college game.

This is not a stable arrangement.

It is a contest among partial authorities.

That is why every attempted fix creates another problem. Compensation reform creates Title IX questions. Transfer freedom creates roster instability. Playoff expansion creates calendar strain. Conference realignment creates travel burdens and non-revenue sport damage. NIL enforcement creates antitrust and labor concerns. State laws create national fragmentation. Litigation creates pressure without necessarily creating governance.

The sport does not need another workaround.

It needs a constitutional order.

IV. The New Governing Structure

The first element of that order should be a separate governing structure for major college football.

Not because football should be severed from universities.

Not because the rest of college athletics does not matter.

Because major college football has become too economically, legally, and competitively distinct to be governed through the same structure as every other sport.

A football-specific governing body would have authority over the issues that now destabilize the sport:

• membership standards;

• scheduling principles;

• athlete contracts;

• compensation categories;

• transfer windows;

• roster rules;

• health and safety standards;

• enforcement procedures;

• postseason structure;

• media-rights coordination;

• dispute resolution;

• and coordination with Congress, the NCAA, and professional football.

That body should not be a private club for the richest brands.

It should be a compact of responsibility.

Membership at the highest level should be tied to obligations: athlete protections, compensation transparency, health care, insurance, academic support, support for broad-based athletics, scheduling commitments, and acceptance of a common dispute-resolution system.

The governing structure should be strong enough to govern, but limited enough to preserve institutional identity. It should not erase conferences, rivalries, or campus culture. It should set the constitutional rules within which those features can survive.

The point is not centralization for its own sake.

The point is authority matched to reality.

V. The Role of Conferences

Conferences should remain important.

They are too deeply embedded in the sport’s history, scheduling, media structure, and institutional relationships to disappear. They provide identity, competitive context, and bargaining power. Fans understand them. Schools organize around them. Media partners pay for them.

But conferences should not be the final governing authority for the sport as a whole.

Their incentives are too partial.

A conference exists to advance the interests of its members. That is not a criticism. It is the nature of the institution. But a system governed primarily by conference self-interest will produce predictable results: revenue competition, access disputes, scheduling imbalance, realignment instability, and playoff fights.

The new order should therefore treat conferences as important constitutional units, not sovereign governments.

They can schedule. They can organize rivalries. They can distribute revenue among members. They can preserve regional identity where possible. They can negotiate media arrangements within the broader framework.

But the basic rules of the sport should not depend on whichever conference has the most leverage in a given media cycle.

The national game needs a national structure.

VI. The Athlete Bargain

The second essential element is a new athlete bargain.

College football cannot govern players as amateurs in the old sense. It also should not reduce them to ordinary employees in a generic entertainment business without regard to education, development, and institutional affiliation.

The better approach is to acknowledge the hybrid nature of the role.

Football players at the highest level are students, athletes, institutional representatives, commercial participants, and, for a small number, future professionals. Their legal and economic status may vary depending on how the system develops. But whatever label is used, the rules governing them must be legitimate.

That requires contracts.

It requires compensation categories.

It requires health protections.

It requires insurance.

It requires academic support.

It requires truthful information about professional prospects.

It requires transfer rules that are enforceable because they are reasonable and accepted through a legitimate process.

Most of all, it requires representation.

Rules about compensation, movement, discipline, postseason obligations, and NIL enforcement cannot simply be imposed on athletes by the institutions that benefit from those rules. If the sport wants labor peace, it must build a structure through which athletes have a real voice.

That does not mean every athlete will get everything he wants.

No serious system works that way.

It means restraints must be bargained for, not merely announced.

The old bargain was implicit.

The new bargain must be explicit.

VII. Compensation Without Chaos

The third element is a compensation system that is honest enough to be legitimate and structured enough to be governable.

The sport should stop pretending all payments are the same.

They are not.

A school payment for athletic participation is different from a third-party endorsement. A group licensing payment is different from a booster inducement. A postseason payment is different from an educational benefit. Insurance is different from salary. NIL is different from revenue sharing, even if the categories sometimes overlap in practice.

A durable system should distinguish among:

• institutional compensation;

• NIL and publicity-rights compensation;

• third-party endorsements;

• group licensing;

• educational benefits;

• postseason compensation;

• health and insurance protections;

• and deferred benefits.

Clear categories would not eliminate disputes.

But they would make disputes more manageable.

They would help schools budget, athletes understand their rights, regulators evaluate compliance, and fans understand what the system is actually doing.

The goal should not be to eliminate markets.

Markets are already here.

The goal should be to make markets visible, contractual, and subject to rules that can survive scrutiny because the affected parties had a role in creating them.

Compensation without structure becomes chaos.

Structure without compensation becomes fiction.

The new order needs both.

VIII. Transfers, Contracts, and Stability

The transfer system must also be rebuilt around the same principle.

Freedom matters.

Stability matters too.

A system with no meaningful player mobility is unfair and likely unlawful. But a system with unlimited transfer freedom is not healthy either. A player attending five schools in five years may be formally exercising choice, but that is not a stable developmental model for the athlete, the team, the school, or the sport.

The answer is not to restore the old restrictions.

The answer is to connect transfer rules to contracts, windows, academic calendars, and athlete representation.

Players should have meaningful rights to move. Schools should have some ability to plan rosters. Athletes should know what commitments they are making. Coaches should not be able to treat contracts as binding only on players. Tampering rules should be clear. Buyouts or notice provisions may be appropriate in some contexts, but only if they are reasonable, transparent, and reciprocal.

A reformed system should distinguish between mobility and churn. Mobility allows an athlete to leave a bad fit, respond to a coaching change, pursue playing time, protect his education, or improve his circumstances. Churn turns every roster into a temporary holding company and every offseason into a market reset.

The transfer portal should not function as a permanent shadow free-agency market.

Nor should it be replaced by institutional control dressed up as stability.

The system needs enforceable commitments because football requires planning, development, and team continuity. But those commitments must be fair enough to be accepted.

That is the recurring theme.

Rules can exist.

But rules need legitimacy.

IX. The Calendar and the Playoff

The calendar is where governance becomes visible.

A sport that cannot organize its calendar cannot govern itself.

College football’s calendar now carries too many unresolved conflicts: regular season, conference championships, playoff expansion, bowl games, transfer windows, recruiting, final exams, holidays, NFL draft preparation, all-star games, spring practice, and athlete recovery.

The answer is not simply to add more games.

A twenty-four-team playoff would be a warning sign that the sport has mistaken inventory for improvement. It would dilute the regular season, increase physical burdens, compress the academic and transfer calendar, and push college football closer to becoming a less coherent version of professional football.

The playoff should crown a champion.

It should not consume the sport.

A better calendar would begin earlier, create fourteen weeks for twelve regular-season games, preserve two open dates, protect Army-Navy, reduce overlap with transfer and draft decisions, place semifinals on January 1 in the Rose and Sugar Bowls, and finish with a national championship roughly ten days later.

The details can be negotiated.

The principle is what matters.

The calendar should be designed around the whole sport, not around the next available television window.

The regular season is college football’s central asset.

The postseason should serve it.

X. Title IX and Broad-Based Athletics

Football reform cannot ignore the rest of college athletics.

If major football is separated structurally, the separation must be paired with responsibility. Otherwise, reform will be viewed, fairly, as an effort by the richest football programs to professionalize revenue while abandoning the obligations that helped justify college sports in the first place.

Title IX will remain central.

In some respects, a clearer football structure may make Title IX analysis more manageable. Because football has no direct equivalent in roster size, revenue, or institutional function, pretending it is simply one ordinary varsity sport among many has always strained the analysis.

But separation does not mean evasion.

Universities still have obligations to provide equitable athletic opportunity. Women’s sports and non-revenue sports should not be collateral damage in the restructuring of football.

A new football order should therefore include defined support obligations for broad-based athletics. Those obligations could be tied to membership, postseason access, media distributions, or federal legal protection.

The principle should be simple.

Football can be treated differently because football is different.

But football cannot be allowed to consume everything else.

XI. The Role of Congress

Congress may be necessary, but it should not be asked to save college football from itself.

Federal legislation may be needed to preempt conflicting state laws, recognize athlete-representation structures, provide limited antitrust protection, set minimum athlete protections, and stabilize the legal environment around compensation and governance.

But Congress should not grant immunity without settlement.

Legal protection should be conditional on building a legitimate structure: athlete representation, transparent governance, health and safety protections, compensation clarity, dispute resolution, and support for broad-based athletics.

The NCAA and conferences should not ask Congress for a blank check.

They should bring Congress a framework worthy of protection.

Congress, in turn, should act as referee rather than architect. It can create legal space for governance. It should not micromanage playoff formats, conference membership, or the cultural details of the sport.

The federal role should be enabling, not substituting.

College football should govern itself.

But it may need Congress to make that governance legally durable.

XII. The NFL Relationship

The NFL is not responsible for every problem in college football.

But the professional game is part of the structure.

College football identifies, develops, markets, and filters future professional players. The NFL benefits from that system. The NFLPA has interests in entry rules. Colleges have interests in retaining elite players. Athletes have interests in development, compensation, health, and professional opportunity.

A reformed college football order should account for that relationship openly.

That does not mean the NFL should control college football. It should not. The college game’s value depends on remaining distinct from professional football.

But the systems should coordinate where their interests overlap: draft timing, early-entry procedures, medical standards, insurance, combine preparation, all-star events, agent certification, and calendar conflicts.

The developmental bargain should be explicit.

College football should not become the NFL’s minor league in name or spirit.

But it should stop pretending the NFL is irrelevant to its design.

XIII. Enforcement and Dispute Resolution

A constitution without enforcement is only an aspiration.

The new system will need rules. It will also need procedures capable of applying those rules fairly.

That means enforcement must be independent, transparent, prospective where possible, and tied to defined penalties. It should include guidance, advisory opinions, safe harbors, written decisions, appeal rights, conflict-of-interest protections, and expedited procedures for time-sensitive disputes.

The purpose of enforcement should not be theatrical punishment.

It should be stability.

The system should make compliance easier before making punishment harsher. It should punish the responsible actor rather than the most convenient one. It should protect athletes from being used as enforcement tools against institutions. It should prevent collectives and third parties from functioning as shadow payroll systems while denying accountability.

Disputes will happen.

The question is whether they are handled through law or leverage.

A mature system channels conflict into defined procedures before it becomes public crisis.

That is part of what governance means.

XIV. The Implementation Principle

The transition cannot happen all at once.

It should proceed through a defined sequence: formation of a football governing body, adoption of a transition charter, creation of athlete representation, clarification of compensation categories, calendar alignment, enforcement reform, federal engagement, and eventual adoption of permanent rules.

The sequence will not be perfect.

Some steps will overlap. Some will require negotiation. Some will be delayed by litigation, politics, media contracts, or institutional resistance.

But a messy sequence is still better than no sequence.

The sport should stop mistaking motion for progress. A new playoff format is not governance. A new NIL clearinghouse is not governance. A new congressional hearing is not governance. A new conference alliance is not governance.

Those things may be pieces of a transition.

They are not the transition itself.

Implementation requires a map.

Without one, the sport will continue drifting from crisis to crisis while calling each adjustment reform.

XV. What Success Would Look Like

A successful new order would not make college football quiet.

It should not.

The sport will still have arguments about rankings, schedules, officiating, money, transfers, conference strength, playoff access, and competitive fairness. It will still have winners and losers. It will still have regional grievances and institutional ambition. It will still be emotional, irrational, and occasionally maddening.

That is part of the appeal.

Success would look different.

It would mean the sport has a recognized governing structure with authority matched to responsibility. It would mean athletes have representation. It would mean compensation is contractual and intelligible. It would mean transfer rules are enforceable because they are reasonable: protecting real mobility while discouraging endless churn. It would mean the calendar is designed before the playoff expands. It would mean Congress provides legal support for a real settlement rather than immunity for institutional drift. It would mean non-revenue sports are protected rather than treated as afterthoughts. It would mean the NFL pathway is acknowledged without allowing the NFL to define the college game.

Most of all, it would mean fans can trust that the sport is being governed for something more than the next media negotiation.

That trust matters.

College football has always depended on belief: belief that rivalries matter, that seasons have shape, that championships are earned, that schools stand for something, that players are more than temporary contractors, and that Saturdays are connected to places and histories larger than the broadcast window.

A governance structure cannot manufacture that belief.

But bad governance can destroy it.

The purpose of reform is to keep that from happening.

XVI. The Reformed Season

In a reformed system, the sport would still feel like college football.

The season would begin with campus games in late August. Rivalries would be protected. Conferences, or scheduling associations, would still give the sport regional texture. A player would know before the season what he is owed, what he has licensed, what happens if he transfers, what health protections exist, and where disputes are heard. Schools would know the rules governing compensation, rosters, transfers, and enforcement before the market moved around them.

The playoff would not swallow the sport. The regular season would remain the center. Army-Navy would remain protected. The Rose and Sugar Bowls would anchor January 1. The national championship would follow soon after, rather than pushing college football indefinitely into the professional calendar.

Non-revenue sports would not be dragged across the country simply because football media contracts required it. They could return, where appropriate, to regional competition with national championships at the end.

This would not make the sport quiet or perfectly rational.

It would make it governable.

XVII. Conclusion

College football is not beyond saving.

It is still too loved, too valuable, too culturally rooted, and too institutionally important to surrender to drift.

But preservation will not happen by nostalgia.

It will not happen by pretending the old amateur model can be restored. It will not happen by letting the richest conferences improvise a private settlement. It will not happen by asking Congress for immunity without reform. It will not happen by expanding the playoff until the regular season becomes a preliminary round. It will not happen by treating athletes as the only parties without a seat at the table.

The sport needs something like a constitution—not a document for ceremony, but a structure for governance.

One that separates major football where necessary, preserves the broader college athletics ecosystem where possible, compensates athletes honestly, protects their health and education, restores order to transfers and the calendar, disciplines media incentives, coordinates with professional football, and preserves the cultural features that make the sport worth governing in the first place.

No structure will eliminate greed, ambition, litigation, or institutional self-interest. The point is not to remove those forces. It is to channel them into a system that can endure them.

The old order is gone.

The new order is not yet built.

That is the danger.

It is also the opportunity.

The most likely alternative is not immediate collapse, but gradual diminishment: a sport still popular, still profitable, and still televised, but less coherent, less trusted, less regional, less connected to campuses, and less recognizably itself.

College football can become a diminished version of professional football, governed by television inventory, litigation risk, and conference leverage.

Or it can become a modernized version of itself: commercial but not rootless, compensated but not chaotic, national but still regional, structured but still emotional, reformed but still recognizably college football.

The choice is still available.

But it will not remain available forever.

“Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.”
— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 70

A constitutional structure is only useful if it can be implemented.

The same is true of college football reform.

It is one thing to say that major college football needs a new governing structure, a rational calendar, athlete contracts, enforceable compensation rules, regional competition, labor peace, and a better relationship with the rest of college athletics. It is another thing to move from the present disorder into that system without destroying value along the way.

That transition will be difficult.

It will involve institutions with different resources, different legal exposures, different media contracts, different state laws, different athlete populations, and different visions for the sport. It will require schools and conferences to surrender some unilateral freedom in exchange for a more durable national structure. It will require athletes to accept some rules in exchange for representation, compensation, protections, and stability. It will require Congress, courts, media partners, and possibly the NFL to recognize a structure they did not create alone.

But difficulty is not impossibility.

The current system is already changing. The question is whether that change will continue through litigation, improvisation, and private leverage, or whether it can be organized into a transition plan.

Implementation should not be understood as a single event.

It should be understood as a sequence.

Not a perfect sequence. Not a frictionless sequence. But a sequence nonetheless.

I. The First Principle: Do Not Build the New System on Emergency Rules

College football has spent years responding to crisis with temporary arrangements.

A court decision produces an interim policy. A state law produces a waiver. A settlement produces a compliance office. A conference dispute produces a scheduling compromise. A media negotiation produces a postseason adjustment. A transfer problem produces another exception.

Some emergency measures are unavoidable.

But emergency rules should not become the architecture of the sport.

The danger is that each temporary fix creates reliance interests. Schools hire staff around it. Athletes sign contracts under it. Collectives adapt to it. Conferences negotiate around it. Media partners build schedules around it. By the time anyone tries to replace the temporary rule, it has become part of the system.

That is how drift becomes governance.

The first implementation principle should therefore be simple: temporary rules must be identified as temporary, tied to transition periods, and replaced by permanent structures on a defined timetable.

A sport cannot govern itself through indefinite emergency.

II. Establish the Football Governing Body First

The first major step should be the creation of a separate governing body for major college football.

This body should not simply be a renamed NCAA committee or an informal conference alliance. It should be a defined institution with authority over the football-specific issues that the current structure cannot handle coherently.

Its jurisdiction should include:

• membership standards;

• scheduling principles;

• roster rules;

• athlete contract rules;

• transfer windows;

• compensation structures;

• enforcement procedures;

• health and safety standards;

• postseason format;

• media-rights coordination;

• dispute resolution;

• and coordination with the NCAA, Congress, and professional football where necessary.

This body need not administer every detail of every sport. It should not attempt to govern all of college athletics. Its purpose would be narrower and more realistic: to govern major college football as the distinct economic and legal enterprise it has become.

The governing body would likely begin not as a fully sovereign authority, but as a voluntary compact among institutions with shared incentives. Its authority would become meaningful only as it became tied to the things schools actually need: postseason access, media participation, scheduling agreements, athlete-contract recognition, and eventually federal legal protection.

In other words, the new structure would not begin with abstract power.

It would acquire authority through participation conditions.

The initial members would likely include the schools and conferences participating at the highest level of the sport. But membership should not be merely a matter of brand power. It should be tied to defined obligations.

Schools that participate in the top football structure should be required to meet standards for athlete compensation, health care, insurance, academic support, financial transparency, scheduling, roster management, and support for broader athletic obligations.

A new governing body should not be a club formed only to capture revenue.

It should be a compact formed to assume responsibility.

III. Define Membership and Competitive Tiers

The new system cannot work unless it defines who is in it.

That does not mean college football needs a closed league modeled on the NFL. It does mean the sport needs clearer membership standards for the highest level of competition.

At present, the top of college football is both formally broad and practically stratified. Many schools share the same subdivision label while operating with vastly different budgets, facilities, media value, recruiting reach, roster economics, and competitive expectations.

That fiction creates confusion.

A more honest system would define competitive tiers based on objective criteria, including:

• financial commitment to football;

• athlete compensation capacity;

• stadium and facility standards;

• scholarship or roster investment;

• medical and insurance commitments;

• compliance capacity;

• scheduling obligations;

• media participation;

• and support for broader institutional responsibilities.

The highest tier should be open in principle but demanding in practice.

Schools should be able to enter if they meet the standards. They should be able to remain if they continue meeting them. They should be able to step down if the obligations no longer fit their institutional mission.

This would be healthier than the current system, where schools are often trapped between aspiration and reality.

A defined tier structure would also make playoff access, scheduling, revenue distribution, and athlete compensation easier to govern. Rules can be more coherent when they apply to institutions operating under comparable obligations.

The goal is not exclusion for its own sake.

The goal is honesty.

IV. Create a Transition Charter

Before permanent rules are adopted, the new football structure should operate under a transition charter.

That charter would function as the bridge between the current system and the final constitution.

It should identify:

• the governing body’s temporary authority;

• the participating institutions;

• the transition period;

• the issues to be resolved before full implementation;

• the interim compensation rules;

• the interim transfer rules;

• the enforcement process;

• the athlete-representation process;

• the relationship to existing conference contracts;

• the treatment of existing athlete agreements;

• the initial calendar;

• and the deadlines for permanent rules.

The transition charter should be public.

That matters.

One of the current system’s legitimacy problems is that too much governance appears to happen through private bargaining, leaked proposals, emergency waivers, and opaque enforcement decisions. A transition charter would not solve every problem, but it would give schools, athletes, fans, media partners, and policymakers a visible map.

The charter should also include sunset provisions.

If interim rules do not expire, they will become permanent by inertia. The transition period should be long enough to avoid chaos but short enough to prevent another decade of temporary governance.

Two to three years may be the right range.

Longer than that, and the transition risks becoming the new disorder.

V. Build Athlete Representation Before Relying on Restraints

The new system should not begin by imposing a full set of restraints and then asking athletes to accept them later.

That sequence would repeat the mistake of the old model.

If the sport wants enforceable rules on compensation, transfers, roster obligations, postseason participation, NIL review, health protections, or dispute resolution, it needs an athlete-representation mechanism early in the transition.

This does not necessarily require a fully mature professional-style union on day one.

But it does require something real.

At minimum, the transition should establish:

• a football-specific athlete representative body;

• a process for selecting or certifying representatives;

• access to independent legal and financial advice;

• a defined role in approving rules that restrain athlete rights;

• a grievance process;

• protection against retaliation;

• and a path toward more formal bargaining if federal law permits or requires it.

That representative structure must also be independent enough to be credible. It cannot be selected, funded, or controlled entirely by the institutions whose rules it is asked to approve. However designed, it must include a recognized selection process, access to independent counsel, financial independence, and authority to withhold consent from rules that materially affect athlete compensation, movement, health, or discipline.

This is not merely about fairness.

It is about enforceability.

A compensation cap without athlete consent is a target. NIL enforcement without athlete participation is a grievance. Transfer limits without representation are litigation risk. Postseason obligations without negotiated protections invite conflict.

The goal is not simply to avoid a strike or organized refusal to play.

The goal is to create a system in which conflict can be resolved through governance before it becomes crisis.

Labor peace cannot be assumed.

It has to be built.

VI. Grandfather Existing Rights and Contracts

A transition plan must account for existing commitments.

Athletes may already have NIL deals, revenue-sharing expectations, transfer decisions, scholarship arrangements, insurance policies, or school-specific promises. Schools may have conference obligations, media contracts, donor commitments, coaching contracts, facility debt, and state-law compliance obligations. Conferences may have grant-of-rights agreements, scheduling contracts, bowl relationships, and playoff commitments.

Ignoring those realities would create unnecessary litigation and political resistance.

The transition should therefore include a grandfathering framework.

Existing athlete agreements should generally be honored unless they violate clearly defined minimum standards or involve fraud, coercion, or improper circumvention. Existing media and conference contracts should be respected where possible, but future agreements should be made subject to the new football governance structure.

The transition should distinguish between:

• existing contracts that must be honored;

• existing practices that may continue temporarily;

• existing rules that expire at the end of the transition;

• and future agreements that must comply with the new system.

This is not glamorous work.

It is essential work.

Reform fails when it ignores reliance.

A serious implementation plan should reduce the number of actors who feel forced to sue simply to preserve expectations created under the old system.

VII. Sequence Compensation Reform Carefully

Compensation reform should be phased.

The sport should not jump from informal NIL chaos to rigid central control overnight. Nor should it preserve a system where every payment is nominally independent while everyone understands that many payments are tied to athletic value.

The transition should begin by separating categories of compensation more clearly.

At minimum, the system should distinguish among:

• institutional payments for athletic participation;

• NIL and publicity-rights compensation;

• third-party commercial endorsements;

• group licensing;

• postseason or championship compensation;

• academic and educational benefits;

• health, insurance, and injury protections;

• and deferred or post-eligibility benefits.

Those categories should not be treated as interchangeable.

A school payment for athletic participation is different from a local endorsement deal. A group licensing payment is different from a booster inducement. An insurance benefit is different from a salary substitute. A postseason bonus is different from a scholarship.

Clear categories make enforcement more legitimate.

They also make Title IX analysis, tax treatment, budgeting, athlete counseling, and public understanding more manageable.

During the transition, schools should be required to disclose compensation structures in standardized ways. Athletes should receive plain-language contract summaries. Agents and advisors should be registered. Disputes should go to a defined arbitration or grievance process.

The goal is not to eliminate markets.

It is to make the markets governable.

VIII. Create a Real Enforcement System

A new structure will fail if enforcement is either toothless or arbitrary.

The old model often suffered from both problems. Some rules were aggressively enforced in ways that felt disconnected from the realities of the market. Other rules were ignored until public embarrassment forced action. Enforcement was slow, uneven, and often mistrusted.

A reformed system needs a different approach.

Enforcement should be:

• prospective where possible;

• transparent in procedure;

• consistent across institutions;

• independent from direct conference control;

• respectful of athlete rights;

• tied to defined penalties;

• supported by written decisions;

• governed by conflict-of-interest rules;

• subject to reasonable discovery limits;

• capable of expedited review during the season;

• and subject to appeal.

The enforcement body should not exist merely to punish athletes or schools after the fact. It should also provide guidance, advisory opinions, safe harbors, contract review, and compliance education.

The system should prefer clarity over traps.

If a school, athlete, agent, or collective can ask in advance whether a structure is permissible, fewer disputes will become scandals.

Penalties should be aimed at the actors responsible. Athletes should not automatically bear the cost of institutional or collective misconduct. Schools should not be punished based on vague standards. Collectives and third parties should not be allowed to operate as shadow payroll systems while claiming independence.

The new enforcement system must be credible enough to matter and restrained enough to be trusted.

That balance will be hard.

It is also unavoidable.

IX. Align the Calendar Before Expanding the Postseason

Calendar reform should not be treated as an afterthought.

The season, transfer windows, recruiting periods, academic calendar, conference championships, playoff, bowl games, NFL draft process, and spring practice all interact. When those pieces are designed separately, athletes and institutions absorb the conflict.

The transition should therefore adopt a calendar before locking in the next postseason model.

The following calendar is not the only possible model. It is an illustration of the kind of integrated schedule a reformed system should be capable of producing.

A workable calendar might include:

• a regular season beginning earlier in August;

• fourteen weeks to play twelve regular-season games;

• two open dates for recovery and travel management;

• the regular season ending on Thanksgiving weekend;

• a protected window for Army-Navy;

• a limited and predictable transfer window after the regular season;

• playoff quarterfinals in December;

• semifinals on January 1, anchored by the Rose and Sugar Bowls;

• and a national championship approximately ten days later.

The exact dates can be negotiated.

The principle should not be.

The calendar must be designed as a whole.

A twenty-four-team playoff would move in the opposite direction. It would add games, compress the calendar, dilute the regular season, increase travel and injury burdens, complicate final exams and holidays, and intensify the conflict with transfers and NFL preparation.

That is not modernization.

It is expansion without discipline.

A reformed system should preserve the regular season as the central asset of college football. The playoff should crown a champion, not consume the sport.

X. Protect Non-Revenue Sports During the Transition

Football separation should not become an excuse to abandon the rest of college athletics.

One of the central arguments for a separate football structure is that football’s economics have become too large and too legally distinct to govern through the same model as every other sport. But that separation should be used to stabilize the broader athletic ecosystem, not strip it for parts.

The transition should include protections for non-revenue sports.

Those protections could include:

• defined institutional support obligations;

• revenue-sharing or solidarity payments from the football structure;

• limits on using football separation to evade broad-based athletics commitments;

• scheduling principles that reduce unnecessary travel;

• preservation of regional competition where possible;

• and transparent reporting on athletic department spending.

Those obligations should not be merely aspirational. They should be conditions of membership, postseason eligibility, and access to media-rights distributions within the new football structure.

This will be politically and legally important.

If football reform is perceived as a way for the richest schools to professionalize football while cutting Olympic sports, women’s sports, or lower-profile men’s sports, it will face intense resistance.

It should face resistance.

A legitimate settlement must recognize that football created many of the pressures now destabilizing college athletics. The solution should not be to protect football alone.

The better model is separation with responsibility.

Football should have the structure it needs.

The rest of college athletics should receive the stability it deserves.

XI. Coordinate With Congress at the Right Time

Congress should not be the first step.

Nor should it be ignored.

The sequencing matters.

The sport should not begin by asking Congress for a blank check. It should first develop the framework Congress is being asked to protect: a defined governing body, a recognized athlete-representation mechanism, minimum health and educational protections, transparent compensation rules, a rational calendar, and a dispute-resolution process.

Congressional engagement may need to begin before the final framework is complete. Legislators, conferences, schools, and athlete representatives will need to understand what forms of legal protection are realistically available.

But final federal protection should come after—not before—the sport has built the structure Congress is being asked to protect.

Only then does federal legislation become defensible.

Congress should be asked to enable a negotiated structure, not to rescue institutions from the consequences of failing to create one.

Federal legislation may be necessary to:

• preempt conflicting state laws;

• recognize or protect athlete-representation structures;

• provide limited antitrust protection for collectively approved rules;

• establish minimum athlete protections;

• clarify the treatment of certain compensation arrangements;

• and protect broad-based athletics obligations.

But legal protection should be conditional.

Institutions should not receive immunity simply because the old model failed. They should receive limited protection only if they build a system that includes athlete representation, transparent governance, enforceable protections, and real dispute resolution.

Congress should bless a settlement.

It should not be asked to invent one.

XII. Coordinate With the NFL Without Becoming the NFL

The NFL should not govern college football.

But the professional pathway should be part of implementation.

The new structure should seek formal channels for coordination with the NFL and NFLPA on issues that affect both systems, including:

• draft declaration deadlines;

• early-entry procedures;

• combine timing;

• medical information standards;

• insurance;

• player education;

• all-star events;

• agent certification;

• and calendar conflicts.

The purpose would not be to make college football subordinate to professional football.

It would be to reduce avoidable conflict.

If the college season, transfer window, playoff, all-star calendar, combine preparation, and draft process are all misaligned, athletes suffer first. Schools and professional teams suffer next. Fans eventually suffer too, because the postseason product becomes entangled with opt-outs, roster uncertainty, and professional preparation.

The NFL will participate only if it sees value in doing so.

That value can be practical: healthier prospects, better information, cleaner evaluation, fewer legal risks, and a more stable developmental environment.

College football should not beg the NFL for governance.

It should invite the NFL into areas where shared infrastructure serves both systems.

XIII. Use Pilot Rules Before Permanent Rules

Not every reform should be made permanent immediately.

Some changes should be tested.

A transition structure could authorize pilot programs for:

• transfer windows;

• roster limits;

• injury reporting standards;

• compensation disclosure;

• contract templates;

• postseason participation rules;

• scheduling models;

• and athlete grievance procedures.

Pilot rules should have defined terms, public evaluation criteria, and sunset dates.

Pilot programs affecting athlete compensation, movement, health, discipline, or postseason obligations should also require approval from the athlete representative structure. A transition system should not experiment with athlete rights without athlete consent.

This is especially important because college football is not a laboratory with identical subjects. A rule that works for the richest programs may not work for less wealthy ones. A transfer window that helps roster management may harm academic progress. A compensation disclosure rule that improves transparency may create privacy or competitive concerns. A scheduling model that helps national television may burden athletes with travel.

The system should be humble enough to test.

But it should also be disciplined enough to decide.

Pilot programs should not become a way to avoid permanent choices. They should generate evidence for those choices.

XIV. Establish Dispute Resolution Before the First Major Dispute

Every serious system needs a way to handle conflict.

College football currently resolves too many disputes through public pressure, emergency injunctions, conference politics, NCAA waivers, media leaks, and private bargaining.

That is not sustainable.

A reformed system should create defined dispute-resolution channels before the first major crisis occurs.

Those channels should include:

• athlete grievances;

• school-conference disputes;

• compensation and contract disputes;

• eligibility appeals;

• enforcement appeals;

• media and scheduling disputes;

• transfer disputes;

• and disputes between the football governing body and member institutions.

Some disputes should go to arbitration. Some should go to independent panels. Some may require expedited review during the season. Some may require public written decisions. Some may need confidentiality to protect athlete privacy.

The important point is that the forum should exist before the conflict.

A system that improvises dispute resolution during crisis will usually favor whoever has the most leverage in the moment.

That is not law.

It is power.

XV. The Implementation Timeline

A realistic transition could proceed in phases.

These phases would not unfold perfectly or entirely sequentially. Some would overlap, and some would require revision as legal, contractual, and political conditions changed. The point is not to pretend implementation can be made clean. The point is to prevent the transition from becoming entirely improvisational.

Phase One: Formation

The major football institutions and conferences agree in principle to form a separate football governing body. They adopt a transition charter, identify participating members, define temporary authority, and begin athlete-representation discussions.

Phase Two: Framework

The new body drafts initial rules on compensation categories, transfer windows, roster management, enforcement, scheduling, and dispute resolution. Athlete representatives participate in the process. Existing contracts and obligations are mapped.

Phase Three: Federal Engagement

Once the framework exists, the sport approaches Congress for targeted enabling legislation. The request is not for blanket immunity, but for limited protection tied to athlete representation, transparency, minimum protections, and national uniformity.

Phase Four: First Operating Cycle

The new system runs its first football season under transition rules. The calendar is adjusted. Compensation disclosures begin. Dispute-resolution processes are tested. Enforcement focuses on guidance and compliance rather than retroactive punishment.

Phase Five: Permanent Constitution

After the transition period, the football governing body adopts permanent rules. Interim policies expire. Pilot programs are either adopted, revised, or abandoned. The system moves from transition to ordinary governance.

This timeline is not the only possible sequence.

But some sequence is necessary.

Without one, the sport will continue mistaking motion for progress.

XVI. Conclusion

Implementation is where reform becomes real.

It is also where reform most often fails.

The temptation will be to announce a new structure before the hard questions are answered. The temptation will be to ask Congress for protection before athletes are represented. The temptation will be to expand the playoff before fixing the calendar. The temptation will be to impose compensation limits before creating labor peace. The temptation will be to preserve old contracts while pretending they do not constrain new governance.

Those temptations should be resisted.

A durable transition requires order: governing body first, transition charter second, athlete representation early, compensation categories clearly defined, calendar alignment before postseason expansion, federal legislation only after a real framework exists, and dispute resolution before crisis.

None of this will be simple.

But the alternative is not simplicity.

The alternative is continuing to rebuild college football through lawsuits, leaks, emergency rules, private leverage, and postseason negotiations that solve one problem by creating another.

The sport has already entered the transition.

The task now is to govern it.

“The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people.”
— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 22

The future of college football will not be settled by one lawsuit, one congressional bill, one conference alliance, one NCAA bylaw, or one media contract.

The system has become too complex for that.

Major college football now sits at the intersection of antitrust law, labor law, state legislation, federal politics, university governance, athlete compensation, media rights, conference realignment, Title IX, professional football, and public sentiment. Each of those forces can destabilize the others. None can fully resolve the problem alone.

This is why the next phase of college football reform should be understood as a settlement problem.

Not merely a legal settlement in the narrow litigation sense. The word is used here in the older institutional sense: a settlement of authority, rights, obligations, and procedures among the parties whose cooperation is necessary for the system to function.

A system that governs athletes, schools, conferences, and markets without durable consent from the governed will remain unstable no matter how clever its rules appear on paper.

The present system has no such settlement.

It has temporary compromises, emergency rules, litigation responses, private workarounds, state-law patches, and media-driven incentives masquerading as governance.

That is not enough.

The point is not that every issue must be solved at once in perfect detail. It is that the core issues must be negotiated within a single recognized framework, because each partial fix changes the incentives surrounding the others.

I. Why No Single Actor Can Fix the System

College football’s central problem is not simply that the wrong people are making decisions.

It is that no existing actor possesses enough legitimate authority to solve the entire problem.

The NCAA lacks the legal credibility and institutional power it once claimed. The conferences possess commercial leverage but not national legitimacy. Individual schools cannot solve collective problems on their own. Courts can identify legal violations but cannot easily design a complete governance system. Congress can create federal authority but may do so crudely or politically. Athletes possess growing leverage but lack a unified representative structure. The NFL benefits from college football’s developmental pipeline but does not formally govern it.

Each actor controls part of the system.

None controls the whole.

Some actors may possess enough leverage to force short-term outcomes. That is different from possessing enough legitimacy to create a durable order.

That is why piecemeal reform repeatedly fails. A transfer rule creates antitrust exposure. A compensation rule creates Title IX questions. A playoff change creates calendar problems. A conference realignment decision creates non-revenue sport burdens. A state NIL law creates national inconsistency. A federal bill creates labor implications. A court ruling changes bargaining leverage without creating a replacement structure.

The problem is systemic.

The solution must be systemic as well.

II. The Limits of Litigation

Litigation has played an essential role in forcing college sports to confront realities it avoided for decades.

Without litigation, athlete compensation would likely have remained artificially constrained far longer. Courts have exposed the weakness of amateurism as a comprehensive legal defense and forced institutions to justify restraints that were once treated as natural features of the system.

That pressure was necessary.

But litigation is a blunt instrument for institutional design.

Courts can strike down unlawful restraints. They can approve settlements. They can interpret statutes. They can determine whether certain rules violate antitrust, labor, or employment law principles.

Court-approved settlements can create real obligations and temporary administrative machinery. But they are constrained by the claims before the court, the parties to the case, and the need to resolve litigation rather than design an entire sport.

What courts cannot easily do is design a coherent national football calendar, create a sustainable transfer system, allocate media revenue, preserve Army-Navy, protect Olympic sports, determine playoff access, balance conference incentives, coordinate with the NFL, and build athlete representation structures all at once.

Judicial intervention can clear away unlawful arrangements.

It cannot, by itself, create a durable constitutional order for the sport.

That distinction matters.

If college football continues to rely on litigation as its primary governance mechanism, the sport will remain reactive. Each new rule will be tested after the fact. Each settlement will create new ambiguities. Each judicial decision will shift leverage without necessarily producing a stable operating model.

Litigation can force reform.

It cannot substitute for governance.

III. The Limits of the NCAA

The NCAA remains useful in many areas of college athletics.

It can administer championships, establish eligibility standards, support non-revenue sports, and provide national infrastructure for competitions that do not carry football’s commercial and legal pressures.

But major college football has outgrown the NCAA’s traditional model.

The NCAA was built around the idea that broad categories of collegiate athletics could be governed through common amateurism principles, institutional membership rules, and centralized eligibility standards. That model is increasingly mismatched with major football’s economic reality.

The problem is not simply that the NCAA has made bad decisions. It is that the institution is not designed to bargain like a league, regulate like a labor system, distribute revenue like a commercial enterprise, and preserve broad-based college athletics all at the same time.

The NCAA also faces a legitimacy problem.

For years, it defended restrictions that many athletes, courts, policymakers, and fans increasingly viewed as unfair or artificial. Its authority has been weakened not only by litigation, but by the perception that it failed to adapt until forced.

That does not mean the NCAA should disappear.

It does mean the NCAA should not be expected to serve as the primary governing authority for major college football going forward.

A more plausible future would preserve the NCAA’s role where it remains useful while moving major football into a separate structure designed for its unique economic, legal, and competitive realities.

The NCAA can remain part of college athletics.

It should no longer be asked to contain the entire football problem.

IV. The Limits of Conference Power

If the NCAA lacks sufficient authority, the conferences possess a different problem: they have power without enough legitimacy.

The largest conferences now control enormous media value, institutional brands, and postseason leverage. In practical terms, the Big Ten and SEC increasingly operate as the sport’s central power blocs. Their decisions shape the future of scheduling, playoff access, media rights, and national governance.

That reality cannot be ignored.

But conference power is not the same as legitimate national governance.

Conferences are associations of self-interested institutions. Their fiduciary and political incentives run primarily toward their members, not toward the sport as a whole. A conference commissioner may be highly capable and acting entirely rationally while still pursuing outcomes that increase the conference’s leverage at the expense of broader coherence.

That is not a personal failing.

It is the nature of the structure.

A system governed primarily through conference bargaining will predictably produce access disputes, revenue fights, scheduling imbalance, playoff-format conflict, instability for schools outside the largest leagues, and insufficient attention to the national interest of the sport.

A breakaway by the largest conferences might solve one problem while deepening another. It could create a more coherent commercial structure for the schools with the most leverage, but it would not automatically solve athlete representation, labor peace, federal preemption, Title IX, non-revenue sports, professional-entry rules, or national legitimacy. A smaller room is not necessarily a lawful or durable room.

The conferences must be part of any settlement.

They cannot be the settlement.

V. Congress as Referee, Not Architect

Congress may ultimately be necessary.

A durable national structure may require federal legislation addressing preemption of inconsistent state NIL laws, limited antitrust protection for collectively approved rules, recognition of athlete representation, health and safety standards, and the legal status of certain compensation structures.

But congressional involvement carries its own risks.

College football is popular, regional, emotional, and politically visible. Every member of Congress has schools, conferences, donors, voters, and local interests. Any federal legislation will be vulnerable to lobbying, carveouts, symbolic provisions, and political compromises that may have little to do with sound governance.

The NCAA’s repeated appeals to Congress reveal the depth of the authority problem. An organization that once claimed broad governing power over college athletics now increasingly asks federal lawmakers to supply what it can no longer command: national uniformity, legal protection, and institutional legitimacy.

That does not mean Congress has no role.

It likely does.

But there is a difference between Congress acting as a referee and Congress acting as an architect.

Congress can preempt conflicting state laws, define limited legal protections, recognize bargaining structures, and set minimum athlete protections. Congress has the power to legislate broadly, but it is poorly suited to designing the competitive, cultural, and economic settlement college football requires.

The least defensible version of federal intervention would be immunity without settlement: a law that shields incumbent institutions from antitrust exposure while leaving athletes without meaningful representation and leaving the sport without a coherent governance structure.

That would not solve the problem.

It would merely preserve institutional discretion under a new legal shield.

The question should not be whether institutions receive protection. The question should be what they must build, and whom they must include, before receiving it.

A serious federal role should therefore be limited but important. Congress should not attempt to write the sport’s entire operating manual. It should create the legal conditions under which a legitimate football governance structure can be negotiated and enforced.

That may include:

• preemption of conflicting state compensation laws;

• recognition of an athlete representative body or bargaining framework;

• limited antitrust protection for rules adopted through approved procedures;

• minimum health, safety, insurance, and educational protections;

• transparency obligations for revenue and compensation systems;

• and preservation of institutional responsibilities to broad-based athletics.

The goal should be enabling legislation, not micromanagement.

VI. The State-Law Problem

State NIL laws helped break the old system.

They also helped create the current disorder.

Once states began passing their own NIL statutes, national uniformity became impossible. Schools in different jurisdictions operated under different rules. Legislatures had incentives to advantage in-state universities. Regulators moved faster than national governing bodies. The NCAA’s ability to maintain a common framework collapsed.

In one sense, this was predictable.

When national governance fails, states fill the vacuum.

Those laws were not irrational. In many cases, they were a rational response to national institutional failure. States acted because the national governing structure would not.

But a national sport cannot function indefinitely under fifty different compensation regimes. A quarterback in one state, a booster collective in another, a school in a third, and a conference operating across ten more cannot all be governed coherently through inconsistent state rules.

The result is not genuine federalism in the constructive sense.

It is regulatory fragmentation.

A durable settlement will likely require federal preemption of state laws that directly regulate athlete compensation, transfer rights, or NIL arrangements in ways that prevent national uniformity. That preemption should not be used to eliminate athlete rights. It should be used to replace fragmented state competition with a national framework that protects athletes and institutions more consistently.

The current state-law patchwork was useful as a disruption mechanism.

It is not a stable governing model.

VII. The Athlete Representation Problem

No settlement will be legitimate if athletes are merely governed rather than represented.

This is one of the most important lessons of the current era.

For decades, athletes were treated as the objects of regulation rather than participants in governance. Rules were made about their compensation, movement, eligibility, health, and educational obligations without a durable mechanism for athlete consent.

That model is no longer viable.

If college football is to adopt enforceable rules regarding contracts, transfer windows, revenue sharing, roster obligations, health benefits, NIL enforcement, or dispute resolution, athletes must have some recognized role in the creation and approval of those rules.

The precise form of representation remains difficult.

Athletes are transient. Rosters turn over quickly. Some players have professional futures; most do not. Interests differ by position, school, conference, class year, and market value. Quarterbacks at elite programs may not want the same system as developmental offensive linemen, special teams players, or athletes at less wealthy schools.

Those differences complicate representation.

They do not eliminate the need for it.

For major college football, the most plausible representative structure may need to be football-specific rather than NCAA-wide. The interests of football players in a national commercial subdivision are not identical to the interests of athletes in every sport at every level of college athletics.

A plausible settlement could include a national football players association, a certified representative structure, conference-level athlete councils with real authority, or some hybrid mechanism recognized by federal law. The details matter less than the principle: rules that substantially restrain or structure athlete rights should not be imposed unilaterally.

Representation does not guarantee agreement.

It does create legitimacy.

VIII. The Labor-Peace Problem

A settlement that does not include athlete representation may buy time, but it will not necessarily buy peace.

The House settlement framework changes the economics of college athletics by permitting direct institutional payments to athletes under a capped revenue-sharing model and by creating new enforcement machinery around third-party NIL arrangements. But it is not a collective bargaining agreement. It does not create a durable labor-peace mechanism. It does not answer the deeper question of who has authority to agree to compensation limits, NIL restrictions, transfer rules, enforcement procedures, or penalties on behalf of the athletes whose rights are being regulated.

That distinction matters.

A cap imposed through litigation settlement, conference rule, or enforcement policy is different from a cap accepted through bargaining. The former may be temporarily enforceable or practically useful. The latter carries a different kind of legitimacy because the restrained parties had a recognized voice in the bargain.

Without that legitimacy, the system remains exposed. Athletes may challenge rules in court. Agents and collectives may find ways around them. Schools may comply unevenly. Conferences may threaten separation. And at some point, athletes themselves may decide that the most effective leverage is not another lawsuit, but collective refusal.

A player strike is not inevitable.

It is not even necessarily likely in the immediate term.

College athletes are transient, dispersed across programs, and difficult to organize. Their interests differ by sport, school, position, class year, and market value. Many athletes may prefer immediate individual opportunity to collective action.

But the possibility should not be dismissed.

Football is unusually vulnerable to concentrated labor pressure because the economic value of the season is packed into a small number of Saturdays. If players at enough major programs concluded that the system was limiting compensation, restricting NIL, policing movement, and enforcing penalties without meaningful athlete consent, the threat of not playing would become a powerful bargaining tool.

Whether labeled a strike in the formal labor-law sense or an organized refusal to play in practical terms, the leverage would be real.

That is the point of labor peace.

It is not merely a concession to athletes.

It is a stability mechanism for the sport.

If college football wants enforceable rules, it needs a structure through which those rules can be accepted, challenged, revised, and legitimized. Otherwise, every cap is provisional, every enforcement mechanism is contested, and every season carries the risk that the people producing the product will eventually demand a formal seat at the table.

IX. The NFL and Professional Football Problem

The previous paper addressed the relationship between college football and the professional game in greater detail. For purposes of settlement, the point is narrower: the professional pathway cannot be treated as external to college football governance.

Eligibility rules, draft timing, early-entry restrictions, insurance, medical standards, combine preparation, postseason obligations, and the college football calendar all interact with professional football. A settlement that ignores the NFL relationship would leave one of the sport’s most important incentive structures outside the room.

The NFL and NFLPA may have little incentive to change the current arrangement. The NFL receives a valuable developmental pipeline. Current professional players may prefer restrictions that limit younger competition. Colleges benefit from retaining elite players longer.

But if college football becomes more openly commercial, contractual, and professionalized, the legal and institutional pressure around the professional pathway may grow.

A serious settlement should therefore account for professional football without surrendering college football to it.

The college game should remain distinct.

But the pathway at the end of it should be part of the design.

X. The Media Rights Problem

No settlement can ignore media rights.

Television money is the economic engine of modern college football. It drives conference realignment, scheduling, kickoff times, playoff expansion, and institutional decision-making. Any proposed governance structure that treats media partners as an afterthought will fail.

But media incentives are not identical to the long-term interests of the sport.

Networks want valuable inventory. Conferences want distribution and revenue. Schools want exposure and money. Fans want meaningful games. Athletes need rational schedules and recovery time. Universities need academic compatibility. Traditions require preservation.

Those interests overlap.

They are not the same.

This is not because media partners are acting improperly. They are pursuing the inventory and audiences they paid to obtain. The problem arises when the sport lacks an independent governing structure capable of deciding which commercial opportunities serve the game and which ones distort it.

A durable settlement must therefore discipline media incentives rather than merely surrender to them. Media partners should be part of the economic structure, but they should not become the de facto constitution of the sport.

That means calendar design, playoff size, rivalry preservation, kickoff windows, and postseason timing should be governed by the sport’s institutional framework first, with media rights negotiated around that framework.

If the order is reversed, the system will continue to produce the same pattern: commercial expansion first, structural repair later.

That is not governance.

It is drift.

XI. The Terms of a Real Settlement

A serious settlement for major college football would need to address multiple issues together.

At minimum, it would likely require agreement on:

• who governs major college football;

• which institutions participate at the highest level;

• how revenue is distributed;

• how athlete compensation is structured;

• how athlete representation operates;

• what rules govern transfers and contracts;

• how Title IX and broad-based athletics obligations are preserved;

• how the calendar is organized;

• how the playoff is structured;

• how media rights are negotiated;

• how non-revenue sports are protected;

• how disputes are resolved;

• how professional entry is handled;

• and what federal legal protections are necessary.

These issues need not all be resolved with the same level of detail on day one, but they must be addressed within the same framework.

This is why partial reform keeps failing.

Each issue is connected to the others.

A transfer rule affects compensation. Compensation affects Title IX. Title IX affects institutional budgeting. Budgeting affects non-revenue sports. Non-revenue sports affect conference alignment. Conference alignment affects media rights. Media rights affect playoff structure. Playoff structure affects the calendar. The calendar affects transfers, academics, health, and the NFL pathway.

The system cannot be repaired by pretending those questions are separate.

They are not.

XII. Why Timing Matters

The danger is not that college football will collapse overnight.

It probably will not.

The danger is that the sport will continue adapting through crisis rather than design.

The pattern is already familiar: playoff expansion before calendar settlement, compensation caps before athlete bargaining, NIL enforcement before labor peace, and conference realignment before sport-specific alignment.

Each year of drift produces more entrenched interests, more legal uncertainty, more contractual complexity, more conference imbalance, more athlete frustration, and more public cynicism. Eventually, the sport may still be profitable while becoming less coherent, less legitimate, and less connected to the institutions that made it valuable.

That is the risk.

Not immediate failure.

Gradual institutional exhaustion.

The longer reform is delayed, the harder it becomes to distinguish between what should be preserved and what has already been surrendered.

XIII. Conclusion

College football does not need another temporary workaround so much as it needs a settlement: a legal, economic, athletic, political, and cultural arrangement durable enough to survive the next lawsuit, media negotiation, transfer cycle, labor conflict, or playoff fight.

That settlement must include schools, conferences, athletes, media partners, courts, Congress, and professional football. It must preserve enough flexibility for the sport to evolve while creating enough stability for institutions, athletes, and fans to trust the system again.

No single actor can impose that settlement alone.

But the absence of perfect authority is not an excuse for continued drift.

The choice is not between the old amateur model and permanent chaos. The choice is between a negotiated structure capable of governing modern college football and a continuing series of emergency adjustments made by institutions trying to survive the next lawsuit, the next media negotiation, the next transfer cycle, the next labor conflict, or the next playoff fight.

The sport is already being remade.

The only question is whether that process will be governed.

The next question is implementation: how a sport built through conferences, contracts, litigation, and habit could transition into a structure capable of governing itself.

“The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite.”
— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 23

College football is not formally part of the National Football League.

Functionally, however, the relationship is impossible to ignore.

The NFL benefits from college football in ways no other major American professional league benefits from a separate collegiate system. College football identifies players, develops them physically, exposes them to national audiences, tests them under pressure, builds their public identities, and filters professional prospects before the NFL ever spends a draft pick or signs a contract.

That arrangement has been enormously valuable for professional football.

It has also shaped college football’s incentives in ways the sport rarely confronts directly.

The college game is expected to remain distinct from the NFL. It is also expected to supply the NFL with talent. It is expected to preserve educational values. It is also expected to operate as a national developmental market. It is expected to protect tradition. It is also increasingly governed by the economics of professionalization.

Those tensions cannot be resolved by pretending the NFL is merely an outside observer.

The task is not to turn college football into professional football.

It is to make the developmental bargain explicit enough to govern.

I. The Unofficial Developmental System

The NFL does not operate a traditional minor league.

It does not need to.

College football performs much of that function.

That does not mean college football exists only, or even primarily, for the NFL. Most college players will never play professional football, and the college game has its own history, audience, institutional identity, and cultural value independent of the draft.

But for the subset of athletes with professional potential, and for the NFL teams evaluating them, college football operates as the principal developmental and scouting environment.

Universities recruit players from high school, provide coaching, strength training, medical support, nutrition, facilities, competition, media exposure, and brand development. Players mature physically and competitively while NFL teams observe them across multiple seasons.

By the time a player enters the draft, the NFL has often received years of information.

It has seen the player compete against high-level opponents. It has watched him respond to coaching, injury, adversity, travel, public attention, and pressure. It has accumulated film, testing data, interviews, medical information, and market awareness.

The NFL benefits from that system enormously.

College football benefits too, of course. The possibility of professional advancement helps attract elite athletes, sustain fan interest, and reinforce the sport’s national importance. But the relationship is not symmetrical.

The NFL receives a mature talent pipeline while bearing only a fraction of the costs that would accompany a true professional development system.

College football bears much of that cost while also being told, often sincerely and often inconsistently, that it must not become too professional.

That contradiction sits near the center of the modern college football problem.

II. The Three-Year Rule

The most obvious formal connection between college football and the NFL is the professional-entry rule.

Unlike basketball or baseball, football players generally may not enter the NFL immediately after high school. They must be at least three years removed from high school before becoming draft eligible.

There are sound reasons for caution.

Football is physically violent. Most eighteen-year-olds are not ready to compete safely against grown professional players. The developmental gap between high school and the NFL is enormous. A premature entry system could expose young athletes to serious physical and financial risk.

For many athletes, the rule likely prevents premature professional entry that would end quickly and badly. It gives players time to develop physically, receive coaching, build film, mature emotionally, and obtain at least some educational benefit before confronting the narrow economics of professional football.

But the current rule also serves institutional interests.

It benefits the NFL by preserving a largely external developmental pipeline. It benefits existing NFL players by reducing competition from younger entrants. It benefits colleges by keeping elite players in the college system longer. And it benefits media partners by ensuring that future professionals remain visible in college football for multiple seasons.

Those interests may be legitimate in some respects.

They are still interests.

The three-year rule is often discussed as though it were simply a matter of player safety or competitive readiness. It is also a labor-market restriction that allocates value among the NFL, the NFL Players Association, colleges, media partners, and athletes themselves.

That does not automatically make the rule unlawful or unwise.

It does mean the rule should be analyzed honestly.

III. Why the NFL and NFLPA May Resist Change

Any change to professional-entry rules would likely require negotiation with the NFL and the NFL Players Association.

Neither side has an obvious reason to rush toward reform.

The NFL already receives the benefits of a highly visible developmental system without paying directly for a minor league. The league can evaluate players over multiple seasons, market future stars before they arrive, and draft from a pool of athletes who have already been physically and publicly tested.

The NFLPA also has reasons to be cautious.

That is not irrational or improper. The NFLPA exists to represent current professional players, not future entrants still outside the bargaining unit.

Existing professional players may not welcome earlier entry by younger athletes competing for roster spots, practice-squad positions, and salary-cap allocation. Even if only a small number of exceptional players would qualify, any loosening of entry rules changes the labor-market dynamics at the margins.

Colleges, meanwhile, have their own incentive to preserve the status quo.

Elite players drive winning, ticket sales, donor enthusiasm, television interest, and institutional visibility. A system allowing more early exits could weaken college rosters, especially at the top of the sport.

This creates a rare alignment among powerful institutions.

The NFL, NFLPA, colleges, conferences, and media partners may disagree about many things. But they often share an interest in keeping elite football players in college for several years before professional entry.

That shared interest does not make the system illegitimate.

It does mean reform will not happen merely because it is conceptually tidy.

It would have to be negotiated.

IV. The Legal Pressure Point

For years, the three-year rule has been insulated by practical realities.

Most players are not physically ready for the NFL earlier. The NFL and NFLPA operate under a collectively bargained system. Courts have traditionally given significant deference to collectively bargained professional sports rules. And college football’s nominal amateur structure made the delay seem less like a professional labor restriction and more like a developmental fact of life.

That history matters. Prior challenges to the NFL’s eligibility rule have run into the force of the league’s collectively bargained structure and the labor-law doctrines that protect many rules adopted through that process. Any future challenge would therefore face serious obstacles.

But the legal environment is changing.

College football is no longer plausibly separated from commercial reality. Players may receive compensation. Schools may enter more sophisticated contractual relationships with athletes. Revenue sharing, NIL licensing, transfer regulation, and employment-status debates all push the system closer to an openly economic model.

As that happens, the professional-entry restriction may receive renewed scrutiny.

The question is not whether most athletes should enter the NFL earlier.

They should not.

The question is whether an absolute rule remains defensible for the rare athlete who can demonstrate unusual physical, professional, and economic readiness.

A system that increasingly treats college football players as market participants may find it harder to justify denying any pathway to professional entry before an arbitrary date.

The legal challenge may not come tomorrow.

But the pressure is not imaginary.

V. The Exceptional Athlete Problem

The hardest cases usually expose the weakness of broad rules.

Most college football players need years of physical and technical development before professional football is realistic. Many never reach that level at all. For those athletes, college football remains a developmental environment, an educational opportunity, and a competitive experience with value independent of the NFL.

But a small number of players are different.

Some athletes arrive on campus with extraordinary physical maturity. Some become nationally marketable almost immediately. Some may be ready for professional evaluation earlier than the current system allows. Others may face injury risk while being required to remain in college despite already possessing professional value.

A rational system should not be designed around the exception.

It also should not ignore the exception entirely.

One possible approach would be a limited early-entry petition process. Such a process could require:

• independent medical evaluation;

• professional-readiness assessment;

• consultation with certified advisors;

• disclosure of risks;

• insurance review;

• educational counseling;

• and approval by a neutral eligibility body.

Approval would not guarantee draft selection, roster placement, or professional success. It would simply allow a narrow class of athletes to test the professional market when continued exclusion is difficult to justify on developmental grounds.

The standard should be demanding.

The pathway should be narrow.

But a narrow pathway may be more legitimate than a categorical prohibition.

It would recognize that football is different from basketball or baseball while also acknowledging that exceptional cases exist.

VI. Why This Matters for College Football Reform

The professional-entry issue matters because it reveals a broader truth: college football cannot design its own future while ignoring the NFL.

Eligibility rules, athlete compensation, transfer structures, roster management, insurance, medical protections, and the calendar all interact with the professional pathway.

If players remain in college longer because the NFL requires it, then college football bears greater responsibility for their compensation, health, and development. If college football is effectively the developmental stage for professional football, then its governance structure should reflect that reality. If colleges are expected to prepare athletes for the NFL while also preserving educational values, then the system must be designed honestly around both functions.

The current structure often wants the benefit of both descriptions.

When defending restrictions, it describes college football as educational and distinct.

When selling media rights, promoting stars, and staging national events, it operates as a major commercial entertainment product.

When the NFL evaluates talent, college football functions as a developmental pipeline.

When legal accountability arises, institutions often retreat to the language of amateur education.

That inconsistency is increasingly difficult to sustain.

A more durable system would not require college football to become the NFL.

It would require college football to acknowledge its relationship to the NFL more clearly.

VII. The NFL’s Possible Role

If college football continues serving as the NFL’s primary developmental system, the NFL’s role may eventually require more serious discussion.

That does not necessarily mean the NFL should own or operate college football. It should not. The college game’s value depends on institutional identity, regional tradition, alumni attachment, campus culture, and forms of continuity the NFL cannot replicate.

Nor does this need to be framed as a subsidy to universities or a moral debt owed by the NFL. The more practical framing is shared infrastructure. The NFL has an interest in healthier players, better information, cleaner evaluation, improved coaching pipelines, and a more stable developmental environment.

The NFL could contribute to:

• health and safety research;

• officiating development;

• coaching education;

• player medical protections;

• insurance pools;

• career-transition programs;

• draft advisory systems;

• data standards;

• and post-playing career support.

It could also participate more formally in discussions about calendar design, draft timing, combine scheduling, and early-entry procedures.

The goal would not be to subordinate college football to the NFL.

It would be to recognize that the two systems are already connected and that the connection should be managed more deliberately.

The difficulty, of course, is leverage. College football cannot simply summon the NFL to redesign its eligibility rules or contribute to developmental infrastructure. The NFL would participate only if doing so served its own interests, reduced legal risk, improved talent development, or became part of a broader political or legal settlement.

The NFL has benefited from the college game for generations.

A more mature structure would ask whether some portion of that benefit should be reflected in shared responsibility.

VIII. Protecting the College Game From NFL Imitation

Acknowledging the NFL relationship does not mean college football should imitate the NFL.

That distinction is essential.

The NFL is a professional league built around centralized control, competitive parity, salary caps, drafts, franchise structures, and broad postseason access. College football is built around institutions, regions, rivalries, asymmetry, tradition, and the unusually high value of the regular season.

The college game should not become a lesser NFL.

It would be bad at that.

A college football system designed merely to mimic professional football would likely lose much of what makes it valuable. Expanded playoffs, nationalized schedules, excessive roster churn, and purely transactional player movement all risk making the sport more professional without making it better.

The better approach is not imitation.

It is differentiation with honesty.

College football can acknowledge its commercial and developmental relationship with the NFL while still preserving the features that make it distinct:

• campus settings;

• rivalry traditions;

• regional identity;

• marching bands and bowl history;

• educational affiliation;

• and regular-season urgency.

The NFL relationship should inform reform.

It should not define the soul of the sport.

IX. The Calendar Connection

The professional pathway also affects the calendar.

The college football calendar increasingly collides with the NFL calendar, the transfer portal, academic schedules, postseason expansion, and player preparation for the draft. Players on playoff teams may face overlapping pressures involving championship competition, professional evaluation, NIL obligations, academic responsibilities, and roster decisions.

This is not a minor scheduling inconvenience.

It is a structural problem.

A coherent college football calendar should account for the professional pathway without allowing it to dominate the sport. That means creating cleaner separation among:

• regular-season competition;

• conference championships;

• playoff games;

• transfer windows;

• draft declaration deadlines;

• all-star games;

• combine preparation;

• and spring practice.

The current system often forces these events into conflict.

That conflict harms athletes, coaches, schools, and the postseason product itself.

For purposes of the NFL relationship, the key is not simply whether the season begins earlier or ends later. It is whether the calendar gives athletes a coherent sequence: finish the college season, make informed professional-entry decisions, resolve transfer status if they remain in college, and prepare for spring football or the draft without all of those processes colliding at once.

This is not merely an administrative concern.

Time is part of governance.

A sport that cannot organize its calendar cannot govern itself.

X. Compensation and Development

As discussed earlier in this series, athlete compensation should not be treated as a single undifferentiated category.

The NFL relationship also complicates athlete compensation.

If college football were purely educational, compensation might be understood primarily through scholarships, educational benefits, and limited NIL opportunities. If it were purely professional, compensation might be understood through salaries, collective bargaining, and market contracts.

Modern college football is neither purely one nor the other.

It is a hybrid system.

Athletes provide competitive value to schools. They provide promotional value through their identities. They provide media value through broadcasts and highlights. And for a subset of players, they provide developmental value to the NFL ecosystem by becoming future professional labor.

A coherent compensation system should reflect that complexity.

This is why athlete contracts may need to distinguish between:

• athletic participation;

• institutional compensation;

• NIL and publicity rights;

• health and insurance protections;

• postseason obligations;

• transfer rights;

• and professional-entry procedures.

The NFL does not need to control those contracts.

But the existence of the NFL pathway makes them more important.

If college football is the final developmental stage before professional football, then the system must be especially careful about medical care, injury protection, insurance, representation, and truthful information about professional prospects.

The athlete who never plays professionally deserves a fair and stable collegiate system.

The athlete who may play professionally deserves a system that does not exploit the gap between college value and professional eligibility.

Both interests matter.

XI. The Developmental Bargain

The relationship between college football and the NFL rests on an implicit bargain.

Players receive coaching, exposure, education, competition, and a possible path to professional football. Schools receive athletic performance, institutional visibility, revenue, and alumni engagement. The NFL receives a developed and evaluated talent pool. Fans receive a sport that is both emotionally distinct from the NFL and connected to it through future stars.

That bargain has worked in many ways.

It has also become unstable.

The economics have grown too large. The legal assumptions have weakened. The athlete-compensation model has changed. The transfer market has accelerated. The playoff is expanding. The calendar is strained. The professional pathway remains largely controlled by institutions outside college football itself.

A bargain can survive only if its terms remain legitimate.

That requires honesty about who benefits, who bears risk, and who has authority to make rules.

College football cannot continue serving as the NFL’s developmental system while denying the implications of that role.

Nor should it surrender its own identity simply because the NFL sits at the end of the pipeline.

The task is to make the bargain explicit enough to govern.

XII. Conclusion

The NFL is not the cause of every problem in college football.

But the professional game shapes the college system more deeply than the formal governance structure admits.

It influences eligibility, compensation, player development, medical risk, calendar design, media value, and the incentives of schools, conferences, athletes, and professional leagues.

Any serious reform must therefore include the NFL relationship within the analysis.

College football does not need to become professional football.

It does need to stop pretending professional football is irrelevant to its design.

A durable system would preserve the college game’s distinctive identity while acknowledging the professional pathway that gives much of the modern sport its economic and developmental force.

The college game should remain college football.

But it should be governed with eyes open to the league waiting at the other end.

“The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth.”
— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 12

Major college football now drives the economics of college athletics to a degree the broader collegiate model was never designed to absorb.

That fact is not new.

Football has long generated the largest audiences, the largest media contracts, the largest donor commitments, and the largest institutional investments. What has changed is the extent to which football’s economic logic now governs nearly everything else.

Conference realignment is driven primarily by football media value. Postseason reform is driven primarily by football inventory. Athlete compensation debates are driven primarily by football revenue. Even non-revenue sports increasingly find their competitive structures shaped by football-driven conference decisions.

The result is an increasingly misaligned system.

Football operates as a national commercial enterprise. Most other college sports operate as regional, educational, and developmental competitions. Attempting to govern both through the same economic and institutional structure has distorted each.

This paper argues that separating major college football more clearly from the rest of college athletics may be necessary not only to stabilize football, but to preserve the broader collegiate athletic model itself.

I. The Economic Center of Gravity

The modern college athletic department is built around football.

At many institutions, football determines:

• conference affiliation;

• media revenue;

• donor enthusiasm;

• facility investment;

• institutional branding;

• and national visibility.

Basketball matters. Olympic sports matter. Women’s athletics matter. But football remains the economic center of gravity for the largest athletic departments in the country.

That reality creates a structural problem.

When football’s interests dominate conference decision-making, other sports are often forced to live with consequences they did not create. Volleyball, soccer, softball, baseball, swimming, track, tennis, golf, and other programs increasingly travel across vast geographic distances because football media economics made those affiliations attractive.

When a West Coast volleyball or soccer team must travel repeatedly across multiple time zones because football media value dictated conference affiliation, the mismatch becomes obvious. The competitive map for football may be rational under one set of incentives while imposing costs on athletes in sports that gain little from that national footprint.

The result is not merely inconvenience.

It is institutional distortion.

A conference structure designed around football television revenue may be poorly suited to the competitive, academic, and financial realities of most other sports.

II. The Misalignment Problem

The central economic problem in college athletics is not simply that some schools have more money than others.

That has always been true.

The deeper problem is that the incentives of football and non-football sports increasingly diverge.

Football benefits from:

• national media markets;

• broad television inventory;

• postseason expansion;

• high-stakes scheduling;

• and national recruiting reach.

Many non-revenue sports benefit from almost the opposite:

• regional competition;

• manageable travel;

• predictable scheduling;

• academic integration;

• and lower operating costs.

The same conference map cannot easily serve both sets of interests.

A structure that makes sense for football may make little sense for women’s soccer. A media arrangement that benefits football may impose unnecessary burdens on tennis or volleyball. A nationalized conference footprint may increase football revenue while weakening the educational and competitive experience of athletes in other sports.

The present system obscures this problem by treating “the conference” as though it serves a single unified purpose.

It increasingly does not.

III. Football Separation as Preservation, Not Abandonment

Separating major college football from the broader NCAA structure is often framed as a threat to non-revenue sports.

That concern is understandable.

For decades, football revenue has helped support broad-based athletic departments. If football separates entirely, universities may fear that Olympic sports and women’s sports will lose financial support, institutional visibility, or political protection.

Those risks are real.

But the opposite risk is also real: keeping all sports tied to football’s economic logic may ultimately damage the broader collegiate model more severely.

Football-driven realignment has already produced travel burdens and competitive structures that make little sense for many athletes. The more football becomes a national entertainment product, the more difficult it becomes to pretend that every other sport should follow the same map.

A clearer separation could allow football to be governed according to its commercial realities while allowing other sports to return, where appropriate, to structures better suited to their own purposes.

Separation would not make football legally independent from the university in any simple or absolute sense. Nor would it eliminate obligations involving gender equity, employment law, taxation, academic oversight, or institutional responsibility. The point is narrower: clearer structural separation may allow the different economic and legal questions surrounding football to be addressed directly rather than forcing every sport into the same increasingly strained institutional category.

That is not abandonment.

It may be preservation.

IV. Regional Competition for Non-Revenue Sports

One of the most obvious benefits of football separation would be the possibility of restoring regional competition in non-revenue sports.

There is no inherent reason that every sport must follow football’s conference alignment.

A university might participate in a national football federation while competing regionally in volleyball, soccer, baseball, softball, track, swimming, tennis, golf, and other sports.

This would better reflect the realities of those competitions.

Regional structures could:

• reduce travel costs;

• reduce missed class time;

• improve athlete welfare;

• preserve rivalries;

• and create more sensible competitive schedules.

This is not a radical concept.

College athletics already contains sport-specific affiliations, affiliate memberships, and different competitive structures across different sports. The question is whether those principles should be applied more deliberately in response to football’s growing exceptionalism.

Regionalization would not need to operate identically across every sport. Basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer, swimming, tennis, and track each have different competitive calendars, travel demands, recruiting patterns, and postseason structures. Some sports may benefit from regional regular seasons followed by national postseason competition. Others may preserve more national scheduling where competitive quality or tradition warrants it.

The important point is not that every non-football sport must be governed locally. It is that those sports should not be forced automatically into football’s national conference map when their own competitive and educational needs point elsewhere.

The answer is increasingly yes.

V. Development and Institutional Incentives

The same misalignment appears not only in conference structure, but in the incentives surrounding athlete development.

Healthy systems generally align developmental incentives with long-term institutional interests.

The present structure increasingly struggles to do so.

Programs investing heavily in identifying and developing players may lose those athletes immediately after breakthrough performance, often without compensation or meaningful roster continuity. At the same time, institutions face pressure to prioritize short-term roster acquisition over long-term player development.

This environment may produce transactional efficiency in certain respects.

It may also weaken many of the institutional relationships and developmental structures that historically distinguished college football from purely commercial sports markets.

A more durable system would likely seek greater balance between mobility and continuity, preserving athlete opportunity while ensuring that developmental investment remains institutionally rational over time.

That principle applies beyond football.

Non-revenue sports also depend heavily on continuity, coaching relationships, institutional fit, and long-term development. If the broader collegiate model becomes too transactional, those sports may lose many of the qualities that make them valuable educationally and competitively.

VI. The Redistribution Question

Any serious reform must confront the financial question directly.

If football becomes more structurally distinct, how are non-revenue sports protected?

There is no single answer, but several principles should guide the discussion.

First, institutions that benefit from football’s commercial value should remain responsible for supporting broad-based athletics. Football separation should not become an excuse for universities to abandon Olympic sports or women’s athletics.

Second, revenue-sharing arrangements within a football federation could include obligations tied to institutional athletic support. Participation in the highest level of football might require continued investment in broad-based athletic opportunities.

Third, media and postseason revenues could be distributed in ways that preserve competitive incentives while also supporting the wider ecosystem. The strongest football brands will naturally resist excessive redistribution, but they also benefit from a system that remains nationally legitimate and institutionally broad.

Fourth, Title IX and gender-equity obligations must be addressed directly rather than treated as afterthoughts. A more separated football structure may clarify some questions, but it will not eliminate universities’ legal and institutional responsibilities.

This would likely require participation conditions rather than voluntary goodwill alone. A football federation could condition membership, postseason eligibility, or revenue distributions on demonstrated institutional support for broad-based athletics. Schools receiving the benefits of the highest level of football competition would remain obligated to maintain minimum sport-sponsorship commitments, gender-equity compliance, and defined levels of support for non-football athletic opportunities.

In other words, football separation should not mean football privatization. The economic engine may require distinct governance, but access to that engine can still be conditioned on obligations to the broader university athletic mission.

The goal should not be to drain football revenue away from the rest of college athletics.

The goal should be to prevent football’s unique economic logic from distorting every other sport while preserving institutional commitments to broad athletic participation.

VII. Why the Winners Still Need the System

The strongest football programs may believe they can thrive under almost any structure.

In the short term, many probably can.

The largest brands possess national audiences, donor resources, recruiting advantages, and media leverage that make them less vulnerable than smaller institutions.

But even the strongest programs benefit from a broader system that remains coherent and legitimate.

A sport consisting only of a small collection of wealthy brands playing each other repeatedly may generate short-term television value, but it risks losing the national texture that makes college football distinctive. Regional diversity, institutional variety, rivalry networks, and broad fan participation all contribute to the value of the product.

There is also a practical media problem with excessive concentration. A closed or nearly closed ecosystem of elite brands may produce attractive matchups at first, but repeated inventory can become less distinctive over time. Part of college football’s value lies in contrast: regional styles, institutional variety, upset risk, and the possibility that different parts of the country remain connected to the national race.

A system that narrows too aggressively may increase the average brand value of individual games while reducing the breadth of national engagement that makes the sport valuable across an entire season.

The strongest programs are valuable partly because the system around them gives their success meaning.

A national champion matters because the national structure matters. Rivalries matter because they are embedded within a broader competitive and cultural ecosystem. Television audiences care because the sport still feels connected to schools, regions, alumni, and traditions across the country.

Total fragmentation eventually harms even the winners.

VIII. The Risk of a Two-Tier Future

A more transparent structure would likely reveal what already exists: college athletics is moving toward tiers.

Some institutions will participate in the highest level of football. Others will compete meaningfully at different levels. Some may reduce their football ambitions while continuing to support strong basketball, baseball, Olympic, or regional athletic programs.

That reality should not be denied.

But it should be governed carefully.

A two-tier future can develop in two very different ways.

One version is chaotic: schools scramble for access, conferences fracture, athletes move constantly, and financial pressures push institutions into decisions that make little long-term sense.

The other version is structured: institutions understand the requirements of participation, revenue flows are more transparent, movement between levels is possible but governed, and non-football sports are not forced to absorb every consequence of football’s commercial escalation.

This need not require a formal promotion-and-relegation system copied from European soccer. College athletics is tied to universities, geography, alumni bases, facilities, and long-term institutional commitments in ways that make simple importation of that model unrealistic. Movement between levels, if it exists, would likely be slower, more conditional, and based on sustained institutional commitment rather than a single season’s results.

The choice is not whether hierarchy will exist.

It already does.

The choice is whether hierarchy will be acknowledged and governed.

IX. Basketball and the Other Revenue Sport

Basketball occupies a different position from football.

It is commercially significant, nationally visible, and central to the identity of many institutions. But its economics, roster sizes, developmental pathways, and postseason structure differ substantially from football’s.

That distinction matters.

Basketball may not require the same degree of separation as football. Its national tournament remains one of the most successful postseason structures in American sports precisely because it includes broad participation across institutional types.

This does not mean basketball will remain untouched by the same pressures affecting football. Athlete compensation, media rights, conference consolidation, and tournament revenue will continue to create tension in basketball as well. The point is only that basketball’s existing national championship structure still aligns more closely with the sport’s competitive identity than football’s current governance structure does.

The danger is that football’s economic logic could eventually distort basketball and other sports unnecessarily.

A football-specific governance structure would allow basketball to preserve more of its existing national model while allowing other sports to return to more sensible regional structures where appropriate.

This is another reason football separation should not be understood as a wholesale rejection of the NCAA model.

It may instead allow different sports to be governed according to their actual characteristics.

X. The Broader Collegiate Model

The broader collegiate athletic model still has value.

It provides opportunities for athletes who will never play professionally. It connects students and alumni to institutions. It supports Olympic development. It creates educational and competitive experiences that do not fit neatly within commercial sports logic.

That model should not be sacrificed because football has outgrown the governance structure that once contained it.

Nor should football be artificially constrained by rules designed for sports operating under fundamentally different economic conditions.

A better structure would recognize difference without severing connection.

Football can be governed more commercially and nationally. Other sports can remain more regional and educationally integrated. Universities can continue supporting broad-based athletics while acknowledging that one sport now requires distinct treatment.

The present system tries to avoid these distinctions.

That avoidance is becoming increasingly costly.

XI. Conclusion

The future of college athletics depends on aligning structures with reality.

The starting point is simple: football is different, not as a matter of moral priority, but as a matter of institutional reality.

Its revenues, roster sizes, media value, legal exposure, and cultural significance place pressures on the broader athletic system that no other sport creates in the same way.

Pretending otherwise has not preserved the collegiate model.

It has distorted it.

A more honest structure would allow football to be governed according to its unique realities while protecting the broader athletic ecosystem from being reorganized entirely around football’s commercial demands.

The goal is not to separate football because other sports do not matter.

It is to separate football because they do.

College athletics can remain broad, regional, educational, and culturally meaningful.

But only if its governance structure stops forcing every sport to live under football’s shadow.

A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.”
— James Madison, Federalist No. 62

Much of the current debate surrounding college football proceeds as though the sport were merely another entertainment product requiring economic optimization.

That view misses something important.

College football persists not simply because of television contracts or playoff revenue, but because it remains tied to regional identity, institutional tradition, and forms of emotional continuity uncommon in modern American life. Rivalries persist across generations. Stadiums become civic landmarks. Marching bands, fight songs, tailgates, and Saturday rituals create attachments that professional sports often struggle to replicate.

The regular season matters because individual games matter. Geography matters because institutions remain tied to actual places and communities. Even the imperfections of the sport—its asymmetries, traditions, and eccentricities—contribute to its distinctiveness.

These characteristics are not incidental to the value of college football.

They are the value.

The purpose of reform is therefore not to professionalize the sport beyond recognition or convert it into a weaker imitation of the NFL. It is to preserve the qualities that made the sport culturally significant while adapting its governing structure to realities the existing system can no longer manage effectively on its own.

I. A Regional Sport in a National Culture

Few major American institutions remain as regionally rooted as college football.

Professional sports increasingly operate as national entertainment products with relatively interchangeable structures and identities. College football remains different. Programs carry the identities of states, universities, and regions in ways that transcend the games themselves.

The Iron Bowl is not merely a contest between two football teams. Neither is Ohio State–Michigan, Texas–Oklahoma, or the Red River rivalry. These games function as recurring civic rituals tied to family history, institutional memory, and regional identity.

People inherit allegiances to college football in ways they often do not inherit allegiance to professional franchises.

That distinction matters.

It explains why conference realignment has generated resistance extending well beyond administrative inconvenience or nostalgia. Fans intuitively recognize that geography and continuity are not incidental features of the sport. They are part of what gives it meaning.

II. Why the Regular Season Matters

College football’s regular season possesses a level of urgency uncommon in modern sports.

Losses matter. Rivalry games matter. September games matter.

This has historically distinguished the sport from postseason-heavy professional systems in which large portions of the regular season function primarily as qualification exercises for expanded playoffs.

The pressure toward playoff expansion increasingly threatens that distinction.

A postseason involving twenty-four teams may maximize inventory and broadcast inventory, but it risks weakening the central competitive asset that makes college football uniquely valuable in the first place: the significance of individual Saturdays.

The sport derives much of its emotional intensity from scarcity.

Fans understand instinctively that a November game between undefeated rivals carries extraordinary stakes precisely because access to championships remains limited and difficult. Excessive expansion risks replacing that urgency with a more diluted model emphasizing participation over significance.

This does not mean the playoff should never evolve.

It does mean the sport should be governed by people whose incentives remain aligned with preserving the regular season rather than simply maximizing additional inventory.

The continuing debate surrounding the Army-Navy game illustrates the point clearly. Even amid discussions of playoff expansion and postseason restructuring, institutional leaders across the sport continue to recognize that certain traditions possess significance beyond television inventory alone.1

Army-Navy persists not because it maximizes commercial efficiency, but because it occupies a unique place within the history and identity of the sport itself. The fact that playoff expansion now threatens to collide with that tradition is less an isolated scheduling issue than evidence of a broader structural tension: the sport increasingly struggles to distinguish between what should evolve and what should be preserved.

III. The Importance of Institutional Identity

College football also differs from professional sports because the institutions themselves matter independently of athletic success.

Universities persist across generations. Alumni return to campuses decades after graduation. Stadiums become attached not only to teams, but to personal memory and institutional identity.

That continuity creates emotional investment extending beyond wins and losses.

A losing NFL franchise may relocate cities within a decade. A struggling college football program often remains deeply tied to the same institution, community, and traditions despite competitive decline.

This continuity gives the sport unusual resilience.

It also imposes obligations on the institutions governing it.

Short-term commercial optimization can damage traditions and relationships that took generations to develop. Rivalries disappear. Geographic coherence erodes. Entire portions of the sport begin to feel detached from the communities that sustained them originally.

These losses are not always immediately visible in quarterly revenue reports.

They are visible over time.

IV. Development Beyond Football

For all of the commercial pressures now surrounding the sport, it is also true that college football continues to function as a developmental institution in ways that are difficult to measure purely economically.

The cliché that football “turns boys into men” is easy to mock, and often overstated. Even so, many of us former players would recognize some truth beneath the phrase. For a large percentage of athletes, college football represents the first environment in which they encounter:

• meaningful personal accountability;

• sustained adversity;

• institutional expectations;

• and relationships extending beyond family and hometown identity.

Players arrive on campus as teenagers. Most leave several years later having experienced forms of discipline, pressure, responsibility, and personal growth that shape the rest of their lives regardless of whether professional football follows.

This does not occur perfectly or uniformly. Some programs fail these responsibilities badly. Some athletes experience the system primarily as extraction rather than development.

Even so, reducing college football entirely to commercial entertainment misses something real about why the institutional setting continues to matter.

The value of the sport has never resided solely in producing professional athletes. It has also resided in producing alumni, communities, relationships, and forms of personal development that persist long after football itself ends.

V. The Limits of Pure Commercial Logic

The modern economics of college football are unavoidable.

Television revenue, playoff expansion, athlete compensation, and conference consolidation now shape the structure of the sport in profound ways. Pretending otherwise is neither realistic nor especially helpful.

At the same time, purely commercial logic does not fully explain why college football remains valuable.

If revenue maximization alone governed the sport, many of its defining characteristics would already disappear:

• regional rivalries;

• marching bands;

• bowl traditions;

• campus settings;

• and the emotional distinctiveness separating college football from professional sports.

Many institutions have already experienced tension between these competing priorities. Conference expansion may increase media revenue while simultaneously weakening geographic identity and traditional rivalries. Expanded playoff structures may create additional inventory while reducing the significance of regular-season competition.

The point is not that commercial considerations are illegitimate.

It is that institutions governing college football must recognize they are stewarding something more culturally fragile than a generic entertainment product.

VI. The Problem With NFL Imitation

One of the recurring risks facing college football is gradual imitation of the NFL without acknowledgment that the two sports derive value from different qualities.

The NFL succeeds because:

• competitive parity is high;

• postseason advancement is broad;

• and franchise structures are centrally controlled.

College football historically succeeded for almost the opposite reasons:

• regional identity;

• institutional asymmetry;

• tradition;

• emotional continuity;

• and the significance of the regular season.

Attempting to convert college football into a slightly less efficient version of the NFL risks undermining the very qualities that distinguish it.

This tension already appears in debates surrounding:

• playoff expansion;

• conference consolidation;

• transfer rules;

• and scheduling structure.

Reform is necessary.

Imitation is not.

VII. Why Governance Matters Culturally

Questions of governance are often treated as technical or administrative.

In reality, governance shapes culture.

The institutions responsible for organizing the sport determine:

• how rivalries are preserved;

• whether geography matters;

• how postseason access is structured;

• how much continuity fans experience over time;

• and whether the regular season retains its significance.

These decisions are not culturally neutral.

Poor governance does not merely create legal instability or economic inefficiency. It gradually alters the character of the sport itself.

This is one reason the present moment matters.

The system is not simply negotiating compensation structures or media contracts. It is determining what college football will become over the next generation.

VIII. Preservation Through Adaptation

Preservation does not mean resisting all change.

College football has always evolved:

• scholarship rules changed;

• television restrictions disappeared;

• conferences expanded;

• and athlete compensation rules transformed substantially over time.

The question is not whether change occurs.

It is whether change occurs within a framework capable of preserving the qualities that made the sport valuable in the first place.

Some traditions are flexible. Others are foundational.

A governance system incapable of distinguishing between the two risks preserving nothing at all.

IX. Conclusion

College football is not merely a collection of television contracts and athletic departments temporarily cooperating for commercial purposes.

It is one of the few remaining American institutions that still combines:

• regional identity;

• intergenerational continuity;

• educational affiliation;

• and national cultural relevance at scale.

That does not exempt the sport from economic reality or legal scrutiny.

It does mean the consequences of institutional failure extend beyond balance sheets and conference politics.

The purpose of reform should therefore be larger than maximizing revenue or stabilizing litigation risk alone.

It should be to preserve a sport whose cultural significance emerged from traditions and institutional continuity that cannot easily be reconstructed once lost.

The challenge facing college football is not simply how to modernize.

It is how to modernize without surrendering the qualities that made the sport worth preserving in the first place.

“The vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty.”
— Alexander Hamilton

One of the central contradictions in modern college football is that the sport increasingly functions as the primary developmental system for professional football while continuing to operate under rules designed for a very different model of participation.

The current structure attempts to serve multiple purposes simultaneously:

• education;

• player development;

• commercial competition;

• institutional branding;

• and professional preparation.

Those objectives are not always aligned.

The result is a system in which eligibility rules, transfer policies, scheduling demands, and professional-development incentives often evolve independently of one another. Individual reforms address isolated problems while creating new tensions elsewhere in the structure.

This paper proceeds from a narrower claim.

A more coherent system would recognize openly that major college football serves simultaneously as a collegiate competition, a national entertainment enterprise, and the principal developmental pathway for professional football. Its rules should therefore be designed to support:

• player development;

• competitive stability;

• educational opportunity;

• and orderly professional transition at the same time.

The current framework does this inconsistently.

I. The Existing Developmental Model

Unlike basketball or baseball, football lacks a substantial alternative developmental structure for elite young players.

For practical purposes, major college football already performs that function.

NFL organizations rely heavily on collegiate programs to:

• identify talent;

• develop players physically;

• provide advanced competition;

• and prepare athletes for professional systems.

This arrangement benefits professional football enormously. It also places unique pressures on the college system itself.

Programs are expected to compete for championships while simultaneously functioning as developmental environments for athletes whose professional timelines differ substantially from traditional academic timelines.

The current rules do not always reflect that reality clearly.

II. Eligibility and Artificial Timelines

The existing eligibility structure combines several distinct concepts:

• amateur participation;

• academic enrollment;

• age-based development;

• and professional readiness.

These categories increasingly pull against one another.

Some athletes are professionally prepared before exhausting their collegiate eligibility. Others require substantial developmental time before approaching professional viability. Still others pursue education and athletics simultaneously without realistic professional aspirations at all.

The present system attempts to manage these different groups through uniform eligibility rules that often fit none of them particularly well.

That rigidity contributes to instability.

III. Earlier Professional Entry

A more coherent framework would likely permit greater flexibility for athletes prepared to enter professional football earlier.

At present, NFL eligibility rules effectively require players to wait three years after high school before entering the draft. Those restrictions emerged largely through collectively bargained agreements between the NFL and NFLPA rather than through independent legal mandate.

That reality matters.

Neither the NFL nor the NFL Players Association has significant incentive to alter the current arrangement voluntarily. The league benefits from a highly developed external training and evaluation system, while veteran players may reasonably view delayed entry as a mechanism that protects roster opportunities and compensation within the professional market.

From their perspective, the existing structure is rational.

At the same time, legal scrutiny may not end with the NCAA. As athlete compensation and mobility continue to evolve, restrictions on professional entry could eventually face broader examination as well—particularly if they are perceived less as developmental safeguards and more as barriers limiting economic opportunity for athletes already capable of professional participation.

The practical effect of the present system is that college football retains many elite players not necessarily because continued participation serves their developmental interests, but because alternative pathways remain restricted.

A different structure might permit:

• earlier draft eligibility;

• more flexible evaluation periods;

• or structured professional-development mechanisms allowing elite athletes to advance when genuinely prepared.

Not every player would benefit from accelerated entry.

Many would not.

The point is narrower: eligibility rules should reflect developmental realities rather than imposing artificial uniformity across fundamentally different career trajectories.

IV. Why Earlier Entry Benefits Multiple Parties

Greater flexibility in professional transition could benefit several participants simultaneously.

For athletes clearly prepared for professional competition, earlier entry reduces unnecessary delay and injury exposure while allowing earning potential to begin sooner.

For college football, it may reduce some of the distortions currently shaping roster construction and compensation escalation. Programs would devote fewer resources toward retaining players already functionally prepared for professional participation.

For the NFL, earlier identification and integration of elite talent could expand developmental flexibility and align the football pipeline more coherently.

None of this eliminates the importance of college football itself.

Most players would still develop within the collegiate system. Most athletes are not professionally ready after one or two seasons.

The objective is not to dismantle the relationship between college and professional football.

It is to align incentives more rationally.

V. Transfers and Development

The transfer portal has reshaped roster management across the sport.

Some movement reflects legitimate opportunity and player empowerment. At times, transfers correct poor institutional fits or allow athletes to pursue playing opportunities unavailable within their original programs.

At the same time, constant movement can undermine development.

Quarterbacks change offensive systems repeatedly. Linemen move between strength programs and coaching staffs. Teams increasingly rebuild significant portions of their roster annually through short-term acquisition rather than long-term cultivation.

The cumulative effect is a system that increasingly rewards immediate roster optimization over developmental continuity.

That shift carries competitive and institutional consequences.

VI. Structuring Mobility More Carefully

A more stable framework would likely preserve player mobility while organizing it more coherently.

This might include:

• clearly defined transfer windows;

• contractual notice periods;

• negotiated eligibility standards;

• and compensation structures tied to roster continuity.

The purpose would not be to restore the restrictive transfer rules of prior eras.

The current debate often treats stability and athlete freedom as inherently opposing concepts. In reality, sustainable systems generally require both.

Pure restriction produces rigidity and unfairness. Pure fluidity produces instability. Most durable competitive structures emerge somewhere between those extremes, preserving mobility while maintaining enough continuity for institutions, athletes, and fans to invest meaningfully in the system over time.

Those rules became difficult to justify legally and competitively.

The purpose instead would be to prevent unrestricted instability from becoming the default operating condition of the sport.

Professional sports systems routinely balance mobility with contractual structure. College football increasingly faces similar pressures even if its institutional setting remains distinct.

VII. Scheduling and Competitive Coherence

Scheduling remains another area where the present system increasingly lacks coherence.

Conference expansion has produced schedules often disconnected from geography, historical rivalry, and traditional competitive logic. At the same time, playoff expansion pressures institutions to optimize strength-of-schedule calculations in ways that can conflict with regional identity and fan interest.

The consequences are visible:

• reduced scheduling consistency;

• diminished rivalry continuity;

• and increased travel burdens across multiple sports.

A more coherent federated structure could establish:

• standardized scheduling principles;

• protected rivalry frameworks;

• clearer postseason qualification paths;

• and greater alignment between regular-season competition and playoff access.

These changes are not merely aesthetic.

College football derives much of its value from the significance and emotional continuity of the regular season itself.

Structures that weaken those characteristics risk damaging the long-term quality of the product.

VIII. The Calendar Problem

The current football calendar increasingly strains both athletes and institutions.

Transfer windows overlap with bowl preparation and playoff competition. Recruiting remains effectively year-round. Compensation negotiations occur continuously. Coaches and athletes operate within overlapping cycles that leave little true offseason stability.

The result is a system that often feels permanent rather than seasonal.

Recent discussions among conference leadership increasingly reflect recognition that these issues are interconnected rather than isolated. Questions involving playoff expansion, transfer timing, conference championship games, athlete recovery, scheduling flexibility, and even academic calendars now overlap in ways the existing structure struggles to manage coherently.1

The growing support for an earlier August start and a longer scheduling window reflects this broader realization. The issue is no longer merely when games begin. It is whether the sport possesses a calendar capable of accommodating postseason expansion, player movement, academic obligations, and athlete recovery without forcing all of them into direct conflict with one another.

A more coherent framework would likely impose greater structure on the calendar itself.

One plausible model might include:

• preseason reporting and camp in early August;

• a regular season beginning in late August during the current Week 0 window;

• two open dates across a fourteen-week regular season schedule;

• preservation of the Army-Navy game as a standalone national event on the first Saturday of December;

• a streamlined playoff structure beginning the following week;

• semifinal games permanently tied to the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl on or around January 1;

• and a national championship game approximately ten days later.

Such a structure would create greater flexibility while preserving several characteristics that distinguish college football from professional sports:

• the significance of the regular season;

• the importance of rivalry and bowl traditions;

• and a calendar that concludes before drifting excessively into the NFL postseason schedule.

Just as importantly, it would create cleaner separation between:

• postseason competition;

• transfer periods;

• recruiting cycles;

• and roster management.

The present calendar increasingly forces all of these systems to operate simultaneously.

A more rational system would recognize that competitive integrity depends not only on rules and compensation structures, but on time itself being organized coherently.

IX. Education and Institutional Identity

None of these reforms require abandoning the educational connection entirely.

College football remains tied to universities for good reasons:

• institutional identity;

• alumni engagement;

• campus culture;

• and developmental opportunity remain central features of the sport.

The objective is not to sever those relationships.

It is to recognize that educational participation and professional development now coexist within the same system and must be governed accordingly.

Some athletes will prioritize professional preparation. Others will prioritize education and long-term institutional affiliation. Most will pursue some combination of both.

A durable structure should accommodate those different objectives honestly rather than pretending they do not exist.

X. The Professional Pathway

The current system often treats professional transition as something external to college football itself.

In reality, the two systems are deeply interconnected.

NFL success depends heavily on collegiate development. College football visibility depends substantially on its relationship to elite professional talent. Fans follow both systems simultaneously, and athlete decision-making increasingly reflects awareness of both levels at once.

The relationship therefore requires more coordination than currently exists.

That does not mean college football becomes a minor league.

It means acknowledging openly that one of its core functions is developmental, and structuring eligibility, scheduling, compensation, and mobility rules accordingly.

The present system performs that role implicitly.

A more coherent one would perform it deliberately.

XI. Conclusion

The current structure of college football evolved incrementally over decades shaped by assumptions that no longer fully reflect the realities of the sport.

Eligibility rules, transfer systems, scheduling structures, and professional-development incentives now operate within an environment far more commercial, mobile, and legally complex than the one in which those rules originated.

Incremental adjustments have addressed portions of that tension without resolving it fully.

A more durable framework would begin from a simpler premise:

major college football is simultaneously a collegiate competition, a national entertainment enterprise, and the principal developmental pathway for professional football.

Its governing structure should reflect all three realities at once.

No system will eliminate every conflict between those objectives.

A coherent one need only align them more effectively than the present structure does now.

“The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power.”
— James Madison

The current compensation system in college football is neither fully regulated nor fully market-based.

It exists instead as a patchwork of NIL arrangements, institutional payments, booster involvement, evolving settlement structures, and legal uncertainty. Compensation has expanded dramatically, but the framework governing it remains fragmented and unstable.

This condition satisfies few participants for long.

Athletes face uncertainty regarding contracts, movement, and long-term protections. Institutions operate within escalating competitive pressures without a durable structure governing compensation or roster stability. Enforcement remains inconsistent, and litigation continues to reshape the system incrementally.

The problem is no longer whether athletes should receive compensation.

That question has already been answered.

The issue now is whether college football can construct a compensation framework capable of enduring legally, competitively, and economically over time.

I. The Present System

The modern compensation environment emerged rapidly.

NIL was initially framed as a mechanism through which athletes could profit from legitimate commercial activity involving their name, image, and likeness. In practice, it evolved into something broader: a decentralized market through which institutions, collectives, sponsors, and donors compete for players through a combination of commercial arrangements and indirect recruiting incentives.

At the same time, the House settlement and related reforms accelerated movement toward direct revenue sharing by institutions themselves. The NCAA agreed to nearly $2.8 billion in back damages and authorized schools to share substantial revenue directly with athletes going forward1.

These developments altered the system permanently.

Compensation is no longer peripheral to college football.

It is one of its organizing realities.

II. Compensation Without Structure

The difficulty is not the existence of compensation itself.

Professional and commercial sports systems have long operated with compensated athletes. The difficulty lies in the absence of a stable framework governing how compensation interacts with recruiting, roster management, transfers, and institutional obligations.

At present:

• some compensation flows through schools;

• some through collectives;

• some through independent sponsorship arrangements;

• and some through structures that blur those distinctions almost entirely.

Oversight remains uneven.

The College Sports Commission and related clearinghouse mechanisms have attempted to review NIL arrangements for legitimacy and fair-market value, but enforcement remains contested and legally uncertain.

The result is a system that operates partly through formal rules and partly through negotiated improvisation.

That condition is difficult to sustain indefinitely.

III. The Problem of Competitive Escalation

Compensation systems without coordinated rules tend to produce escalation.

No institution can easily reduce spending unilaterally without risking competitive disadvantage. At the same time, few institutions possess unlimited resources. The result is an environment in which competitive pressure steadily expands compensation expectations across the market.

This dynamic is already visible.

Quarterbacks and other premium-position players now command valuations resembling professional free agency markets.

At the same time, institutions remain bound by:

• fixed media agreements;

• donor limitations;

• Title IX obligations;

• and internal budget constraints that differ substantially across programs.

Absent structure, the pressure to escalate rarely stabilizes on its own.

IV. Why Contracts Become Necessary

A compensation system of this scale cannot operate indefinitely through informal understandings.

Over time, the incentives of both athletes and institutions point toward enforceable agreements.

Institutions seek:

• roster stability;

• predictable obligations;

• and protection against short-term departures after substantial investment.

Athletes seek:

• guaranteed compensation;

• clearer expectations;

• and enforceable rights rather than discretionary promises.

Those incentives naturally produce contracts.

The present system already points in this direction. NIL agreements increasingly contain detailed obligations, arbitration provisions, and liquidated-damages clauses tied to transfers or early departure2.

These arrangements remain legally unsettled in many respects, but the broader trajectory is difficult to miss.

As compensation becomes more institutionalized, purely informal systems become less viable.

V. Contractual Architecture

A more mature compensation system would likely distinguish between different categories of athlete compensation rather than forcing all payments into a single conceptual bucket.

That distinction already exists elsewhere in college athletics. Coaching agreements often separate compensation for coaching services from compensation tied to media obligations, promotional activity, intellectual property, or the institution’s right to use the coach’s name, image, likeness, and related publicity rights.

Athlete agreements may eventually develop along similar lines.

One agreement, or one portion of an agreement, could govern athletic participation, institutional compensation, educational benefits, health protections, roster obligations, and dispute resolution. Another could govern the school’s use of the athlete’s name, image, likeness, voice, signature, biography, highlights, merchandise rights, and promotional appearances.

Such a structure would not eliminate every legal issue. Coaches and athletes occupy different legal positions, and athlete contracts would raise distinct questions involving employment status, eligibility, collective representation, and gender equity.

But the basic point remains important: athletes provide multiple forms of value to institutions.

They provide competitive value as participants in games. They provide promotional value through their identities and public association with the school. They provide media value through highlights, broadcasts, documentaries, video games, and other forms of content. And they provide institutional value by becoming part of the school’s athletic history and public identity.

The present system often blurs those categories.

A more durable one would define them.

VI. Mobility and Stability

The transfer portal has expanded athlete mobility substantially.

That development addressed legitimate concerns under the prior system, where movement restrictions often operated in ways difficult to justify legally or competitively.

At the same time, unrestricted mobility carries costs of its own.

The present system also creates increasingly distorted incentives surrounding player development itself.

Programs that identify, recruit, and develop athletes over multiple seasons may lose those players immediately after breakthrough performance with little institutional protection or continuity in return. In practice, this can transform portions of the sport into a loosely organized developmental marketplace in which certain institutions bear the costs of long-term player development while others capitalize on the finished product.

That dynamic is difficult to sustain indefinitely.

Most competitive systems eventually develop mechanisms recognizing that development itself carries value. The purpose of such mechanisms is not necessarily to restrict movement, but to avoid creating incentives that punish institutions for investing in long-term athlete growth.

Institutions now re-recruit portions of their rosters annually. Athletes make high-stakes decisions within compressed windows and incomplete information. Compensation negotiations increasingly overlap with transfer timing, creating incentives that are often short-term in orientation.

A more stable system would likely preserve mobility while structuring it more carefully.

This might include:

• defined transfer windows;

• contractual notice periods;

• negotiated eligibility rules;

• and compensation structures that recognize both athlete freedom and institutional investment.

The objective is not to eliminate movement.

It is to prevent constant instability from becoming the organizing principle of roster construction.

VII. Compensation and Collective Bargaining

The legal pressures surrounding compensation increasingly point toward negotiated structures.

As discussed previously, unilateral restrictions imposed by institutions face substantial antitrust risk. Negotiated arrangements, by contrast, may receive different treatment under established labor principles.

This is one reason collective bargaining or similar negotiated systems continue to gain attention within college athletics.

Professional sports provide the clearest example.

The NFL’s compensation framework—including salary structures, free agency rules, roster limits, and revenue distribution—operates not because those rules avoid legal scrutiny entirely, but because they emerge through collectively negotiated agreements.

College football differs in important respects, particularly given its connection to educational institutions.

Even so, the underlying principle remains relevant.

Coordinated compensation systems are generally more sustainable when they are negotiated rather than imposed unilaterally.

VIII. Competitive Balance and the Limits of Equality

No realistic compensation system will eliminate resource disparities among institutions.

College football has never operated on perfectly equal footing, nor has competitive imbalance emerged solely from NIL or revenue sharing. Facilities, recruiting geography, donor support, institutional commitment, and historical success have long influenced competitive outcomes.

The goal of a compensation framework is therefore not complete equality.

It is sustainability.

A durable system must:

• prevent runaway escalation;

• preserve meaningful competition;

• and ensure that institutions can participate without constantly operating at the edge of financial instability.

That may require:

• negotiated compensation parameters;

• luxury-tax or redistribution mechanisms;

• revenue-sharing formulas;

• or other structures designed to preserve broad participation without imposing artificial parity.

The precise mechanisms are less important than the principle itself.

Competition functions best when participants believe the system remains viable over time.

IX. A Hypothetical Athlete

Consider a highly recruited quarterback entering the proposed federated system.

Under the present structure, his compensation may derive from:

• several NIL agreements;

• collective promises;

• booster relationships;

• institutional arrangements;

• and informal assurances that may or may not survive coaching changes or transfer movement.

The legal status of many of these arrangements remains uncertain. Enforcement varies. Long-term obligations are often unclear.

Under a negotiated federated structure, that same athlete might instead receive:

• defined institutional compensation;

• collectively negotiated benefits;

• health and insurance protections;

• transparent transfer rules;

• and contractual rights enforceable through standardized dispute-resolution mechanisms.

If he chooses to transfer before the expiration of his agreement, certain financial consequences might apply—not as punitive restraints on movement, but as negotiated terms reflecting institutional investment and contractual expectations.

Professional sports systems routinely operate under similar principles.

The difference is not the existence of mobility.

It is that mobility occurs within a defined framework.

X. The Role of Damages and Buyouts

One of the more contentious issues in the current environment involves transfer-related compensation disputes.

Institutions and collectives increasingly seek mechanisms to protect against substantial expenditures followed by immediate athlete departure. Athletes, meanwhile, resist arrangements that function as disguised restrictions on movement.

The emerging litigation in this area reflects a broader structural tension3.

A durable system would likely address this through negotiated standards governing:

• liquidated damages;

• buyout provisions;

• transfer compensation;

• and contractual termination rights.

Such mechanisms already exist throughout professional sports and commercial employment relationships.

The key issue is not whether these tools are permissible in principle. It is whether they arise through negotiated systems with sufficient procedural legitimacy and legal foundation.

Over time, systems emphasizing institutional compensation rather than direct athlete penalty structures may prove both more workable and more legitimate. Negotiated transfer compensation between participating institutions, for example, may create fewer concerns than frameworks perceived primarily as punitive restrictions on player movement itself.

The distinction matters.

A durable system should seek not merely to limit mobility, but to balance athlete freedom with recognition that development, roster continuity, and institutional investment possess legitimate value as well.

XI. Football Exceptionalism and Title IX

One of the most difficult questions surrounding any compensation structure involves Title IX.

That issue cannot be treated casually. Women’s athletics and Olympic sports remain important institutional and educational components of the collegiate model, and any major restructuring of football economics would inevitably raise difficult legal and political questions regarding gender equity and resource allocation.

At the same time, football already occupies an economically exceptional position within college athletics.

No other collegiate sport combines:

• comparable revenue generation;

• comparable roster size;

• comparable media value;

• and comparable influence over conference structure and institutional finance.

For decades, the broader athletic system has effectively been organized around football economics while simultaneously attempting to treat football as structurally indistinguishable from every other sport. That tension is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

A more separated football governance structure may ultimately provide greater clarity rather than less. Questions surrounding direct compensation, employment classification, and negotiated revenue sharing may prove easier to analyze if major football operates under partially distinct legal and institutional assumptions rather than remaining embedded within a single undifferentiated model of collegiate athletics.

This is particularly true because football lacks a direct equivalent elsewhere in the collegiate sports structure. No women’s sport operates at comparable roster scale, revenue generation, or commercial significance within the existing collegiate structure. Attempting to fit football’s economic model neatly within assumptions designed for the broader collegiate athletic system increasingly creates tension not only for football itself, but for the continued administration of non-revenue and Olympic sports as well.

None of this eliminates the importance of gender equity protections.

It does suggest that preserving broad-based athletics may eventually require more structural honesty about the uniquely commercial role football already occupies within the system.

XII. Conclusion

The era in which college football could avoid confronting compensation directly has ended.

Athletes now participate in a system generating extraordinary economic value. Institutions compete within markets shaped increasingly by compensation, transfers, and negotiated leverage. Courts continue to apply ordinary legal principles to relationships once treated as exceptional.

The remaining question is not whether compensation will exist.

It is whether the structure surrounding it can become stable enough to endure.

That stability is unlikely to emerge through informal arrangements alone. It will require contracts, negotiated rules, enforceable obligations, and institutions capable of managing competitive pressures coherently over time.

No compensation system will eliminate every dispute or every imbalance.

A sustainable one need only accomplish something narrower, but more important:

to create a framework in which competition, mobility, and compensation can coexist without continuously destabilizing the sport itself.

“Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct.”
— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 8

The prior papers have described the forces reshaping college football: the erosion of NCAA authority, the growing instability of the current compensation system, the fragmented football calendar, the increasing role of litigation, and the practical limits of the existing structure.

Those pressures do not dictate a single solution.

They do, however, narrow the range of plausible ones.

A durable system must satisfy several conditions simultaneously. It must operate within existing legal constraints. It must provide institutions with a workable framework for coordination. It must recognize the economic realities of the modern sport while preserving the competitive characteristics that make college football distinct.

Just as importantly, it must be capable of surviving contact with reality.

This paper proceeds from a narrower claim than many reform proposals. It does not attempt to design a perfect system, nor does it assume that longstanding tensions between institutions, athletes, conferences, and media partners can be eliminated entirely.

It argues instead that the most plausible long-term framework is a federated structure: a system in which authority is shared, incentives are aligned more coherently, and major college football is governed through institutions designed specifically for the conditions under which the sport now operates.

I. Why a Federated Structure Is the Most Plausible Outcome

The present system lacks a coherent center of authority.

The NCAA retains formal governance power, but its ability to impose durable rules has weakened. Conferences possess significant influence, yet their incentives increasingly diverge. Individual institutions operate with growing independence, while courts and external actors now shape outcomes that were once controlled internally.

At the same time, full centralization is neither politically realistic nor especially desirable.

College football remains rooted in institutions with distinct histories, regional identities, and competitive priorities. Conferences continue to provide meaningful value as organizing structures, both culturally and commercially.

A federated system reflects those realities more accurately than either extreme.

Under such a model:

• core governance functions would be centralized;

• conferences would continue to organize competition within that framework; and

• institutions would retain substantial autonomy outside those areas requiring coordinated rules.

The objective is not centralization for its own sake. It is the creation of a structure capable of producing enforceable rules while preserving the decentralized features that continue to make the sport distinctive.

II. The Federation Itself

At the center of the system would be a new governing entity devoted exclusively to major college football.

This body would not replace the NCAA across all sports, nor would it function as a traditional commissioner’s office with unilateral authority over every aspect of competition. Its legitimacy would depend on representation, defined jurisdiction, and negotiated authority.

Its responsibilities would likely include:

• governance of competition;

• administration of compensation frameworks;

• transfer and eligibility rules;

• enforcement and dispute resolution;

• scheduling standards;

• postseason administration; and

• negotiation with athlete representatives.

The structure matters as much as the powers themselves.

A system governed solely by institutions would encounter many of the same legal vulnerabilities that now constrain the NCAA. A system governed solely through athlete leverage would struggle to produce stable coordination across participants with vastly different resources and objectives.

A more durable framework would likely require representation from:

• participating institutions;

• conferences;

• athlete representatives; and

• independent members responsible for oversight, integrity, and dispute resolution.

No constituency would fully control the system.

That is not a flaw. It is the point.

III. Membership, Tiers, and Competitive Alignment

Not every institution participates in college football at the same level of commitment, investment, or national significance.

The current system recognizes this informally while refusing to acknowledge it structurally. The result is constant tension between institutions pursuing fundamentally different competitive and economic objectives.

A federated model would address this more directly.

The highest tier would likely consist initially of the institutions already operating within the current power-conference structure, together with other programs capable of meeting the obligations associated with participation.

Importantly, this would not function as a permanently closed system.

Participation would depend less on historical status than on continued commitment to the requirements of the structure itself:

• investment thresholds;

• scholarship and facility standards;

• compensation participation;

• governance obligations; and

• sustained competitive commitment.

A more transparent competitive structure would also make visible something the current system often obscures: not every institution will participate indefinitely at the highest level of major college football.

That reality already exists in practice. Financial commitment, competitive investment, donor support, facilities, recruiting infrastructure, and institutional priorities already differ dramatically across the sport. The present system merely masks those disparities through unstable conference alignments and formal labels that no longer reflect operational reality consistently. (As an alum of a Group 5 school, I know this firsthand.)

Acknowledging those differences openly is not punitive.

It is more honest than pretending all institutions continue to operate under identical conditions.

The present system already contains functional tiers. They are simply unstable, inconsistently governed, and obscured by formal labels that no longer reflect operational reality.

The question is not whether differentiation exists.

It is whether that differentiation should occur transparently within a coherent structure rather than through endless realignment and escalating institutional conflict.

Movement between tiers would likely occur gradually and infrequently. American sports traditions make full promotion and relegation improbable, and existing institutional relationships make immediate exclusion politically unrealistic.

Over time, however, participation would increasingly reflect the realities of competition and commitment rather than legacy affiliation alone.

IV. Conferences and the Preservation of Influence

Conferences would not disappear under a federated system.

They would evolve.

Their role would remain substantial:

• organizing scheduling within federation parameters;

• preserving rivalries and regional identity;

• administering conference competition; and

• participating directly in governance through federation representation.

What changes is the source of ultimate authority.

At present, conferences increasingly function as quasi-sovereign actors competing for media leverage, institutional advantage, and survival. That structure contributes directly to instability. Realignment decisions are often driven less by the long-term health of the sport than by short-term positioning within media negotiations and conference politics.

This dynamic is difficult to sustain indefinitely.

A federated structure offers conferences something the current environment increasingly struggles to provide: preservation through coordination.

This does not mean conferences surrender authority without resistance. Many will be reluctant to cede power over scheduling, revenue, or governance. Some may reasonably fear diminished autonomy within a broader framework.

Those concerns are legitimate.

The alternative, however, is not preservation of the current system. It is continued fragmentation.

Absent a more coherent structure, authority is likely to continue shifting:

• toward courts;

• toward media partners;

• toward individual institutions acting independently; and

• toward external compensation markets beyond meaningful institutional control.

In that environment, conferences retain names and contracts, but lose influence over the broader direction of the sport.

The federated model does not eliminate conferences. It provides a framework within which they can continue to matter.

V. Rulemaking and Enforcement

One of the clearest weaknesses of the present system is the widening gap between rulemaking and enforcement.

Rules continue to exist, but enforcement is often delayed, contested, inconsistent, or reshaped by litigation before it is completed. Participants increasingly operate within a system where the practical consequences of violating rules are uncertain.

That condition undermines legitimacy over time.

A federated structure would not eliminate disputes or legal pressure, but it could produce a more coherent process.

Rules affecting competition, compensation, eligibility, and movement would likely emerge through negotiated procedures involving both institutions and athlete representatives. Governance would become less unilateral and more procedural.

That distinction matters legally as well as practically.

Enforcement would require:

• independent investigative authority;

• standardized penalty structures;

• defined adjudication procedures; and

• formal appellate mechanisms.

The objective is not aggressive punishment for its own sake.

It is predictability.

Participants must understand not only what the rules are, but how they are likely to be applied.

At present, that clarity often does not exist.

VI. Athlete Representation and Negotiated Governance

As discussed in the prior paper, the long-term trajectory of the sport increasingly points toward some form of negotiated governance.

This does not necessarily require college football to replicate every feature of professional labor systems. The institutional setting remains different, and any eventual structure would likely develop in ways unique to higher education.

Even so, purely unilateral governance appears increasingly difficult to sustain.

A federated system would therefore likely include formal mechanisms for athlete representation in negotiations involving:

• compensation frameworks;

• transfer rules;

• eligibility standards;

• scheduling and calendar issues; and

• health and safety matters.

The significance of this arrangement is not limited to participation alone.

Negotiated structures may provide stronger legal footing for coordinated rules that would otherwise face substantial antitrust scrutiny if imposed unilaterally.

That reality is already becoming visible across the sport.

VII. The Competitive Structure

The quality of the competitive product remains one of college football’s greatest strengths.

The regular season carries unusual significance. Rivalries retain emotional weight. Regional identity still matters in ways largely absent from professional sports.

Those features should be preserved carefully.

At present, however, the structure surrounding the sport often undermines them. Scheduling lacks coherence. Competitive alignment is uneven. The postseason operates partially outside the broader framework of the season itself.

The playoff debate illustrates the larger problem.

Expansion proposals increasingly reflect institutional politics and media incentives rather than the competitive logic of the sport. A twenty-four-team playoff may create additional inventory, but it risks weakening the regular season—the single most valuable competitive asset college football possesses.

The sport does not benefit from becoming a diluted imitation of professional postseason structures.

It benefits from preserving the importance of each Saturday.

A federated model would allow for:

• more coherent scheduling;

• clearer competitive tiers;

• integrated postseason qualification;

• reduced mismatch games; and

• greater year-to-year continuity.

The objective is not to eliminate unpredictability or regional variation. Those qualities remain central to the appeal of the sport.

The objective is to ensure that the structure surrounding the competition reinforces those strengths rather than gradually eroding them.

Institutions charged with governing college football should be incentivized not merely to maximize inventory, but to preserve the qualities that made the product valuable in the first place.

VIII. Economic Coordination and Competitive Sustainability

The economic structure of the current system is increasingly fragmented.

Media rights remain tied largely to conferences. Compensation flows through a combination of institutional resources and external NIL arrangements. Spending continues to escalate without a stable framework governing how costs, obligations, and competitive balance interact over time.

This environment creates pressures that are difficult to coordinate effectively.

Institutions compete simultaneously:

• for players;

• for media leverage;

• for conference positioning; and

• for donor and sponsorship support.

No participant can easily reduce spending unilaterally without risking competitive disadvantage.

Over time, this produces the familiar dynamics of escalation.

A federated structure would not eliminate economic inequality. College football has never operated on perfectly equal footing, and no realistic system will entirely erase resource differences between institutions.

The goal is narrower and more practical.

It is to create a framework within which competition remains sustainable.

That likely requires:

• coordinated approaches to compensation;

• clearer relationships between institutional spending and system revenues;

• more transparent economic obligations;

• and some form of shared governance over national commercial assets.

The precise mechanisms would remain subject to negotiation and adjustment over time.

That uncertainty is unavoidable.

What matters is the existence of a structure capable of managing those negotiations coherently rather than leaving them entirely to fragmented market pressures and ad hoc institutional behavior.

IX. Separation from the NCAA and the Reordering of Incentives

Under a federated model, major college football would operate separately from the NCAA while other sports remain within more traditional collegiate structures.

This separation reflects practical realities rather than hostility toward the NCAA itself.

Football now operates at a national commercial scale with legal and economic pressures that differ substantially from those affecting most other collegiate sports.

A more clearly separated football structure may also help clarify increasingly difficult legal questions surrounding compensation and Title IX. Football already operates economically unlike any other collegiate sport, with roster sizes, revenues, and commercial significance that fundamentally shape the broader athletic system around it.

For decades, the broader athletic system has effectively been organized around football economics while simultaneously attempting to treat football as structurally indistinguishable from every other sport. That tension is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

This is particularly true because football lacks a direct equivalent elsewhere in the collegiate sports structure. No women’s sport operates at comparable roster scale, revenue generation, or commercial significance. Attempting to fit football’s economic model neatly within assumptions designed for the broader collegiate athletic system increasingly creates tension not only for football itself, but for the continued administration of non-revenue and Olympic sports as well.

A separate football governance structure would not eliminate those challenges entirely. It may, however, allow them to be addressed more transparently than the present system permits.

Attempting to govern both environments under the same assumptions has increasingly distorted the incentives of each.

The consequences are visible well beyond football.

Conference realignment driven primarily by football economics has imposed growing burdens on non-revenue and Olympic sports. Athletes in sports with fundamentally regional competitive traditions now travel across multiple time zones for routine conference competition.

A softball player at UCLA should not routinely travel to State College because football television contracts required conference consolidation.

A more regional structure for non-football sports is not a retreat.

It is a restoration of competitive logic.

Under a separated system:

• football could operate within a national framework appropriate to its scale;

• non-revenue sports could return to more regional competition;

• and institutions could manage both structures simultaneously without forcing one to distort the other.

The NCAA would continue to serve an important function.

It simply would no longer attempt to govern a sport whose scale and legal realities have exceeded the framework for which it was designed.

A separate football governance structure may also clarify legal questions surrounding compensation and Title IX that become increasingly difficult to manage within a single undifferentiated model of collegiate athletics.

X. Implementation and the Pace of Change

No plausible transition occurs overnight.

The institutions most likely to participate in a federated system remain bound together by:

• conference relationships;

• media agreements;

• grant-of-rights provisions;

• postseason arrangements; and

• political realities that cannot simply be ignored.

The transition therefore would likely unfold incrementally.

Initial coordination would probably emerge among institutions already operating within the current power structure. Governance principles could develop before formal separation occurs. Negotiated frameworks might initially operate alongside existing agreements rather than replacing them immediately.

Major transition points would likely coincide with:

• expiring media contracts;

• playoff renegotiations;

• settlement structures;

• or broader legal developments affecting athlete compensation and employment status.

In practice, reform is less likely to resemble revolution than migration.

The system changes gradually until the old structure no longer serves as the primary source of authority.

That process is already beginning.

XI. A Structure Designed to Endure

No governing structure eliminates conflict.

College football will continue to contain competing interests, unequal resources, legal disputes, and institutional tension regardless of how it is organized.

The question is whether those conflicts occur within a framework capable of managing them coherently.

The current system increasingly struggles to do so.

A federated structure does not promise perfection. It does not eliminate politics, economic disparities, or competitive pressure.

It offers something narrower, but more important.

A system capable of producing rules that participants recognize as legitimate, that courts are more likely to sustain, and that preserve the distinctive qualities of the sport over time.

That is not a complete solution to every problem facing college football.

It is, however, the most plausible foundation upon which one could be built.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
— James Madison, Federalist No. 51

The preceding papers have described the pressures reshaping college football: the erosion of NCAA authority, the instability of the current compensation system, the growing role of litigation, and the increasingly misaligned incentives facing both institutions and athletes.

Those pressures point toward a common conclusion.

The present system lacks a mechanism capable of producing durable rules.

That problem is now more significant than any individual dispute over compensation, eligibility, or transfers. College football does not simply face disagreement over outcomes. It lacks a framework through which those disagreements can be resolved in a stable and legally defensible way.

This paper proceeds from a narrower claim than some advocates on either side might prefer. It does not argue that college football must fully replicate professional sports. Nor does it assume that athletes and institutions will immediately embrace formal unionization in its traditional form.

It argues instead that some form of negotiated structure is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid.

I. The Problem With Unilateral Governance

For most of its history, college athletics operated through unilateral rulemaking.

The NCAA and its member institutions established rules governing compensation, eligibility, transfers, and competitive structure. Athletes participated within that framework, but did not meaningfully participate in constructing it.

That arrangement depended on two assumptions:

• that the NCAA possessed sufficient authority to impose uniform rules; and

• that courts would largely defer to those rules as part of the amateur model of college sports.

Neither assumption holds with the same force today.

As discussed previously, courts now treat many NCAA restrictions as coordinated market restraints subject to antitrust scrutiny. At the same time, the economic realities of major college football have made purely unilateral governance increasingly difficult to sustain.

The result is a system in which rules continue to exist, but their legal footing is uncertain and their enforcement increasingly inconsistent.

II. Litigation Is Not a Governing System

At present, many of the most consequential changes in college sports occur through litigation.

Compensation limits have been weakened through antitrust cases. Eligibility restrictions have been challenged in federal court. Employment questions continue to develop through labor litigation and administrative proceedings.

This process produces change, but not stability.

Courts resolve disputes presented to them. They do not design comprehensive governance systems. As a result, outcomes tend to emerge incrementally and reactively, often without broader coordination among the parties affected.

The House settlement illustrates the point. The agreement fundamentally reshaped athlete compensation and authorized direct revenue sharing, but it did not resolve the broader structural questions surrounding labor status, enforcement, or long-term governance1.

That uncertainty remains.

III. Why Negotiated Systems Endure

In professional sports, the most stable rules governing compensation, free agency, eligibility, roster limits, and player movement are generally not imposed unilaterally.

They are negotiated.

Collective bargaining does not eliminate disputes, nor does it eliminate legal scrutiny entirely. It does, however, create a mechanism through which competing interests can establish rules with greater legitimacy and stronger legal footing.

That distinction matters under antitrust law.

Courts have long recognized a non-statutory labor exemption that protects many collectively bargained restraints from ordinary antitrust challenge2.

This is one reason professional leagues are able to operate systems involving salary caps, draft restrictions, free agency rules, and roster limitations that would be difficult to sustain if imposed unilaterally.

College football increasingly confronts the same structural problem.

Institutions seek coordination and predictability. Athletes seek compensation, mobility, and enforceable protections. Litigation alone cannot reliably produce a framework balancing those interests over time.

IV. The Emerging Case for Representation

The question, then, is not simply whether athletes should receive additional compensation or rights.

It is whether the system can continue functioning without some mechanism for representation and negotiation.

That possibility is no longer theoretical.

Courts and labor authorities have increasingly considered whether college athletes may qualify as employees under federal law3.

At the same time, institutional actors like college athletic directors themselves have begun openly discussing collective bargaining as a potential path toward stability4.

This shift reflects a practical reality.

A negotiated framework may offer institutions something the current system cannot: a more durable legal basis for coordinated rules.

V. The Institutional Reluctance

Even so, substantial obstacles remain.

Many institutions resist formal employment status for athletes, in part because of the potential consequences:

• wage-and-hour obligations

• collective labor rights

• workers’ compensation exposure

• Title IX implications

• expanded administrative burdens

These concerns are not trivial.

Nor are they limited to universities. Legislators, conferences, and governing bodies have all explored ways to preserve elements of the existing system while avoiding broader employment classification.

The difficulty is that legal pressure continues to move in the opposite direction.

The current system increasingly resembles a commercial labor market while attempting to avoid many of the structures that typically accompany one.

That tension becomes harder to sustain over time.

VI. The Problem of Representation

One of the central unresolved questions involves representation itself.

If college football ultimately moves toward negotiated governance, the structure through which athletes are represented remains uncertain. Collective bargaining in traditional labor settings typically depends upon clearly defined employment relationships and bargaining units. College athletics presently lacks many of those features.

Important questions remain unresolved:

• whether athletes would be considered employees;

• whether representation would occur institutionally, by conference, or federation-wide;

• whether football athletes would bargain separately from other sports;

• and how universities themselves would participate within such a structure.

No obvious framework currently commands universal support.

That uncertainty is significant, but it should not be overstated. Many governance systems evolve institutionally only after the pressures necessitating them become unavoidable. The absence of a final structure does not eliminate the underlying incentives pushing institutions and athletes toward negotiated coordination.

Indeed, much of the current instability reflects the fact that the sport increasingly functions like a negotiated labor market without possessing institutions fully capable of governing one.

VII. Negotiation Without Complete Professionalization

None of this necessarily requires college football to become identical to the NFL.

A negotiated framework could take multiple forms.

Representation might occur:

• at the conference level

• through a federation structure

• through player associations rather than traditional unions

• through hybrid bargaining systems tailored to the realities of higher education

The precise mechanism matters less than the underlying principle.

Rules affecting compensation, movement, and working conditions become more sustainable when they emerge through negotiated structures rather than unilateral restriction.

VIII. Why the Current Direction Points Toward Bargaining

The present trajectory of college athletics increasingly points in this direction whether institutions formally embrace it or not.

Compensation is expanding. Revenue sharing now exists. NIL markets continue to evolve. Athletes are exercising greater leverage over movement and participation. Courts continue to apply ordinary legal principles to the system.

At the same time, institutions continue seeking:

• predictable rules

• spending controls

• transfer limitations

• roster stability

Those objectives are difficult to achieve through unilateral regulation alone.

Over time, the pressure to establish negotiated constraints rather than imposed ones is likely to increase.

IX. The Mechanism

The central issue is therefore not whether every feature of professional labor relations should be imported into college football.

It is whether the sport can continue operating without a mechanism capable of producing durable, legally sustainable rules.

The existing model increasingly struggles to do so.

Litigation produces fragmentation. Unilateral governance produces legal exposure. Ad hoc reform produces instability.

A negotiated framework does not eliminate those pressures entirely, but it offers a structure through which competing interests can be aligned more coherently.

That is the mechanism currently missing from the system.

X. Conclusion

College football has reached the point where governance questions can no longer be separated from legal and economic realities.

The system now operates within conditions that resemble labor markets, commercial enterprises, and negotiated industries far more than the amateur framework from which it emerged.

Whether the final structure takes the form of formal unionization, player associations, conference bargaining, or some hybrid arrangement, the underlying trend is increasingly clear.

Durable rules are more likely to emerge through negotiation than through unilateral restriction.

The system does not yet fully acknowledge that reality.

It is nevertheless moving toward it.

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
— James Madison

The structure of college football is no longer shaped solely by internal rules or institutional preferences.

It is shaped, in increasingly direct ways, by law.

Over the past decade, litigation has moved from the margins of college athletics to its center. Courts have not replaced the NCAA or the conferences as governing bodies, but they have altered the range of permissible rules and the assumptions on which those rules rest.

This shift has practical consequences. It limits how institutions can coordinate. It affects how compensation is structured. It raises questions about the legal status of athletes themselves.

Any system that ignores these constraints will not endure.

This paper proceeds from a simple premise: a stable framework for college football must be built in a manner that is consistent with existing legal principles, rather than dependent on exceptions to them.

I. Antitrust as the Governing Constraint

The central legal issue in modern college athletics is not obscure.

It is antitrust law.

The NCAA and its member institutions operate as participants in a market. When they act collectively to limit compensation, restrict movement, or define the terms of participation, those actions are subject to scrutiny under the Sherman Act.

This has been clear for some time.

In O’Bannon v. NCAA, the Ninth Circuit held that NCAA rules restricting compensation for the use of athletes’ names, images, and likenesses functioned as an unlawful restraint of trade.

The court rejected the argument that amateurism, standing alone, insulated those rules from antitrust review. Instead, it applied the “rule of reason,” requiring the NCAA to justify its restrictions in terms of their actual competitive effects.1

That approach has since been reinforced.

In NCAA v. Alston, the Supreme Court unanimously held that limits on certain forms of athlete compensation violated federal antitrust law.

The decision did not resolve every question, but it clarified an important point: the NCAA is not exempt from ordinary legal analysis. Its rules must be evaluated in the same way as other forms of coordinated conduct among market participants.

That principle governs the field.

II. The Limits of Coordinated Restraints

Under antitrust law, coordination among competitors is not inherently unlawful.

It becomes problematic when it restricts competition without sufficient justification.

The NCAA’s traditional model depended on coordinated limits—on compensation, on movement, and on the structure of participation. Those limits were defended as necessary to preserve amateurism and competitive balance.

Courts have been willing to consider those justifications.

They have been less willing to accept them without evidence.

The result is a narrowing space in which such restraints can operate. Rules must be tailored, defensible, and supported by demonstrable effects. Broad prohibitions, particularly those affecting compensation, are increasingly difficult to sustain.

This does not eliminate the possibility of coordinated rules.

It constrains how they are designed.

III. The Emerging Labor Question

Antitrust law is not the only source of pressure.

A related issue has begun to take shape in the courts: whether college athletes should be treated, for certain purposes, as employees.

That question is not yet fully resolved. It has, however, advanced far enough to alter the legal landscape.

In cases such as Johnson v. NCAA, plaintiffs have argued that athletes perform services under conditions that resemble an employment relationship, without receiving the protections typically associated with that status2.

If courts were to accept that characterization, the implications would be substantial. Wage-and-hour laws, collective bargaining rights, and other forms of labor regulation could apply.

Even without a definitive ruling, the direction of travel is evident.

The legal framework surrounding college athletics is expanding, not contracting.

IV. Enforcement Through Litigation

One consequence of these developments is that enforcement has become increasingly external.

Where the NCAA once defined and enforced its own rules, courts now play a more prominent role in determining what those rules may be.

Litigation has produced changes in compensation, in eligibility, and in the permissible scope of institutional control. It has also introduced uncertainty, as outcomes depend on case-by-case adjudication rather than a single, coherent framework.

This is not a stable method of governance.

It is, however, the method that emerges when internal rules are not aligned with legal constraints.

V. Designing Within the Law

A durable system must therefore begin from a different premise.

Rather than attempting to preserve existing rules through narrower definitions or incremental adjustments, it must be designed with legal constraints in mind from the outset.

That has several implications.

First, compensation structures must be grounded in principles that can withstand antitrust scrutiny. Coordination, where it occurs, must be justified and limited.

Second, mechanisms for player movement and eligibility must be consistent with the broader legal treatment of labor markets.

Third, governance must be sufficiently transparent and coherent that it can be evaluated—and defended—under existing law.

These are not abstract requirements.

They are the conditions under which the system will be judged.

VI. The Role of Collective Action

One potential path through these constraints is collective bargaining or a similar form of negotiated agreement.

Arrangements reached through negotiation between institutions and athlete representatives may receive different legal treatment than unilateral rules imposed by a governing body.

This approach does not eliminate legal risk.

It does, however, provide a framework in which coordination can occur with a clearer basis for justification.

Whether such a system emerges, and in what form, remains an open question.

What is clear is that purely unilateral regulation is increasingly difficult to sustain.

VII. The Limits of Private Ordering

It is possible that private coordination alone will prove insufficient to stabilize the system fully.

At present, college athletics operates within an increasingly fragmented legal environment:

• state NIL statutes differ substantially;

• antitrust exposure remains persistent;

• labor classification questions remain unresolved;

• and institutional actors often lack clear authority to impose nationally consistent rules.

These pressures may eventually require some degree of federal involvement.

Such involvement need not take the form of sweeping federal control over college sports. More limited legislative measures could include:

• clarification of athlete employment status;

• preemption of conflicting state NIL regimes;

• narrowly tailored antitrust protections for negotiated governance structures;

• or statutory recognition of collective bargaining frameworks unique to college athletics.

Whether Congress possesses the institutional competence or political appetite to address these issues coherently remains uncertain.

Even so, the possibility should not be ignored.

The present system increasingly operates at a national commercial scale while relying upon a patchwork of private agreements and inconsistent state-level regulation. That arrangement may not remain durable indefinitely.

VIII. The Limits of Avoidance

It is sometimes suggested that the legal issues facing college football can be managed through careful drafting, incremental reform, or reliance on historical practice.

That view underestimates the extent of the change that has already occurred.

Courts have shown a willingness to look beyond labels and examine the underlying substance of the system. Arguments that depend primarily on tradition or classification are less persuasive than they once were.

As a result, attempts to preserve the current model through minor adjustments are unlikely to succeed over the long term.

The legal environment does not permit it.

IX. Conclusion

The governing framework of college football can no longer be constructed as if it operates outside the reach of ordinary law.

It does not.

Antitrust principles apply. Labor questions are emerging. Litigation has become a central mechanism of change.

A system that fails to account for these realities will be reshaped by them.

The task, therefore, is not to resist the legal framework, but to work within it—to design a structure that aligns institutional incentives, athlete interests, and legal constraints in a way that can be sustained.

Anything less will remain provisional.

“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”
— James Madison

From the perspective of many institutions, the current system appears to be working.

Revenue continues to grow. Media contracts remain intact. Public interest is strong. In the short term, there is little incentive to disrupt a model that produces substantial returns.

That stability is more apparent than real.

Beneath it, the conditions that support institutional control have begun to shift. Legal pressure has increased. Compensation has expanded beyond traditional boundaries. Competitive dynamics have become more fluid, and more expensive, than in prior eras.

These changes have not yet forced a structural response. They have, however, altered the position of institutions within the system.

This paper proceeds from a simple premise: the current model provides short-term advantages to institutions, but exposes them to longer-term risks that are not fully addressed within the existing framework.

I. Revenue Growth and Its Limits

There is no question that major college football remains financially successful.

Media agreements continue to generate substantial revenue. Conference distributions have increased. Facilities, staffing, and infrastructure have expanded accordingly.

At the same time, the cost side of the system has begun to move in parallel.

Compensation, once constrained, is now an open and evolving category. NIL activity alone has reached significant scale, with tens of thousands of deals submitted for review and hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the system in a relatively short period1.

In practice, institutions are now operating in an environment where spending is driven less by fixed rules and more by competitive necessity.

That shift matters.

A system in which costs are effectively uncapped, but revenues are contractually fixed for years at a time, does not remain stable indefinitely.

II. Escalation Without Structure

The current environment encourages escalation.

Programs compete not only on the field, but in assembling and retaining rosters. Compensation—whether direct or indirect—has become part of that process. Market signals are visible, but not always reliable.

At the upper end, the numbers are substantial. Individual players can command multi-million-dollar valuations, particularly at premium positions.

At the same time, the broader market remains uneven. Compensation is not standardized, and enforcement mechanisms are limited. Institutions are left to navigate a system in which spending is necessary, but not clearly bounded.

Over time, that dynamic tends to produce the same result: rising costs, uncertain returns, and pressure to match the behavior of competitors.

III. The Litigation Environment

Legal risk is no longer peripheral.

It is a central feature of the system.

Recent years have seen a steady progression of cases challenging NCAA rules and, more broadly, the structure of college athletics. Compensation restrictions have been invalidated. Eligibility rules have been contested. The possibility that athletes may be treated as employees is no longer theoretical.

Individual disputes reflect the same trend. Players have begun to challenge eligibility limits and contractual arrangements in court, seeking both the ability to compete and the opportunity to secure compensation2.

In this environment, institutions are not insulated.

They are participants.

Legal exposure does not remain confined to a governing body. It extends to the entities that implement, benefit from, and rely on the system in question.

IV. Control and Its Erosion

Institutional control has traditionally been one of the defining features of college athletics.

That control is now more difficult to maintain.

Player movement has increased. External entities play a larger role in shaping outcomes. State laws influence behavior in ways that are not fully harmonized. Enforcement authority is dispersed.

In practical terms, institutions now operate within a system they influence, but do not fully control.

That distinction is becoming more pronounced.

Decisions that once could be managed internally now depend on external actors, legal interpretation, and competitive pressures that are difficult to predict in advance.

V. The Competitive Dilemma

Each individual institution faces a similar calculation.

Act conservatively, and risk falling behind.

Spend aggressively, and assume risks that may not be sustainable.

Because the system lacks clear boundaries, these decisions are made in relation to competitors rather than within a defined framework. The result is a form of collective escalation in which no single participant can easily opt out.

This dynamic is familiar in other contexts.

Absent coordination, competition tends to expand the range of outcomes—often beyond what participants initially intended.

VI. Why the Current System Feels Stable

Despite these pressures, the system continues to function.

That persistence can create the impression that the risks are manageable, or at least distant.

In part, this reflects the structure of existing agreements. Media contracts provide predictable revenue streams. Conference affiliations remain intact. The visible elements of the system—games, schedules, championships—continue without interruption.

These factors reinforce the appearance of stability.

They do not eliminate the underlying pressures.

VII. The Case for a More Structured Framework

A more structured system would not eliminate competition or reduce the prominence of successful programs.

It would alter the conditions under which that competition occurs.

For institutions, the benefits are straightforward:

• Greater predictability in compensation

• Clearer rules governing movement and eligibility

• Reduced exposure to ad hoc legal challenges

• A framework for coordinating behavior that is consistent with applicable law

Such a system does not guarantee favorable outcomes.

It provides a set of constraints within which outcomes are determined.

That distinction matters over time.

VIII. Alignment and Incentives

Institutional incentives are not static.

They evolve with the system itself.

As costs continue to rise, and as legal uncertainty persists, the relative appeal of a more structured model increases. What may initially appear as a constraint can, under different conditions, function as a form of protection.

This is not a matter of preference.

It is a function of incentives.

IX. Conclusion

The current system offers institutions significant advantages.

It also places them in a position that is less stable than it appears.

Revenue is strong, but costs are expanding. Control remains, but is more limited. Legal risk is no longer abstract.

These conditions do not produce immediate change.

They do, however, shape the direction of it.

Over time, institutions are likely to favor a framework that restores a measure of predictability and alignment between authority, economics, and legal constraints.

The question is not whether that preference will emerge.

It is when.

“A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
— James Madison, Federalist No. 51

The case for reform is straightforward. The current system is unstable, the NCAA lacks the authority to govern it effectively, and both athletes and institutions would benefit from a more coherent structure.

The difficulty lies elsewhere.

Meaningful change must operate within a system defined not only by incentives and ideas, but by binding agreements, entrenched governance structures, and long-term economic commitments. For that reason, reform in college football will not arrive as a single event. It will emerge over time, and only as existing constraints allow.

This paper advances a central claim: the transition to a new system is constrained, but not prevented, by the contractual and institutional framework that currently governs the sport.

I. The Constraint of Existing Agreements

The central obstacle to reform is contractual.

Major college football is governed not only by rules, but by long-term media agreements, conference bylaws, and grant-of-rights provisions that bind institutions to their current structures. These agreements extend well into the next decade and, in some cases, beyond it.

• The Big Ten’s current media deal runs through approximately 2030

• The Big 12’s extends through 2031

• The College Football Playoff agreement runs through 2032

• The SEC’s deal extends into the mid-2030s

• The ACC, through its grant of rights, is effectively bound through 2036 and beyond

These are not informal understandings or easily revised arrangements. They are enforceable contracts that allocate rights, obligations, and revenue streams across the system.

Any proposal for reform that does not account for these agreements is, as a practical matter, incomplete.

II. Grant of Rights and Institutional Lock-In

Among these arrangements, grant-of-rights provisions are particularly significant.

Under a grant-of-rights agreement, member institutions assign their media rights to the conference for the duration of the contract. A school that departs early does not take those rights with it. Instead, it forfeits them, often along with substantial associated revenue.

The effect is straightforward. Exit is possible, but costly.

In recent realignment cycles, institutions have demonstrated a willingness to incur those costs in order to accelerate movement. Even so, those decisions have required substantial financial concessions and have occurred only under specific circumstances.

Grant-of-rights provisions do not render change impossible. They do, however, ensure that change occurs deliberately, and often only when the economic calculus becomes unavoidable.

III. The Power Problem

Structural constraints extend beyond contracts.

Within existing conferences, governance is typically shared among member institutions. Voting power is not always aligned with competitive or economic position. As a result, institutions that might be disadvantaged by reform often retain the ability to delay or prevent it.

The practical consequence is that meaningful change cannot begin with exclusion. It must begin with alignment among institutions that remain bound together under current agreements.

This is not an accidental feature of the system. It reflects the way in which those agreements were constructed—through consensus, not hierarchy.

IV. Why the System Persists

The persistence of the current system is therefore not difficult to explain.

Institutions are bound by contracts that extend years into the future. Conferences operate through governance structures that require collective agreement. Media partners have secured long-term rights to a product defined by its existing form.

Each of these elements reinforces the others.

As a result, the system continues to operate even as its underlying assumptions have begun to erode. The gap between formal structure and practical reality widens, but the framework itself remains in place.

V. Points of Leverage

Change in a system of this kind rarely occurs continuously. It occurs at specific moments when constraints loosen and incentives align.

In college football, those moments are most likely to arise when:

• Major media agreements approach expiration

• The postseason structure is renegotiated

• A subset of institutions reaches agreement on a new framework

Each of these events creates an opportunity for realignment—not merely of conferences, but of governance itself.

The College Football Playoff is particularly significant in this respect. As a national asset with independent governance, it offers a potential foundation for broader structural change. Adjustments to its format or administration may, in practice, precede and enable more comprehensive reform.

VI. An Incremental Transition

Given these constraints, the transition to a new system is best understood as incremental.

Initial coordination is likely to occur within existing frameworks, as institutions explore shared approaches to governance, compensation, and structure. Over time, as contracts expire and new agreements are negotiated, those efforts can be formalized and expanded.

This process does not produce a clean break from the current system. It produces a gradual shift, in which the underlying structure evolves as the constraints that support it weaken.

VII. Necessary Concessions

Transition also requires tradeoffs.

Institutions may be required to accept changes in revenue distribution or to operate within new governance structures. Conferences may be asked to cede certain forms of authority in exchange for continued relevance within a broader system.

Even the most successful programs are unlikely to preserve every existing advantage in a restructured environment.

Reform, in this sense, is not costless. It requires adjustment across the system.

VIII. The Cost of Inaction

The alternative to a managed transition is not stability.

Absent reform, the system will continue to evolve through litigation, regulatory pressure, and ad hoc decision-making. Rules will shift unevenly. Enforcement will remain inconsistent. Institutional control will erode incrementally rather than by design.

Change, in other words, will still occur. It will simply occur without coordination.

IX. The Transition Problem

The difficulty of reform is often cited as a reason to defer it. In practice, it is a reason to approach it deliberately.

Contracts will expire. Incentives will shift. Opportunities for coordination will arise.

The question is not whether the system will change, but whether that change will be structured and intentional, or imposed through external pressure.

X. Conclusion

College football cannot be reconstructed overnight, and no serious proposal should assume otherwise.

The system that exists today is the product of agreements and incentives that remain in force. As those agreements evolve, so too will the structure of the sport.

The task is to recognize that process and to shape it where possible.

Reform will not occur as a single act.

It will occur as a sequence of decisions, each constrained by the moment in which it is made.

The only question is whether those decisions are guided—or left to circumstance.

Recent changes in college football have expanded player freedom in ways that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago.

Athletes can now transfer more easily, pursue compensation through name, image, and likeness arrangements, and exercise a degree of control over their careers that did not previously exist. From a distance, these developments suggest a system that is moving in the right direction.

The reality is more complicated.

Greater freedom has not produced a stable environment. In many cases, it has introduced new forms of uncertainty—particularly for the majority of players who do not occupy the top tier of the market.

This paper proceeds from a straightforward premise: a more structured system would better serve athletes, not by limiting opportunity, but by reducing volatility, clarifying expectations, and ensuring that participation carries defined protections.

I. Mobility Without Stability

The transfer portal has fundamentally altered the landscape of college football.

Movement between programs is now common, and in some cases encouraged. For certain players, particularly those with established reputations, this has created meaningful leverage.

At the same time, the scale of that movement has expanded rapidly. In recent cycles, thousands of players have entered the portal, with a significant number remaining without a new program.1

That dynamic changes the nature of the decision.

Entering the portal is no longer a rare or exceptional step. It is a calculated risk, often taken with incomplete information and uncertain outcomes. Some players improve their position. Others do not.

What appears to be a system of broad opportunity functions, in practice, as a market with uneven results.

II. Compensation Without Structure

The introduction of NIL has reshaped the economic dimension of college football.

At the top of the market, the numbers are significant. Individual athletes can command substantial compensation into the millions of dollars, and programs compete actively to secure talent.

For most players, however, the experience is less predictable.

NIL arrangements vary widely in structure and reliability. Some are tied to legitimate commercial activity; others are more closely connected to recruiting and roster management. Oversight is limited, and enforcement remains inconsistent.

The result is a system in which compensation exists, but is not uniformly accessible or clearly defined. Outcomes depend heavily on visibility, timing, and circumstance.

That environment rewards a small group of players disproportionately, while leaving others to navigate a market that is difficult to assess in advance.

III. Decision-Making Under Uncertainty

Within this framework, players are asked to make consequential decisions with limited clarity.

A transfer may offer increased exposure or compensation, but it may also reduce playing time or delay development. An NIL opportunity may appear substantial, but prove short-lived or conditional.

At the same time, programs operate under incentives that emphasize immediate roster construction. The availability of transfers and the pressure to compete annually can shift focus away from long-term development.

These dynamics do not affect all players equally.

Those with established roles and market visibility are better positioned to manage risk. Those without it are more exposed to the downside of a system that places a premium on movement and short-term evaluation.

IV. What a Structured System Would Provide

A more structured system would not eliminate the ability of players to move or to earn compensation.

It would change the conditions under which those decisions are made.

Such a system would include:

• Defined baseline compensation tied to participation

• Clear and consistent rules governing movement

• Greater transparency in economic arrangements

• Enforceable agreements between players and institutions

The effect would be to reduce uncertainty rather than opportunity.

Players would still make choices. Those choices would occur within a framework that is more predictable and easier to evaluate.

V. Raising the Floor

The current system tends to concentrate benefits at the top.

A relatively small number of players receive substantial compensation and enjoy meaningful leverage. For the majority, the experience is less certain.

A structured model addresses that imbalance by establishing a baseline.

It ensures that participation itself carries defined value, rather than relying entirely on market visibility or negotiation. It also reduces the likelihood that a single decision—such as entering the transfer portal—produces outcomes that are difficult to reverse.

For most athletes, the stability provided by a higher floor is more significant than the possibility of maximizing short-term upside.

VI. Development and Continuity

College football continues to function as a developmental system.

For a small number of players, that development leads directly to professional careers. For most, it does not.

In either case, continuity matters.

Frequent movement, uncertain roles, and shifting expectations can interrupt development in ways that are not always visible in the moment. A system that emphasizes stability alongside opportunity is better aligned with the long-term interests of both groups.

This does not require eliminating movement.

It requires structuring it.

VII. The Player’s Interest

The player’s interest is often framed in terms of maximum freedom—freedom to move, to earn, and to negotiate without constraint.

Those interests are real.

They are not the only ones.

It is also true that the interests of athletes themselves are not perfectly uniform. Some elite players may reasonably prefer the leverage and open-market dynamics of the current environment. For highly visible quarterbacks and other premium-position athletes, instability can produce opportunity. Frequent movement and aggressive bidding may maximize short-term earning potential in ways a more structured system might not.

That reality should be acknowledged directly.

At the same time, most governance systems are not designed solely around maximizing upside for the participants best positioned within them. They are designed to create sustainable conditions across the system as a whole.

Players also have an interest in participating in a system that is predictable, enforceable, and sustainable. They benefit from clear expectations, defined rights, and a framework that reduces the risk associated with major decisions.

The current system provides new forms of opportunity.

It also introduces instability that falls unevenly across the population of players.

A more structured model does not remove competition or limit advancement. It provides a set of conditions within which those processes can operate more reliably.

This is an ongoing series examining how college football should be governed in the NIL era. Each paper builds on the last, beginning with the failure of the current system and moving toward a proposed constitutional framework for the sport’s future. New papers will be published regularly.

The College Football Federalist Papers — Table of Contents

(A Framework for the Future of College Football)

Preamble to The Papers

Paper No. 1 — The Case for Change

Why the current structure of college football can no longer sustain the system it governs.

Paper No. 2 — The Authority Problem

Why the NCAA no longer possesses the legal or practical authority to properly govern major college football.

Paper No. 3 — The Player’s Interest

Why a more structured system would better serve athletes by reducing uncertainty, raising the floor, and aligning incentives with long-term outcomes.

Paper No. 4 — The Transition Problem

Why meaningful reform must operate within existing contracts, institutional constraints, and entrenched incentives—and how a new system can emerge despite them.

Paper No. 5 — The Institutional Interest

Why the current system’s short-term advantages mask longer-term instability—and why institutions have reason to prefer a more structured framework.

Paper No. 6 — The Legal Framework

Why any durable system of college football governance must operate within, rather than attempt to avoid, existing legal constraints.

Paper No. 7 — The Mechanism

Why a durable system of college football governance will likely require negotiated structures, shared authority, and some form of collective representation.

Paper No. 8 — A Constitutional Structure for College Football

The most plausible framework for a lawful, durable, and competitive future for college football governance.

Paper No. 9 — Compensation, Contracts and Competitive Balance

Why a sustainable system of athlete compensation requires enforceable agreements, negotiated constraints, and a structure capable of balancing mobility with stability.

Paper No. 10 — Eligibility, Development and the Professional Pathway

How a coherent system for eligibility, transfers, scheduling, and professional advancement could reduce instability while improving both player development and competitive integrity.

Paper No. 11 — The Cultural and Institutional Case for Preservation

Why the traditions, regionalism, and emotional continuity of college football justify the effort to govern it more carefully.

Paper No. 12 — Economics, Alignment, and the Future of College Athletics

How football’s separation could reshape non-revenue sports, restore regional competition, and stabilize the broader collegiate model.

Paper No. 13 — The NFL and the College Game

How the relationship between professional and collegiate football shapes incentives throughout the sport.

Paper No. 14 — The Settlement Problem

Why college football’s future will require negotiation among schools, athletes, conferences, courts, Congress, and professional football.

Paper No. 15 — Implementation and the Path Forward

How the system transitions from theory to reality—and what must occur for reform to succeed.

Paper No. 16 — The New Order: College Football After Reform

What a fully realized system would look like in practice—from governance and competition to player compensation, movement, and the rhythm of the season.

The objective of these papers is not to preserve the current system unchanged, nor to professionalize college football beyond recognition. It is to consider whether the sport can develop a governing structure capable of aligning modern economic realities with the traditions and competitive characteristics that made college football valuable in the first place.

College football remains formally governed by the NCAA.

In practice, that authority has weakened to the point where it no longer defines how the system operates.

The rules still exist. Enforcement mechanisms remain in place. But the underlying capacity to impose, defend, and sustain those rules has eroded—gradually at first, and now more visibly.

This paper proceeds from a straightforward premise: the NCAA’s authority over major college football persists in form, but not in substance. The gap between the two is no longer incidental. It is structural.

I. Authority Depends on Enforcement

The NCAA continues to exercise formal rulemaking power. It defines eligibility, regulates recruiting, and maintains enforcement processes.

That authority, however, is meaningful only to the extent that it can be exercised consistently and credibly.

In recent years, that consistency has diminished.

Rules are revised frequently. Interpretations vary. Enforcement actions proceed unevenly, often after prolonged delay. The result is not the absence of regulation, but a system in which the application of rules is increasingly uncertain.

Participants adjust accordingly. Compliance becomes a matter of judgment rather than clear obligation. Institutions rely not only on NCAA guidance, but on legal advice, state law, and competitive necessity.

A regulatory system can accommodate some degree of flexibility. It cannot function indefinitely when its rules are no longer reliably applied.

II. The Legal Foundation Has Shifted

The erosion of NCAA authority is not solely an internal development. It reflects a broader change in the legal environment.

Courts have made clear that NCAA rules are subject to ordinary principles of antitrust law. In O’Bannon v. NCAA, the Ninth Circuit held that restrictions on athlete compensation operated as an unlawful restraint of trade.

That conclusion was not limited to a single form of compensation. It established that NCAA rules governing economic activity are not insulated from scrutiny simply because they are labeled “amateur.”

The Supreme Court reinforced that principle in NCAA v. Alston, unanimously affirming that limits on certain forms of athlete compensation violated federal antitrust law.

More significantly, the Court declined to grant the NCAA broad deference. Its analysis treated the NCAA as a collection of market participants whose coordination must be justified under standard antitrust principles.

The implication is not abstract.

A system that depends on coordinated limits among competitors must either satisfy those principles—or change.

Recent developments have gone further. Courts have begun to consider whether college athletes may qualify as employees under federal law, raising the possibility of wage-and-hour obligations and collective labor rights.1

If that line of reasoning continues to develop, the NCAA’s current model would not merely be constrained.

It would be incompatible with the governing law.

III. Coordination Under Constraint

The NCAA’s traditional role depended on its ability to coordinate behavior across competing institutions.

That coordination is now subject to legal limits.

Rules that restrict compensation, movement, or benefits are increasingly evaluated as agreements among competitors to limit market activity. Under antitrust law, such agreements are permissible only under defined conditions and must be justified by demonstrable procompetitive effects.

The NCAA’s framework does not fit comfortably within those conditions.

This produces a persistent tension.

Efforts to enforce restrictive rules invite legal challenge. Efforts to relax those rules reduce the organization’s ability to maintain uniformity.

Neither path restores the original model.

IV. Practical Authority Has Followed Legal Authority

As legal constraints have expanded, practical authority has receded.

Institutions now operate with greater independence. They interpret rules in light of their own risk tolerance and competitive position. State laws influence behavior in ways that NCAA rules cannot fully override. External entities—collectives, sponsors, and third-party intermediaries—play an increasing role in shaping outcomes.

Enforcement, where it occurs, is often reactive and contested.

The cumulative effect is a system in which the NCAA no longer defines the boundaries of permissible conduct with the same clarity it once did.

What remains is a framework that is still referenced, but less determinative.

V. A System Operating Beyond Its Formal Structure

From a practical standpoint, major college football already operates outside the structure the NCAA was designed to enforce.

Compensation occurs through mechanisms that did not exist within the traditional model. Player movement reflects incentives that are not fully captured by existing rules. Institutional decisions are shaped by a combination of legal exposure, competitive pressure, and evolving norms.

The formal system has not disappeared.

It has been supplemented—and, in some respects, displaced—by parallel structures that now influence behavior more directly.

VI. Authority and Alignment

A governing system cannot remain effective when its formal authority diverges from the reality it seeks to regulate.

For a time, that divergence can be managed through adjustment and reinterpretation. Over time, however, the gap widens.

Rules that no longer reflect actual conditions become harder to enforce. Enforcement that is perceived as inconsistent loses legitimacy. Participants respond by relying less on the system itself and more on their own assessments of risk and opportunity.

At that point, authority does not collapse in a single moment. It diminishes incrementally.

VII. The Implication

The present condition of college football is not the result of a sudden failure.

It reflects a system that has evolved beyond the scope of the structure designed to govern it.

Major college football now operates as a national commercial enterprise with a functioning labor market and sustained legal exposure. It requires a form of governance capable of addressing those realities directly.

The NCAA, as currently constituted, was not designed for that role.

VIII. Conclusion

Authority cannot be maintained indefinitely through formal designation alone.

It depends on the ability to define rules that are both enforceable and consistent with the environment in which they operate.

In college football, that alignment has weakened.

The result is a system in which governance persists, but authority is increasingly diffuse—shared among institutions, influenced by courts, and shaped by forces beyond the NCAA’s direct control.

The question is not whether that condition can be sustained.

It is how long it can persist before a different structure emerges.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
— James Madison

College football has outgrown the system that governs it.

What was once a regional, school-based activity has become a national enterprise. It commands enormous audiences, generates billions in revenue, and serves as the primary development pathway for professional football. The scale of the enterprise is no longer in question.

What is in question is whether the structure surrounding it still makes sense.

The current model rests on a set of assumptions that no longer reflect reality. It treats major college football as an extension of a broader amateur framework, governed by an organization designed for a different purpose, at a different time, under very different conditions.

Those conditions have changed. The structure has not.

This paper advances a simple claim: the existing system is no longer sustainable—not because it lacks resources or interest, but because it lacks a coherent and enforceable framework for governance.

I. An Enterprise That Has Changed in Kind

College football did not become something new all at once. It evolved gradually, and for a long time the underlying structure absorbed that change without breaking.

That is no longer the case.

At the highest level, the sport now operates as a national business. Media contracts run into the billions. Recruiting is continuous. Player movement is constant. Legal scrutiny is no longer occasional; it is a persistent feature of the landscape.

None of this is especially controversial. It is simply the current state of the sport.

What remains controversial is the idea that a system built for a different model of college athletics can continue to govern it effectively.

II. A Structure Built on Outdated Assumptions

The NCAA was not designed to regulate a commercial enterprise of this scale. Its original purpose was more limited: to standardize rules, promote safety, and preserve the educational character of college athletics.

For many years, that model held together because the underlying assumptions were broadly accurate. Revenue was modest. Competitive balance was easier to maintain. The distinction between amateur and professional sport was more clearly understood.

Those assumptions have eroded.

Today, major college football functions with many of the characteristics of a professional system, while remaining formally governed as something else. The result is a framework that depends on definitions and labels that no longer carry the weight they once did.

Courts have begun to recognize this. Participants have adapted to it. The system itself has not.

III. The Consequences of Misalignment

When structure and reality diverge, the effects are not always immediate. For a time, the system can continue operating through workarounds—exceptions, reinterpretations, and incremental adjustments.

Over time, those adjustments accumulate.

Rules become harder to interpret. Enforcement becomes less consistent. Outcomes depend more on circumstance than on a clearly defined framework.

What emerges is not a system that has adapted, but one that is increasingly difficult to administer.

This is the present condition of college football. The formal rules remain in place, but they no longer fully describe how the system operates in practice.

IV. The Limits of Incremental Reform

It is often suggested that the current system can be stabilized through incremental reform—clearer guidance, improved enforcement, or modest adjustments to existing rules.

There is some appeal to that approach. It preserves continuity and avoids the disruption associated with more significant change.

The difficulty is that the underlying problem is not one of clarity or execution. It is structural.

The organization responsible for governing college athletics is asked to regulate activities that differ fundamentally in scale, economics, and legal exposure. Football is not simply another sport within that system. It is the central driver of its most significant challenges.

Adjusting individual rules does not resolve that tension. It leaves the core misalignment in place.

V. The Case for Separation

A more durable solution requires a different approach.

Rather than continuing to force major college football into a framework that no longer fits, the sport can be governed through a structure designed specifically for its characteristics.

Separation, in this sense, is not a rejection of the broader collegiate model. It is an acknowledgment that different activities require different forms of governance.

Under such a model, football would operate within its own framework—one capable of addressing issues of compensation, movement, and competitive structure directly. Other sports would remain within a system more closely aligned with their own economic and competitive realities.

This approach does not diminish the role of universities or the connection between athletics and education. It recognizes that those relationships can be maintained even as governance structures evolve.

VI. A Question of Alignment

The central issue is not whether college football should change. It already has.

The question is whether its governance will reflect that change.

A system of this scale cannot rely indefinitely on assumptions that no longer hold. Over time, the gap between formal structure and actual practice becomes too large to sustain.

At that point, the system must adjust.

VII. Conclusion

College football remains one of the most successful enterprises in American sport.

Its popularity is undiminished. Its economic strength is clear. Its cultural significance remains substantial.

Those strengths, however, do not resolve the underlying problem. They make it more important to address.

The system that governs the sport was built for a different version of it. That version no longer exists.

The task is not to discard what works, but to align governance with reality.

The papers that follow consider how that alignment might be achieved—through changes to authority, structure, and incentives.

The starting point is simply to recognize the problem for what it is.

A system that no longer fits the enterprise it governs cannot endure indefinitely.

College football is not broken because its participants lack good intentions. It is broken because the institutions governing it no longer reflect what the sport has become.

What began as a campus activity has evolved into a national entertainment industry with professional-level revenues, labor markets, and legal exposure. Yet it remains governed by a framework designed for a different era—one that depends on legal fictions, inconsistent enforcement, and emergency rulemaking to survive. The result has been instability: constant litigation, annual rule changes, confused stakeholders, and growing mistrust among athletes, schools, and fans alike.

This series proceeds from a simple premise: college football requires a new constitutional order.

Not a collection of temporary fixes. Not another round of guidance memos. But a coherent system of governance that aligns authority with reality, rights with responsibilities, and competition with sustainability.

The essays that follow are modeled loosely on the Federalist Papers—not in style or politics, but in purpose. They seek to explain why the current system cannot endure, what principles should guide reform, and how a new structure could be built without destroying the traditions that make college football worth preserving.

This is not an argument for eliminating college football’s connection to higher education. It is an argument for honesty. The sport now operates as a commercial enterprise layered atop educational institutions. Pretending otherwise has not protected athletes, preserved competitive balance, or reduced legal risk. It has only delayed the inevitable.

Accordingly, this series advances three core propositions:

1. College football must separate from the NCAA and form its own governing federation. This separation would allow non-football sports to remain governed by amateur principles while acknowledging football’s distinct economic and legal reality.

2. The sport must adopt a labor framework grounded in collective bargaining. Stable eligibility rules, compensation standards, and transfer regulations cannot survive antitrust scrutiny unless they are negotiated with the athletes themselves.

3. Reform must be structural, not rhetorical. Rules that depend on selective enforcement, ad hoc waivers, or judicial deference will continue to fail. Durable systems require clear authority, limited powers, and consent of the governed.

Each paper addresses a discrete component of this project: antitrust exposure, governance structure, eligibility rules, athlete compensation, transfers, draft entry, the competitive calendar, and enforcement. The goal is not to maximize revenue or impose uniformity for its own sake, but to restore order, legitimacy, and trust.

Reasonable people may disagree with particular proposals. That is expected. But the status quo is no longer defensible. College football stands at a moment that demands more than incremental reform.

It demands a framework worthy of the game.

Go On to Paper No. 1.