Paper No. 14 — The Settlement Problem
Why college football’s future will require negotiation among schools, athletes, conferences, courts, Congress, and professional football.
“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.