Paper No. 3

On the limits of unstructured freedom and the case for a more stable and enforceable system for college athletes.

"A well-constructed union must be its own regulator."
— Alexander Hamilton

The case for reform in college football cannot rest solely on institutional concerns or legal necessity. Any durable system must also serve the interests of the athletes themselves. Absent that alignment, reform will not be adopted, and if adopted, will not endure.

It is therefore necessary to confront directly the most immediate objection to structural change: that the current system, however imperfect, represents an unprecedented expansion of player freedom and opportunity.

In one sense, that objection is correct. But it is incomplete.

A system need not be unjust to be unsustainable. It is enough that it distributes its benefits unevenly, its risks unpredictably, and its outcomes without durable structure. Such a system may persist for a time. It does not endure.

This paper advances a narrower and more consequential claim: the present system maximizes upside for a small number of athletes, while lowering the expected outcome for many others. A more structured system—properly designed—would raise the floor for all players while preserving meaningful upside for those who earn it.

I. The Promise and Reality of the Current System

The modern college football landscape is often described as one of “player empowerment.” Athletes may transfer with relative ease, participate in NIL markets, and negotiate opportunities that were unavailable in prior eras.

For a subset of players—those with immediate market value, high visibility, and multiple suitors—this environment has produced significant gains. Compensation has increased, mobility has expanded, and leverage has shifted.

But these outcomes are not evenly distributed.

For many athletes, the current system operates less as a platform for opportunity than as a market defined by uncertainty and asymmetric information. Decisions are made quickly, often without complete information, and frequently without enforceable commitments.

The result is a system that appears expansive in theory but is unstable in practice.

II. The Reality of Unstructured Free Agency

The transfer portal, in its current form, functions as a kind of uncapped free agency. But unlike its professional analogues, it operates without contracts, guarantees, or durable rights.

Athletes who enter the portal frequently do so without secured alternatives. In doing so, they may forfeit their existing roster position, their scholarship security, and their place within a program.

Many discover, too late, that the market for their services is narrower than anticipated.

Others accept opportunities based on informal assurances—understandings that may change as rosters shift, coaching staffs evolve, or financial resources are reallocated. In the absence of enforceable agreements, these assurances provide little protection.

The result is a pattern that has become increasingly common: athletes moving multiple times in short periods, pursuing marginal gains, and absorbing the costs of each transition.

Markets of this kind do not fail for lack of opportunity. They fail for lack of structure. Where commitments are informal and enforcement uncertain, rational actors are compelled to prioritize short-term advantage over long-term stability. The result is not equilibrium, but continual motion.

No system can long endure in which movement is unbounded, promises are unenforceable, and outcomes are determined more by timing than by merit.

III. The Distribution of Benefits

The present system produces clear winners. Highly sought-after players—particularly those at the top of the roster—are able to leverage competition among programs to maximize short-term compensation and opportunity.

But the system also produces a broader class of participants for whom the benefits are more limited and the risks more pronounced.

These include:
- Players who enter the portal and fail to secure a comparable opportunity
- Players who are replaced by incoming transfers and lose their position
- Players who rely on informal NIL arrangements that lack durability
- Players whose development is disrupted by repeated movement

For these athletes, the current system offers possibility, but not protection.

The present system allows players to win big. It also allows them to lose everything. A better system would narrow that gap.

IV. The Value of Structure

A more structured system would not eliminate opportunity. It would define it.

Through negotiated rules—most plausibly in the form of a collectively bargained framework—athletes could secure benefits that are largely absent from the current model.

These would include:
- Guaranteed minimum compensation, rather than speculative opportunities
- Contractual commitments of defined duration
- Clearly defined transfer windows and conditions
- Enforceable agreements, rather than informal assurances
- Grievance mechanisms and dispute resolution processes

Under such a system, compensation would not depend on informal arrangements or shifting market conditions. It would be guaranteed, contractual, and enforceable.

Structure, properly understood, is not the enemy of freedom. It is the condition that makes freedom meaningful over time.

For many athletes, this represents not a reduction in opportunity, but an improvement in expected outcome.

V. Freedom and Its Limits

The current system is often defended on the ground that it maximizes individual freedom. But freedom, in this context, is not costless.

What is described as freedom in the present system is, in many cases, the absence of protection. The ability to move without restriction is of limited value where the consequences of movement are borne entirely by the player.

In the current system, a player who tests the market risks forfeiting his position without assurance of a replacement opportunity. A more structured system would decouple exploration from displacement, preserving both mobility and security.

Professional leagues confronted this dynamic decades ago. The result was not the elimination of player movement, but its structuring through contracts, free agency periods, and collectively bargained rules.

Those systems limit certain forms of movement. They also provide compensation, security, and enforceability that an unstructured market cannot.

VI. The Broader Athletic Interest

The interests at stake in the present system are not limited to football players alone. The current structure of college athletics, driven increasingly by football’s economic gravity, has imposed costs on athletes in other sports that are both substantial and unnecessary.

Conference realignment has produced leagues that span the continent, requiring athletes in sports such as baseball, softball, track and field, and volleyball to travel across multiple time zones for routine competition. There is no reason a UCLA Bruin baseball player should be playing in State College in March, nor should a Rutgers volleyball player be headed to Eugene, Oregon for a match. These demands impose physical strain, disrupt academic schedules, and erode the regional character that once defined collegiate athletics.

These outcomes are not the product of necessity. They are the byproduct of a system organized around football revenues but applied indiscriminately across all sports.

A football-specific governing structure would create the opportunity—indeed, the necessity—for other sports to reorganize along more rational lines. Regional competition, reduced travel, and more coherent scheduling would better serve the interests of the vast majority of student-athletes.

The present arrangement asks non-revenue athletes to bear the costs of a system from which they derive limited benefit. A restructured system could restore a measure of proportionality.

In this respect, reform is not a narrowing of opportunity, but an expansion of it—extending the benefits of rational organization beyond a single sport to the broader athletic community.

VII. Aligning Player Interests with System Stability

The long-term interests of athletes are not limited to maximizing immediate compensation. They include:
- Development within stable programs
- Visibility within coherent competitive structures
- Access to enforceable economic opportunities
- Protection against arbitrary or informal decision-making

A system that provides these features is not less favorable to athletes simply because it imposes structure. It is more complete.

The present system, by contrast, prioritizes short-term flexibility at the expense of long-term stability.

VIII. What the Player Gains

The advantages of the present system are visible. Its protections are not.

A structured system would offer athletes benefits that are largely unavailable today:

- Compensation that is guaranteed rather than contingent
- Agreements that are enforceable rather than aspirational
- Mobility that is defined rather than speculative
- Opportunity that is durable rather than momentary

The current system asks players to assume risk in exchange for possibility. A structured system would reduce that risk while preserving meaningful opportunity.

For the small number of athletes at the very top of the market, this may represent a modest constraint. For the majority, it represents a material improvement.

IX. The Choice Before the Players

The question is not whether the current system provides benefits. It does. The question is whether it provides them in a manner that is stable, enforceable, and broadly shared.

At present, it does not.

A system that relies on continual renegotiation, informal commitments, and uncertain outcomes cannot sustain itself indefinitely. It may reward some participants greatly. It will fail to protect many others.

Athletes are therefore confronted with a choice—not between freedom and constraint, but between different forms of each. One offers flexibility without security. The other, properly designed, offers both.

The system that emerges will depend on which form they choose to prefer—and which they are willing to help construct.