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.
“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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/06/06/house-ncaa-settlement/
https://news.law.fordham.edu/jcfl/2025/03/07/the-implications-of-the-non-statutory-labor-exemption-to-antitrust-law-in-the-movement-for-college-athletes-to-seek-compensation-rights/
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/college-athletes-release-model-cba-1636219/
https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/47247619/college-athletic-directors-collective-bargaining-ncaa-future