College Athletics Might Be Losing Its Shields
Three legal structures have held NCAA authority together for decades. This week, plaintiffs attacked one, the NCAA’s own request for federal help may destroy another, and the conferences...well...
Three things hold the NCAA’s governance together. Most of us never have to think about them. I didn’t think much about them until this week, but I did some digging, and now I am going to inflict it on you, dear reader. :)
The first is a 1988 Supreme Court decision called NCAA v. Tarkanian. The second is the College Sports Commission, which the Power 4 conferences and the NCAA created two years ago to enforce the House v. NCAA settlement. The third is the $20.5 million revenue-share cap, which was the settlement’s central financial bargain. Each of the three does a separate piece of the job of letting the NCAA do what the NCAA does. Together they’ve been the legal and institutional architecture of college sports governance for decades.
The NCAA has other protections too. The House settlement’s antitrust release covers damages claims through 2026. The Rule of Reason analysis still lets the NCAA defend its rules on pro-competitive grounds. Various state-level association statutes, the 501(c)(3) tax status, the inertia of thirty years of operating precedent — all of those do some of the structural work of keeping the current system running. I’m picking three out of a longer list because these three bear more of the load than the others, and because all three took structural hits in the last ten days.
The plaintiffs’ lead attorney who wrote the House settlement went to court to strip enforcement authority from the body the settlement created. Three sports-law academics published an argument that Trump’s April 3 executive order could unwind the 1988 case. The Power 4 conferences and athletic directors have been telling reporters and one another that the rev-share cap was dead before it started.
None of the three attacks is coordinated with the others. They’re coming from different directions, from the plaintiffs, from academics, from the conferences themselves, and each of them would work even if the other two didn’t. What makes this week different from the usual litigation-by-litigation erosion of NCAA authority is that each attack hits a different structure, and the structures were separate by design. If all three land, there isn’t anything behind them.
This will get into some legal territory. The Tarkanian decision in particular is the one most readers have never heard of, and it’s doing a lot of work in the story. So let’s walk through all three.
Shield one: Tarkanian
The NCAA is a private voluntary association of universities and colleges. That’s a legal fact with enormous consequences, because in American law it matters a great deal whether you are a private actor or a state actor.
State actors — government agencies and public universities acting in their institutional capacity — are subject to the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process guarantees, the First Amendment’s speech protections, and the full force of anti-discrimination statutes like Title IX. Private actors aren’t. A private employer can fire someone for political speech without violating the First Amendment. A private association can sanction a member without granting the member a hearing. A private business doesn’t have to meet Title IX participation standards as an organization, though its member institutions might.
The test for whether a private actor becomes a “state actor” for constitutional purposes is what lawyers call the “state action” doctrine. It’s notoriously messy. Private actors can become state actors when they enter joint economic enterprises with government, when government officials sit in their leadership, or, the prong that matters here, when their actions are effectively directed by the government.
In 1988, the Supreme Court decided a case called NCAA v. Tarkanian. Jerry Tarkanian was the men’s basketball coach at UNLV, a public university. The NCAA had conducted a years-long investigation and found 38 rules violations in the program. It ordered UNLV to suspend Tarkanian or face sanctions of its own. Tarkanian sued UNLV for violating his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. He’d been disciplined without a hearing. The NCAA intervened in the case because the sanction was really its sanction.
The Court ruled 5-4 for the NCAA. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority. The holding, summarized: the NCAA was not operating under the color of any single state law when it investigated Tarkanian, and UNLV was not using its power as a state actor to enforce NCAA rules. The NCAA, in legal terms, was acting as a private voluntary association of public and private schools, not as an arm of Nevada. Tarkanian lost his due process claim.
That 5-4 decision is the anchor of the NCAA’s legal status. It means that when the NCAA investigates a school, sanctions a coach, suspends an athlete’s eligibility, or regulates what schools can or can’t do, it isn’t subject to the constitutional constraints that would apply to a government agency doing the same things. No due process requirement for sanction hearings. No First Amendment limit on speech rules, which matters for social-media and NIL-message regulations. No direct Title IX obligation on the NCAA itself, which is why Title IX lawsuits over athletic participation run against member schools rather than the association.
On Monday, Matt Brown’s Extra Points newsletter ran a guest essay by three sports-law academics — Neal Ternes at Northern Illinois, Joe Sabin at Southeastern Louisiana, and Sam Ehrlich at Boise State, who also runs the College Sports Litigation Tracker I’ve cited in several of these posts. They wrote one sentence that captures how much Tarkanian has been doing: “It is hard to exaggerate exactly how essential being considered a private entity for legal purposes is to the NCAA’s current business model.” Hard to exaggerate. Thirty-eight years of immunity from the full force of American public law, built on a 5-4 ruling from the Reagan-era Court.
And then, on April 3, Charlie Baker’s NCAA asked the White House for help, and the White House signed an executive order directing the NCAA to adopt specific rules on transfers, eligibility, and NIL under threat of federal funding consequences for schools that don’t comply.
That is the thing the state-action doctrine watches for. Actions directed by the government. Ternes, Sabin, and Ehrlich argue that when the federal executive branch points the NCAA at specific rulemaking under penalty of federal funding, the NCAA’s subsequent enforcement may meet the state-action test it has avoided for four decades. If a court finds that, Tarkanian doesn’t get overruled. It just stops applying to NCAA actions taken pursuant to the executive order. Those actions would be subject to constitutional constraints the NCAA has never had to build systems around.
A caveat on confidence. State-action conversion is historically a narrow doctrine. The classic successful conversion cases — Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority in 1961, Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association in 2001 — involved tighter entanglement than what the April 3 executive order creates. In Brentwood, the Court treated the TSSAA as a state actor partly because state-school officials comprised a decisive majority of its membership and leadership. The NCAA-EO situation is a different geometry. A court could plausibly find that the NCAA’s enforcement still runs through voluntary school-level compliance, that the executive order’s compliance mechanism attaches to schools (through federal funding) rather than the NCAA directly, and that the 1988 holding still governs. Ternes, Sabin, and Ehrlich’s full argument is behind Extra Points Premium’s paywall, so I’m working off what is public, which is the excerpted thesis and the framing. The claim to take seriously isn’t that state-action conversion is inevitable; it’s that the EO introduces a colorable conversion argument where none existed before April 3, and that a plaintiff’s lawyer now has something to work with that wasn’t in the toolkit last month.
The paradox is the shape of it. The NCAA’s president spent weeks lobbying the White House to help protect “the collegiate model.” The protection the NCAA received may be the thing that strips the legal asset the collegiate model has quietly relied on since 1988.
The Extra Points piece is titled “Be Careful What You Wish For.” That’s the thesis in six words.
Shield two: the CSC
The second shield is more recent, and it’s the one that took the most explicit hit this week.
In 2024, after the House v. NCAA settlement was approved, the NCAA and the Power 4 conferences created the College Sports Commission. The CSC’s job is to enforce the settlement’s structural architecture. It polices the $20.5 million revenue-share cap, reviews “associated entity” NIL agreements for fair market value and legitimate business purpose, and operates a clearinghouse called NIL Go that every deal over $600 has to run through. Bryan Seeley, formerly MLB’s Senior Vice President for Investigations and Compliance, runs the CSC as its chief executive.
The CSC was the NCAA’s answer to the central structural gap in its governance. It had never had a real enforcement body. The Committee on Infractions had always been slow and often embarrassed. The new revenue-share era was going to generate enforcement demands at volume and speed that the NCAA’s traditional apparatus couldn’t meet. So the settlement created a specialized body to do what the NCAA couldn’t.
The problem is that the settlement’s own author doesn’t think the CSC is doing the job the settlement actually authorized.
On Monday of this week, Jeff Kessler — the plaintiffs’ lead attorney in House v. NCAA, the lawyer who negotiated the settlement the CSC was created to enforce — filed a motion to enforce the settlement. It asks a special master (Judge Nathanael Cousins, handling dispute resolution under the settlement’s architecture) to declare that multimedia rights partners like Learfield and Playfly, plus third-party brand sponsors like apparel companies, are not “associated entities” under the settlement and therefore fall outside the CSC’s heightened scrutiny.
The filing’s language is more caustic than you usually see in class-counsel motions. It accuses the CSC of “over-zealous, over-bureaucratic overreach that is delaying and rejecting deals that should never have been reviewed in the first place.” It says the CSC has been “scrutinizing virtually every NIL agreement with a Class Member” instead of just associated-entity deals. And in the sentence that is going to get the most attention: the CSC’s attempt to expand its jurisdiction “and anoint itself a roving police force with limitless authority over Class Members’ NIL deals, must be rejected.”
That’s the plaintiffs’ lead counsel, arguing in court, that the enforcement body created by his own settlement is exceeding its mandate.
Seeley responded to both Yahoo Sports (via Ross Dellenger) and Front Office Sports (via Amanda Christovich). His defense is procedural. He told Dellenger the motion is “a clear effort to avoid the arbitration process that plaintiff attorney agreed to.” He told Christovich the motion’s timing “was no coincidence” and pointed to a scheduled arbitration hearing later this month, likely the Nebraska case where 18 players are challenging the CSC’s rejection of over a million dollars in Playfly deals. Seeley also floated what Christovich calls a “matchmaker vs. facilitator” retreat position: if MMRs merely introduce brands to athletes without routing payment, they might not be subject to associated-entity scrutiny. That’s a narrower defense than the CSC’s prior posture.
The matchmaker/facilitator line is substantive, and I should give it its due. It concedes ground. The previous CSC posture treated MMR-routed deals as presumptively associated-entity unless proven otherwise. “If MMRs merely introduce brands to athletes without routing payment” is a materially narrower frame. So Seeley isn’t purely procedural. He is floating a substantive retreat position as a fallback if the arbitration venue doesn’t hold the broader claim. But the rest of what he said to both reporters stayed procedural — timing, venue, arbitration agreement. An enforcement body that concedes a narrower substantive ground while relying mostly on procedural defenses is still, at the level of its original mandate, in retreat. The CSC isn’t defending the scope it claimed six months ago.
The institutional backstory matters. Pete Nakos at On3 reported that the Power 4 legal officers sent a letter in March to Kessler’s team flagging the CSC’s enforcement approach. Sportico’s Daniel Libit confirmed a March 12 meeting between plaintiffs’ counsel and Power 4 representatives on the same question. The Kessler motion didn’t appear from nowhere. The Power 4 conferences, who also control the CSC, were coordinating with plaintiffs’ counsel against the enforcement body the NCAA built. An enforcement body pincered between the plaintiffs who agreed to it and the conferences that run it isn’t an enforcement body for very long.
The court hearing on the motion is set for May 27. If Kessler wins, the CSC’s enforcement reach collapses to booster collectives only. Deals with MMRs, apparel companies, and third-party brands would escape the “associated entity” process that has been the operational mechanism for keeping the rev-share cap honest. Mit Winter’s Monday tweet had the clean version of what that means: “There’s already no real cap on college athlete NIL compensation. But if this motion is successful, that would be formalized. It would become very easy to guarantee athletes large amounts of third-party money.”
Which brings us to the third shield.
Shield three: the cap
The $20.5 million revenue-share cap is what the House settlement paid for. In exchange for the NCAA and the Power 4 accepting the obligation to share revenue directly with athletes, which had been a categorical bar since the association’s founding, the plaintiffs accepted a ceiling on how much revenue could be shared, and the settlement got an antitrust release protecting member schools from further antitrust damages on the compensation question. The cap is the bargain.
It’s also already fiction at the top of the distribution, per the on-record position of Power 4 athletic directors, a sitting Power 4 conference commissioner, and the athletic-association board chair at Louisville. That qualifier matters. The cap may still function as a binding constraint for programs in the middle and bottom of Division I, where the rev-share distribution number is closer to the ceiling than it is to where the top programs are spending. When I say the cap is “being abandoned,” I mean where the compensation market is concentrated, which is at the top of Power 4 football and men’s basketball, where the money is and where the non-compliance question has structural consequences. For the median Division I program, the cap is still the ceiling they’d reach if they could.
In January, Ross Dellenger reported in Yahoo Sports that a high-ranking Big Ten administrator described the current rev-share regime with the phrase “we are money laundering.” Three Power 4 athletic directors, all from non-SEC schools, told Yahoo on the record that they believe there should be no cap at all because enforcement is too hard. Ohio State AD Ross Bjork went further in the same piece: the leaders of college sports, he said, need to consider “no longer restricting the money” because the current cap just incentivizes rule-breaking and legal challenges.
That reporting is three months old. The positions it documents have only hardened since.
On Monday, Pat Forde published a long profile of Louisville athletics for Sports Illustrated that essentially documents what happens when a program tries to compete at the post-House ceiling. The numbers are extraordinary. Louisville athletics lost $12.5 million in FY 2024–25 on $154.9M revenue against $167.4M expenses. The department’s reserve fund has drawn down from $34 million to $3.4 million, a 90 percent drawdown in the settlement’s first operational window. Louisville is running its men’s basketball program at a projected $15–20 million roster for next season and its football program at a projected $22–25 million. Larry Benz, chair of Louisville’s athletic association board, told Forde: “We’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing — we’re borrowing money.”
Which is to say: the rev-share cap is $20.5 million. Louisville’s basketball roster alone will approach or exceed that number. Its football roster will comfortably exceed it. And the athletic director, the head basketball coach, and the head football coach are all on the record that those numbers aren’t unusual. They’re the operational ceiling the market is setting. Jeff Brohm, Louisville’s football coach: “What once was a number you try to stick with gets outdated fast. Everyone’s trying to keep up with the race.”
Benz, who co-authored the March 2 white paper titled “College Athletics Is Running Out of Time,” was more direct about the structural reality: “Athletics gets 8% or 9% of the overall university budget, but it’s 90% of the optics.” That’s a university board chair, on the record, describing the institutional distortion the arms race has produced.
Then there’s Val Ackerman, the Big East commissioner and former WNBA commissioner, who on Tuesday morning publicly endorsed collective bargaining in college sports. Her specific framing matters: the system needs the structural benefits of CBA (bargained rules, athlete voice, employer protections) even if it avoids formal employment classification. “If it can be done without employment, all the better.” When a sitting conference commissioner endorses CBA on the record, the center of the debate about the cap has moved. The cap only works if someone thinks it’s a real ceiling. Ackerman is signaling that the conferences don’t think it is.
And the FBS-level governance committee is reportedly studying whether to move out of the NCAA structure entirely.
None of this kills the cap with a court ruling. No one has litigated it dead. It’s just being abandoned. The cap isn’t being ripped down by an adversary. The conferences that signed the settlement are walking away from it.
The paradox at the center
Each of these three shields was built by the NCAA, requested by the NCAA, or accepted by the NCAA in exchange for something the NCAA wanted. Tarkanian was litigated at the NCAA’s insistence; the NCAA intervened in the case to protect its private-entity status. The CSC was created at the NCAA’s request under a settlement the NCAA signed. The $20.5 million cap was traded for the antitrust release that the settlement provided.
Each shield is now being stripped by or despite the NCAA’s own moves. The executive order the NCAA lobbied for may be the thing that strips Tarkanian. The CSC the NCAA helped build is being disowned by the plaintiffs’ counsel the NCAA negotiated with. The cap the NCAA paid $2.8 billion for is being abandoned by the conferences that run the NCAA.
The through-line isn’t external hostility. It’s internal incoherence. The NCAA keeps reaching for protections that don’t compose with each other and don’t compose with the choices its own member institutions are making on the ground. The EO request was incompatible with the state-action doctrine that Tarkanian depends on. The CSC-as-aggressive-enforcer project was incompatible with the settlement’s narrower definition of “associated entities.” The cap was incompatible with the $40–60 million football rosters that Power 4 programs were already running when the settlement went into effect.
None of these incompatibilities are news to the people inside the system. The thing this week made visible is that they’re piling up at the same time. The NCAA is being deconstructed by its own strategic moves converging into a single structural failure, rather than defeated on a single front.
A more charitable read is worth stating. From inside the NCAA’s strategic calculus, each of the three moves may have been a considered trade-off rather than an accident. The EO ask was a bet that the Tarkanian risk was worth the upside of federal rulemaking authority. The CSC was a bet that a specialized enforcement body could out-operate traditional infractions procedures, even if the boundary of its authority hadn’t been fully tested. The cap was a bet that the antitrust release was worth more than a ceiling everyone knew programs would push against. Each of those bets may still prove right. Charlie Baker doesn’t operate without a calculus. The incoherence I’m describing is one read; the alternative is a leadership team making sequential calculated trade-offs that add up differently than their sum would suggest. Both readings live in the evidence. The ground the NCAA is losing is real in either frame.
What happens if all three come down
If Tarkanian stops applying, the NCAA faces an entirely new litigation category. Due process claims from coaches and athletes sanctioned without hearings. First Amendment claims from athletes and coaches penalized for speech. Title IX claims directed at the association itself rather than at member schools. None of those categories has any current NCAA infrastructure to defend against. Those are big-stakes lawsuits in jurisdictions where the NCAA doesn’t have a track record of winning.
If the CSC’s enforcement reach collapses to booster collectives only, MMR-routed compensation becomes unpoliceable at the federal-settlement level. The rev-share cap stops being a ceiling and becomes an advisory number. Deals that schools are already running through Learfield, Playfly, and apparel partners continue to run through them, just without the fair-market review step. Which is how the market is already functioning, per Louisville, per Ohio State, per the Big Ten administrator who said it in January.
If the cap is abandoned operationally, the House settlement’s central financial bargain is gone. Plaintiffs took the cap in exchange for direct pay and antitrust release. Without the cap, the settlement has delivered direct pay without the constraint that was supposed to accompany it. That’s a scenario where future plaintiffs, including athletes who didn’t participate in the House class, have live arguments that the bargain wasn’t honored.
What survives when the shields are gone? Not nothing. The House settlement’s antitrust release still protects member schools from damages claims on compensation through 2026, which is the period covered by the class settlement, and the release is enforceable in House litigation regardless of what happens to the CSC’s enforcement reach or the cap. Rule of Reason analysis — the antitrust framework that NCAA v. Board of Regents in 1984 and Alston in 2021 both applied — still gives the NCAA room to defend pro-competitive justifications for its rules, including its rules on transfers, on eligibility, and arguably on compensation constraints. The NCAA Board retains the authority to change its own rules under the membership’s delegated governance, and could narrow enforcement exposure by just moving rules out of NCAA jurisdiction and into conference-level governance where the enforcement target is different. Federal preemption of state NIL laws is still on the table through any successful congressional action, which could restore a measure of uniformity even if it doesn’t deliver the full antitrust exemption Baker is asking for. None of these are nothing.
What survives that isn’t defensive. Direct antitrust exposure, which was the thing the shields were supposed to protect against. The NCAA’s eligibility rules are already being challenged on antitrust grounds in state and federal courts, with mixed appellate outcomes but consistent trial-court losses — Chambliss in Mississippi, Heinecke in Oklahoma, Robinson, Blythe, and Fourqurean at the circuit level earlier. State attorneys general have the Ohio v. NCAA and Tennessee v. NCAA consent decrees already constraining the NCAA on transfers and NIL rulemaking. The state courts have been doing governance-by-injunction, one athlete at a time.
The pattern is what No One Is Waiting and The College Sports State Law Patchwork tracked last week from two different angles. The federal system is paralyzed. State courts, state legislatures, and state boards are filling the vacuum. Now the conferences themselves are looking at separation from the NCAA entirely. The NCAA is losing the shields that let it operate as a national governance body. Under the shields was direct antitrust exposure. Above the shields was a federal pathway that hasn’t shown up. The space between those two is getting thin.
Where this leaves the probabilities
A short update rather than a full table. Standard reminders: these are my best estimates from publicly available information, not mutually exclusive, and I reserve the right to move them when the ground moves. See Friday’s post for full definitions.
The EO-as-standalone-reform probability continues to shrink, and for a new reason. The EO may actively make things worse for the NCAA by stripping Tarkanian protection it depends on. Michael McCann’s Sportico piece from Monday morning adds that the EO can still function as coercion against specific schools even if it loses in court. Both readings make the EO a net liability for the institution the NCAA thought it was asking to help. Move the EO-standalone band from 2–4% to 1–3%.
Conference-level governance probability ticks further down. I’d been scoring this in the 2–5% range. The combination of the FBS governance committee reportedly studying separation, the Power 4 legal officers coordinating with Kessler against the CSC, and Ackerman publicly endorsing CBA suggests that the conferences have moved past the NCAA-internal-reform pathway. When the commissioners are openly exploring exit, they aren’t trying to fix the conference-governance route. They’re preparing to leave it. Move to 1–3%.
(edit/note 22APR, 5:12PM MT: A definitional note prompted by a sharp reader question: this band doesn't cover conference separation into a parallel association, which is a different pathway this framework hasn't been ranking explicitly. The evidence piling up in that direction — new enforcement contracts being drafted outside NCAA structure, the governance committee study, conference-level CBA openness — is exactly the kind of evidence that needs its own ranked slot. I'll add the separation pathway as its own band in the next piece.)
Collective bargaining probability moves toward the upper end of the 20–26% band. Ackerman’s “if it can be done without employment, all the better” framing is the exact design space Cantwell-Schmitt has been negotiating in. A legislative bargaining architecture that doesn’t trigger NLRA employee classification isn’t really a new pathway so much as a design preference within the collective bargaining / narrow-hybrid legislation space I’ve been tracking. The political coalition math on a non-employment CBA structure is probably where the actual deal-making is happening, but it doesn’t get its own probability; it slots into the CBA band as the most likely design variant within it. Keep the CBA band at 20–26%.
Litigation-as-governance stays pinned near the ceiling. Every developmental event this week compounds it.
What the NCAA is now
Power conferences are working on a new enforcement contract that would bind schools outside the NCAA framework. The FBS governance committee is reportedly studying whether to leave the NCAA entirely. Ackerman is on the record that college sports needs CBA. The settlement’s lead plaintiff counsel is in court arguing the enforcement body the settlement created is overstepping. Three sports-law academics are publishing an argument that the federal executive order the NCAA asked for may strip its 1988 legal foundation. Louisville’s board chair is on the record that the university is borrowing to compete while reserves disappear.
Lobbying won’t get the NCAA out of this. The situation is a structural dissolution the NCAA helped cause by reaching for incompatible protections at the same time. The federal pathway the NCAA wanted was supposed to provide an antitrust exemption that would stabilize rulemaking. What arrived instead was an executive order that may transform the NCAA’s legal status and a Congress that hasn’t delivered and won’t on the terms Charlie Baker is asking for. Trump restated the Congress ask on Tuesday evening at a White House event honoring Olympic-sport championship teams. AP’s reporting now treats “aspects of the executive order might not withstand legal scrutiny” as baseline wire-service background, not analyst commentary.
The question the NCAA’s leadership should be asking isn’t “can Congress save us?” Cantwell and Schmitt told thirty-plus university presidents it couldn’t pass the SCORE Act as written. The EO arrived with its own legal vulnerabilities. The CSC is being dismantled. The cap is being abandoned.
The question is: if the shields come down and the federal pathway doesn’t land, what is the NCAA?
That isn’t a rhetorical question. Answer one: a member association that governs Division I non-football, non-basketball sports while the Power 4 conferences run their own independent commercial athletic enterprise. Answer two: a member association that retains nominal authority but operates in a field where its rules are routinely subject to federal antitrust scrutiny and state-court injunction, where its enforcement is narrower than the CSC’s current scope, and where due process, First Amendment, and Title IX litigation attaches to its decisions. Answer three: something new that doesn’t exist yet. Answer four, probably the most likely near-term answer: something indistinguishable from what the NCAA already is, but with more of the load bearing on settlement administration, on state-court lawyering, on the conferences’ willingness to operate through the existing infrastructure rather than replace it. Institutions don’t collapse. They drift. The shields coming down doesn’t mean the lights go off on July 1. It means the NCAA keeps running the same national structure while losing the legal and market basis for running it, and the gap between nominal authority and operational reality widens until something formal has to resolve it. The drift scenario is the scenario where nothing decisive happens, the federal pathway stays stuck, the state patchwork grows, and everyone keeps operating on increasingly thin institutional ice.
The states aren’t waiting. The courts aren’t waiting. The conferences aren’t waiting. Congress is waiting. The NCAA is waiting. And the shields that made it reasonable for the NCAA to wait are being stripped in the same week.
If you’re finding this analysis useful, share it with someone trying to make sense of the governance dissolution. Last week’s federal-stall piece is here; the state-level patchwork companion is here. Wednesday is about the third leg.
This is an ongoing series applying political economy analysis to the college sports reform landscape. Recent entries:
The College Sports State Law Patchwork (Saturday)
No One Is Waiting (Friday)
The Week Everyone Tried to Govern (previous Friday)
How Collective Bargaining Could Stabilize College Football (flagship)
Five Roads Out and Why Most of Them Dead-End
Enforcement Is the Real Collective Action Problem
The Executive Order That Tells You Exactly What It Can’t Do
NB: This essay is written in my capacity as a political scientist who studies institutions, incentives, and collective action, not as an institutional spokesperson.