Enforcement Is the Real Collective Action Problem in College Athletics
Why Everyone Wants Rules—But No One Wants to Be the "First Mover"
Public comments from most of the power players and commentators in college athletics are starting to rhyme…a lot. Nearly everyone seems to agree on the basic diagnosis that the system feels unstable.
Rules are increasingly difficult to apply consistently. Outcomes are becoming harder to defend, even for people inside the enterprise. Where consensus breaks down is not over whether guardrails are needed, but over what those guardrails should look like, who should enforce them, and how much risk that enforcement entails.
The reporting from this year’s NCAA convention made that tension difficult to ignore. Leaders from the power conferences are openly questioning whether national governance still functions as intended. Public frustration over tampering, eligibility rulings, and the new revenue-sharing framework has pushed some conferences to explore enforcement at the league level, or even operating partially outside the NCAA structure altogether.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey captured the underlying challenge succinctly: “Big problems are not solved in big rooms filled with people.” (Yahoo: https://sports.yahoo.com/college-football/article/we-are-money-laundering--with-schools-bending-or-breaking-new-rules-sec-and-others-mull-new-governance-model-215315905.html)
This is not nostalgia. Not in the least. And it is not primarily about tradition or culture. It reflects something much more basic: enforcement itself has become the most legally dangerous act in the system.
Everyone Wants Rules. Fewer Want to Enforce Them.
What looks like indecision or hypocrisy is better understood as a coordination problem. Enforcement carries concentrated risk for the first mover, while the benefits of stability only materialize if others follow.
Administrators are remarkably consistent in what they say they want: stability, limits, predictability. And who can blame them? What they are far less comfortable doing is being the first mover on enforcement.
That hesitation is not hypocrisy. It is basic game theory.
In a system where enforcement carries legal risk and competitive cost, the first institution to impose limits bears those costs alone, while the benefits of stability materialize only if others follow. Under those conditions, delay is rational. Enforcement gets pushed toward committees, commissions, and clearinghouses that spread responsibility and dilute blame. Individual exposure falls, even as collective resolve weakens.
The College Sports Commission was created to address exactly this gap. It was designed to oversee revenue sharing and restore coherence after the House settlement. Yet its participation agreement, meant to protect the commission from lawsuits by member schools, has struggled to secure full support. That hesitation is the tell. Institutions endorse enforcement in principle, then hedge when enforcement carries legal exposure. CSC CEO Bryan Seeley acknowledged this directly at the convention: “If there’s a time to stick out your neck, it’s now.” (-Ross Dellenger, quoting Sankey on X (formerly Twitter))
You can see the consequences of that hesitation in how rules now operate day to day. Compensation no longer moves through a single channel or under a single authority. It is routed through collectives, media partners, apparel contracts, and third-party NIL arrangements, often with informal assurances made before any formal clearance occurs. Spending caps still exist, but they are managed, deferred, or creatively interpreted rather than enforced directly. Governance has not disappeared. It has shifted toward process, accounting judgments, and accommodation.
As one high-level administrator put it bluntly, “We are money laundering… All we are doing right now is moving money around.” (Yahoo Sports). And Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte delivered the institutional version of the same point: “Everyone wants to blame the NCAA. The NCAA is us.” (Yahoo Sports)
This is not accidental. It is adaptive behavior under constraint.
Why Enforcement Became Risky
Over the past decade, courts have steadily narrowed the NCAA’s ability to impose broad restrictions on athlete compensation and movement. The House settlement accelerated that shift by normalizing individual market participation without resolving employment status or creating a new collective governance structure.
The result is an imbalance. Individual leverage expanded faster than institutional capacity to coordinate it. In that environment, enforcement invites antitrust challenge, while permissiveness offers relative safety. Institutions respond accordingly. Categorical rules give way to flexibility, discretion, and after-the-fact adjustment.
That is the through-line: the system can still generate rules, it just struggles to generate enforcement without someone getting sued.
Conference-Level Governance as Legal Strategy
The most revealing conversations coming out of the convention were not about competitive balance. They were about antitrust risk. The argument for conference-level governance is that a smaller group can more plausibly argue it lacks market power and therefore faces less exposure.
Georgia president Jere Morehead made the logic explicit. If the CSC won’t enforce, if the NCAA won’t enforce, and if Congress won’t act, “it leaves the SEC in a position that we have to go our own way.” (Yahoo Sports)
This logic is understandable, but it is also incomplete. Fragmentation may reduce risk in the short term, but it weakens the prospects for coordinated, system-wide governance. When each conference enforces its own rules, stabilizing the national enterprise becomes harder, not easier. Legal insulation comes at the cost of coherence.
The Problem Was Addressed—Until It Wasn’t
For several years, expanding exit rights functioned as a release valve, which has absorbed conflict that would otherwise have forced institutions to confront enforcement directly.
Mobility functioned as a release valve. When athletes were dissatisfied, leaving was often easier than challenging rules, organizing collectively, or demanding institutional change. Institutions could accommodate that mobility instead of imposing limits. Movement absorbed conflict, and governance did not have to be rebuilt.
That equilibrium is (slowly, for now) eroding.
Roster limits now impose real constraints. Transfer entries continue to rise, while the number of available spots does not. More and more athletes will enter the portal and fail to land elsewhere. Careers will end quietly. Many student-athletes’ academic paths will be (very) disrupted. Families will ask why a system that promised opportunity delivered such precarity.
As exit becomes less reliable, pressure for constraint will grow. When those constraints arrive without collective bargaining or congressional protection, litigation becomes the predictable outlet. Courts fill the gap when coordination lacks consent.
An Institutional Failure, Not a Moral One
This moment is often framed as a failure of values. It is better understood as a failure of institutional capacity.
The people running college athletics are responding very rationally to incentives that make enforcement risky and coordination difficult. Until rules can be enforced without existential legal exposure (through collective bargaining, congressional action, or genuinely shared governance) the system will continue to meander.
Rules will be written. Enforcement will hesitate. And courts will keep filling the gap institutions cannot safely occupy.
The question is no longer whether guardrails are needed. Everyone agrees on that. The question is whether institutions can build the capacity to enforce them before the courts do it for them.
And, here’s a link to my original piece that lays out the broader political economy and game board in more depth, if you’re interested.
NB: This essay is written in my capacity as a political scientist who studies institutions, incentives, and collective action, not as an institutional spokesperson.