Five Roads Out and Why Most of Them Dead-End
and why road #6 (litigation) remains the most likely, as of today anyway...
NB: This essay is written in my capacity as a political scientist who studies institutions, incentives, and collective action, not as an institutional spokesperson.
A political scientist scans the college sports headlines and runs them through a political economy lens.
I lost count this week. A White House roundtable featuring Tiger Woods and Nick Saban. A pending executive order Trump says will “solve every problem.” A Senate HELP Committee roundtable chaired by Bill Cassidy exploring whether athletes are employees. A third attempt at the SCORE Act looming in the House. The College Sports Commission releasing clearinghouse data showing a system buckling under a marketplace it wasn’t designed for. And — buried under all the noise — a bipartisan impasse on Capitol Hill that tells you more about where this is actually heading than any of the spectacle.
So let me try to do what I’ve been doing in this space: take the week’s developments, run them through the framework I’ve been building across the last several essays, and see what it tells us. This time, though, I want to push further. Michael McCann at Sportico recently laid out five potential reform pathways for college sports — congressional action, executive order, market correction, conference-level governance, and collective bargaining — and assessed each one. It’s good work. I want to engage it directly, extend it where I think the political economy lens sharpens the picture, and push toward something I haven’t done before in this space: a rough probability assessment. Not precision. Just honest calibration.
So, let’s warm up the grill, shall we?
The Room and Who Wasn’t In It
Let’s start with Trump’s roundtable. More than fifty people gathered at the White House on March 6: conference commissioners, media executives, former coaches, private equity figures, a sitting governor, a former Secretary of State. The agenda pushed hard for an antitrust exemption. Trump said federal legislation is needed to let conferences set rules “without litigation and NIL state preemption” — or colleges will be “destroyed” financially. He also acknowledged, with characteristic directness, that any executive order would end up in court: “We will get sued. That’s the only thing I know for sure.”
You know who wasn’t there? A single current college athlete.
Athletes.org released a statement that cut straight to it: if there is a real conversation about fixing college sports, it starts with athletes at the table and ends with a collectively bargained agreement. You can agree or disagree with that position — I’ve written about why collective bargaining faces deep structural obstacles — but the absence itself is the tell. The system’s most powerful actors gathered to discuss the future of an enterprise built on athlete labor, and the laborers weren’t invited. That’s not oversight. That’s the incentive structure made visible.
Two days later, Senator Bill Cassidy — who chairs the Senate HELP Committee, the committee with jurisdiction over employment law — held his own roundtable. Different guest list. LSU’s deputy athletic director. A former student-athlete. A labor attorney. The framing was narrower and more pointed: how would employment classification actually work, and what would it break? Cassidy’s committee doesn’t control the antitrust question, but it controls the employment question — and that, as we’ll see, is where everything gets stuck.
The CSC Under Pressure
Meanwhile, the College Sports Commission is living through exactly the scenario I described back in January in “Enforcement Is the Real Collective Action Problem.”
The numbers are worth sitting with. The CSC’s NIL Go clearinghouse has processed over 21,000 deals valued at $166.5 million. It has flagged 711 deals worth $29.3 million. Eighteen athletes have filed for arbitration, all consolidated into a single case — the Nebraska football players challenging more than a million dollars in rejected third-party NIL deals. It’s the first real test of the system’s dispute resolution mechanism.
But the structural stress runs deeper than the numbers. When the clearinghouse was designed, the expectation was that roughly 90% of NIL deals would flow through automated review. Instead, associated deals — contracts tied to school-affiliated entities like booster collectives, multimedia partners, and apparel companies — account for 63% of all deals and 78% of their value. The system was built for an endorsement economy. What showed up was a labor market.
CSC CEO Bryan Seeley has been remarkably candid about this. The rise of $30 million football rosters funded mostly through third-party payments is within the rules, he said, but “has not sort of matched” the system its founders intended. And the participation agreement — the document that would vest real enforcement power in the CSC — still hasn’t been signed by all 68 Power Four schools. Some rejected the initial version. Revisions have weakened it. Seeley acknowledged that some of the proposed changes “weaken the document” to the point where the CSC might not sign it either.
This is the enforcement problem I keep returning to. Everyone wants rules. No one wants to be the first mover on enforcing them. Enforcement carries concentrated legal risk for whoever goes first, while the benefits of stability only materialize if everyone follows. Under those conditions, delay is rational. The CSC was created to solve this coordination gap, and what it’s discovering is that the gap isn’t a design flaw — it’s a structural feature of the system.
A power conference athletic director said it plainly this week, via Darren Heitner’s newsletter: “The people following the rules are being punished and the people circumventing are being rewarded. We agreed to the House settlement because there was going to be a hard cap. There’s not.”
That’s the game board.
Five Pathways, Honestly Assessed
McCann’s five pathways at Sportico are a useful starting framework. Let me take each one and push it through the political economy lens — not just whether it could work, but whether the incentive structures and power dynamics make it likely to work.
1. Broad Congressional Antitrust Exemption
This is what the NCAA wants. This is what the Power Four commissioners pushed at the White House. This is what the SCORE Act attempts — a limited antitrust exemption that would let the NCAA set rules on NIL, transfers, and eligibility without the constant threat of litigation.
The problem is the math. As McCann and Novy-Williams have noted, more than 40 college sports reform bills have been introduced in Congress since 2020, under both parties. None has passed. The SCORE Act was pulled from the House floor in December after Freedom Caucus defections. Speaker Johnson says he has the votes now for a third attempt. Maybe he does. But even if the House passes it, the Senate requires 60 votes. Cruz said at the roundtable that he needs at least seven Democrats. He currently has zero.
And here’s the deeper problem. The impasse isn’t really about NIL or transfers. It’s about employee status. Cruz’s bill would declare that athletes are not employees. Murphy and the Democrats insist that any legislation must preserve — or create — a pathway to employment classification and collective bargaining rights. Cruz blames Democratic leadership and labor unions for the stalemate. Murphy’s position is that handing the NCAA an antitrust exemption without employee protections is, as Heitner puts it, immunizing the entity most responsible for the dysfunction. Murphy, Blumenthal, Sanders, and Booker put it in writing.
This isn’t a gap that gets bridged by a White House photo op. It’s a genuine ideological fault line that maps onto the deeper partisan structure of American politics — and it scrambles the usual coalitions in interesting ways. Cruz has framed this explicitly: he says Democratic leadership, under pressure from labor unions, won’t allow rank-and-file Democrats to agree to any bill that closes the door on athlete employment. And he’s probably right about the mechanism, even if you read the politics differently than he does. For Democrats, voting to declare college athletes not employees sets a precedent that organized labor will remember at the next election. For Republicans, voting to open the door to employment classification invites a cascade — Title IX complications, NLRA obligations, tax implications — that their institutional donors desperately want to avoid.
What struck me, watching these two camps talk past each other, is how perfectly it illustrates the political coordination failure I described in the flagship essay. The benefits of congressional action are diffuse (system stability, clearer rules for everyone) while the costs are concentrated and highly visible (somebody’s coalition gets mad). That’s the textbook recipe for inaction. Political scientists have known this since Mancur Olson. Knowing the diagnosis doesn’t make the disease any easier to treat.
My read: probability of broad antitrust exemption passing in this Congress — low. Maybe 10-15%. The House might move. The Senate almost certainly won’t. And even if something passes, the narrower it gets to attract bipartisan support, the less it actually resolves.
2. Executive Order
Trump promised a new, “all-encompassing” executive order within a week of the March 6 roundtable. By the time you’re reading this, it may already be out. Let me do the pre-mortem anyway, because the constraints here are structural and they don’t change based on what’s in the document.
The first executive order — “Saving College Sports,” signed July 2025 — directed federal agencies to weigh in on employment status, instructed the Department of Labor and NLRB to opine on whether athletes are employees, and tried to enlist federal support for defending the NCAA from antitrust suits. Its real-world impact? Minimal. Executive orders can direct agency behavior, but they can’t override statutes, create antitrust exemptions, or resolve employment classification. Those require legislation or judicial ruling. Full stop.
A second order hits the same wall. The president can signal priorities. He can direct agencies to study things, issue guidance, take positions in ongoing litigation. What he can’t do is unilaterally restructure the legal framework governing a multi-billion-dollar private enterprise. Trump, to his credit, seems to know this: “We’ll be sued, and we’ll go before the courts, and here we go again.”
So what’s the executive order actually for? I think it’s political staging. It keeps the issue visible. It puts pressure on Congress. It gives the White House a seat in a drama that mostly plays out in courtrooms and conference rooms. That’s not nothing — agenda-setting matters — but it’s not the thing itself.
My read: probability that an executive order meaningfully restructures college sports — very low. Under 5%. It might nudge the NLRB’s posture on employment cases. It might create some political cover for a legislative push. But the system’s constraints are legal and institutional, not administrative. You can’t executive-order your way out of a collective action problem.
3. Narrow Legislation (NIL Standards, Transfer Windows)
This is the more realistic legislative path — not a sweeping antitrust exemption, but a narrower bill that establishes federal NIL standards, replaces the patchwork of state laws, and maybe codifies transfer windows. Something both parties could live with because it doesn’t touch the third rail of employment status.
The appeal is obvious. State-level fragmentation is genuinely destabilizing. Programs in different states operate under different NIL rules. A federal floor — or ceiling — would bring coherence. And because it doesn’t require resolving the employment question, it might actually attract bipartisan support.
But there’s a catch, and it’s the same catch that’s killed narrower bills before. The NCAA and Power Four want any legislation to include an antitrust exemption, even a narrow one. Democrats are reluctant to provide even limited antitrust protection without labor protections. And if you strip both out to get to something passable, what’s left is... modest. Useful, maybe, but not transformative. It doesn’t address revenue sharing, spending escalation, the competitive gap between Power Four and everyone else, or the fundamental question of whether athletes are employees.
My read: probability of narrow federal NIL legislation — moderate but not high. Maybe 25-30%. This is the most plausible congressional outcome, but it solves a subset of the problem and leaves the deeper structural questions untouched.
4. Conference-Level Governance
If Congress won’t act and the CSC can’t enforce, individual conferences can try to govern themselves. The SEC’s Greg Sankey has been the most explicit about this: if nobody else is going to enforce, “it leaves the SEC in a position that we have to go our own way.” Georgia’s president made the antitrust logic explicit — a smaller group can more plausibly argue it lacks market power and therefore faces less antitrust exposure.
This is rational, and it’s already happening informally. Conferences are exploring their own enforcement mechanisms, their own transfer rules, their own spending frameworks. The question is whether fragmented governance can produce stability or whether it accelerates the stratification I described in “When the Balance Sheets Start Talking.”
My instinct: conference-level governance is a short-term adaptation, not a long-term solution. It reduces legal risk for the conference that goes first but weakens the prospects for system-wide coordination. And it deepens the competitive divide. If the SEC enforces its own spending rules while the Big Ten doesn’t — or vice versa — the gap widens. If both enforce but differently, the system fragments further. Legal insulation comes at the cost of coherence.
My read: probability that conference-level governance becomes the dominant model — moderate and rising. Maybe 35-40%. But this isn’t a “solution” in any meaningful sense. It’s what happens when the system can’t solve its collective action problem — the pieces fly apart and each one tries to optimize alone.
5. Collective Bargaining
I’ve written about this one at length — it’s the core of the flagship essay I did — so I won’t rehash the full argument here. But the short version: collective bargaining remains, in my assessment, the most structurally coherent long-term solution. It’s also the least likely to arrive anytime soon. Nothing that happened this week changes that calculus.
If anything, the landscape has gotten worse for it. The NLRB under Trump rescinded the Biden-era guidance on athlete employment. The Dartmouth basketball unionization effort — the one real-world test case — was strategically withdrawn by SEIU to avoid setting a negative precedent with a Trump-era Board. And Congress can’t agree on whether athletes are employees at all, which is the precondition for everything else.
Here’s what I keep chewing on, though. The same forces that make collective bargaining impossible today are the ones that may eventually make it unavoidable. Revenue concentrating. The amateur fiction wearing thinner by the month. Exit options narrowing as roster limits bite and the portal saturates. At some point, the pressure for collective voice builds past the point where individual exit can absorb it. But — and I want to be honest about this — “at some point” is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, and I don’t know when that point arrives.
My read: probability of meaningful collective bargaining emerging in the next 3-5 years — low. Maybe 10-15%. In football specifically, over a longer horizon, higher. But the institutional preconditions don’t exist yet. And the people who’d need to create them have every incentive not to.
The Sixth Road: Litigation as Governance (The Default)
Here’s what McCann’s framework underspecifies, and where I think the political economy lens adds something: the absence of a solution is itself a solution, at least for some actors. When none of the five pathways fully materializes, the system defaults to what it’s been doing — governance by litigation.
Courts fill the gap. Athletes sue for eligibility. Schools challenge enforcement. The NCAA defends rules case by case. Each ruling reshapes the terrain incrementally. And the variance in outcomes — Tennessee’s Aguilar loses his injunction, Bediako in Alabama loses his — but the fact that temporary wins were granted at all keeps the pipeline of litigation flowing. You don’t need to win every time. You just need to win enough to make filing worth it.
This is adaptive behavior under constraint, not dysfunction. Litigation-as-governance serves the interests of actors who benefit from ambiguity. Elite athletes get case-by-case wins. Institutions avoid categorical rules they’d have to enforce uniformly. Conferences preserve flexibility. And the lawyers — well, the lawyers are doing great.
The cost is borne by athletes without resources to litigate, by mid-major programs that can’t absorb the legal overhead, and by the system’s overall coherence. But the actors with the most power don’t bear those costs, which is why the equilibrium persists.
My read: probability that litigation remains the primary governance mechanism for the foreseeable future — high. 60-70%. Not because it works. Because nothing else can get enough buy-in to replace it.
What the Game Board Tells Us
Zoom back out. What does this week actually tell us?
The White House roundtable tells us the political class is paying attention but isn’t close to consensus. The Cruz-Murphy impasse tells us the employment question is the load-bearing wall, and neither party can afford to touch it. The pending executive order tells us the administration wants to be seen acting even when its tools are limited. The CSC data tells us that enforcement under current structures is straining exactly as predicted. And Cassidy’s HELP Committee roundtable tells us that the employment question — the one everybody is trying to avoid — is slowly, inevitably forcing its way into the room.
The system is behaving exactly as the incentive structure predicts. Actors with power benefit from ambiguity. Actors without power bear the costs of instability. Congress faces diffuse benefits and concentrated costs from intervention. Courts remain the path of least resistance. And the gap between what everyone agrees the system needs (stability, enforcement, coherence) and what anyone is willing to absorb the costs of providing (actual governance) remains as wide as ever.
I keep returning to the same line: collective action without a collective.
The balance sheets are still talking. The question is still whether anyone with the power to act is willing to listen — and to move first.
Further Reading / Context:
How Collective Bargaining Could Stabilize College Football (flagship)
When the Balance Sheets Start Talking
Enforcement Is the Real Collective Action Problem
Incentives, Not Hypocrisy, Explain What We’re Seeing in College Sports
Litigation as Governance in College Athletics
NB: This essay is written in my capacity as a political scientist who studies institutions, incentives, and collective action, not as an institutional spokesperson.
When 78% of the value shows up in a category nobody designed for, the defaults just start running the show. Great read, Kyle.