Incentives, Not Hypocrisy, Explain What We’re Seeing in College Sports
A political scientist scans the week's collegiate sports news and fits it into a political economy framework...
One of the easiest mistakes to make right now in college athletics is to describe what’s happening as institutional hypocrisy: universities say one thing about amateurism or stability, then behave in ways that look fully professionalized, market-driven, and legally defensive.
I will keep maintaining that the more useful lens is incentives.
That’s why this recent piece from The New York Times / The Athletic by Joe Rexrode is worth sitting with—not because it reveals scandal, but because it shows how rational actors behave when incentives line up the way they currently do.
The piece looks closely at modern athletic director and coaching contracts, using Kansas State and head basketball coach Jerome Tang as a case study, but the patterns extend well beyond one school or one sport:
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7058333/2026/02/20/jerome-tang-kansas-state-athletic-directors-contracts/
The ongoing state-by-state fragmentation of NIL and eligibility policy only accelerates this logic, as legislatures continue to experiment independently—most recently with proposals to shield athlete compensation arrangements from public disclosure—deepening the patchwork Congress is now being asked to resolve (https://apnews.com/article/2b32bf39506bd8d7e33d7454ef2a2649).
So, what emerges is not chaos but predictability. Contracts are longer. Guarantees are larger. Buyouts are carefully structured. For-cause provisions are drafted with litigation in mind. And when disputes arise, administrators increasingly rely on legal interpretation rather than institutional norms to resolve them.
As one Power 5 athletic director puts it in the piece, once you want to make a change, “you start to fall in love with your legal argument.” That line is doing a lot of work. It captures how governance shifts when incentives, market pressure, and legal risk collide.
This is exactly the dynamic I’ve been arguing is driving so much of what feels incoherent in college sports (links to past pieces down at the bottom of the piece, including the flagship essay). Institutions are not abandoning principle at random. They are responding rationally to environments where the costs of rigidity are high and the penalties for flexibility are increasingly legal rather than reputational.
Darren Heitner’s latest NIL newsletter reinforces this point; his discussion of eligibility disputes and legal positioning underscores how often courts now function as the venue of last—and sometimes first—resort:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/newsletter-image-likeness-vol-172-lets-take-look-what-darren-heitner-btfke/
Seen through an incentives lens, this isn’t surprising. When rules are costly to enforce internally and unevenly binding across institutions, litigation becomes a rational strategy, not an aberration.
It’s also worth noting that this strategy is not uniformly successful, which further reinforces the incentive logic rather than undermining it. In recent days, courts have gone both ways. A Tennessee judge denied quarterback Joey Aguilar’s request for a preliminary injunction after initially granting temporary relief, effectively closing the door on his eligibility claim and marking a significant win for the NCAA on the merits (e.g., https://apnews.com/article/5a852d63b25c8fe73c9ab9fc0afe6aba). Around the same time, an Alabama judge rejected former Crimson Tide player Charles Bediako’s bid for a preliminary injunction, despite earlier emergency relief that had allowed him to play while the case progressed (e.g., https://www.reuters.com/sports/alabama-court-denies-charles-bediakos-injunction-ncaa-eligibility--flm-2026-02-10/). The point is not that courts always side with athletes—they don’t—but that the variance itself keeps litigation attractive where internal remedies feel exhausted or asymmetric. While these denials bolster the NCAA’s position short-term, they also signal to athletes that targeted, well-prepped cases can still yield temporary wins—fueling more suits rather than deterring them.
What’s striking is how clearly this logic now shows up outside the courtroom. The daily churn of athletic department decision-making—coaching contracts, donor-driven collectives, facilities investments, enforcement agreements—reads less like a system clinging to tradition and more like one quietly optimizing under constraint.
Even a scan across the collegiate sports landscape, you can see the same pressures at work. University presidents express support for stronger enforcement in principle while hesitating to sign participation agreements that limit appeal rights. Athletic directors acknowledge the need for collective solutions but remain constrained by boards, governors, donors, and markets. Coaches negotiate for guaranteed money because the market rewards it. None of this requires bad faith to explain.
It requires incentives.
This is also why the recent turn toward Congress—and documents like Senator Schmitt’s NIL blueprint—feel less like ideological pivots and more like institutional adaptation. When governance by litigation becomes the equilibrium, political actors eventually try to reset the game board.
That reset may or may not succeed. But the behavior we’re seeing now—longer contracts, heavier legalism, strategic litigation, appeals to Congress—is not evidence of hypocrisy so much as a system behaving exactly as incentive theory would predict.
Further reading / context
For readers who want the deeper political economy, institutional and game-theoretic framework behind these dynamics that I’ve been working through, this piece builds on several earlier posts:
How Collective Bargaining Could Stabilize College Football (flagship)
https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/how-collective-bargaining-could-stabilize
The Professionalization of College Athletics
https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-professionalization-of-college
Litigation as Governance in College Athletics
https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/litigation-as-governance-in-college
When College Coaches Act Like Employers
https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/when-college-coaches-act-like-employers
Enforcement Is the Real Collective Action Problem
https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/enforcement-is-the-real-collective
Why the Transfer Portal in College Football Isn’t “Chaos”
https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/why-the-transfer-portal-in-college
NB: This essay is written in my capacity as a political scientist who studies institutions, incentives, and collective action, not as an institutional spokesperson.