In a functioning governance system, rules are enforced internally and disputes are resolved by the people in charge. Lawsuits exist as a last resort. They are not how a system is supposed to operate day to day.
College athletics has moved partially past that point, at least until some fix is implemented.
What we are seeing now is not just “more litigation.” It is a deeper institutional shift. The NCAA and its conferences continue to speak in the language of authority, but in practice they are increasingly handing real decision-making power over to courts. Eligibility decisions, enforcement outcomes, and even who gets to step on the field are no longer being resolved through internal processes that command widespread acceptance. Instead, they are being settled through temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions, and negotiated settlements reached under judicial pressure.
That is not incidental. It is what institutional strain looks like in slow motion.
Authority versus enforcement
NCAA leadership continues to insist that the rules are clear, fair, and evenly applied. In recent interviews, President Charlie Baker has (understandably) criticized schools that support eligibility lawsuits for refusing to “play by the same rules as everyone else,” warning that judicial intervention makes enforcement feel “disingenuous.”
But authority is not maintained by saying the rules are clear. It is maintained when rules actually bind, and that’s especially true when following them gets costly.
Once outcomes reliably depend on who files suit first, which judge hears the case, or whether emergency relief can be secured before a season starts, authority begins to shift at the margins. The NCAA’s enforcement machinery still exists, but its legitimacy is not what it once was. And legitimacy does not come back through press releases or congressional appeals.
One of the reasons the NCAA retains institutional authority—despite widespread contention over eligibility, enforcement, and governance—is its financial control over what is effectively the flagship product of college sports: the Division I men’s basketball tournament, better known as March Madness. The NCAA earns the vast majority of its revenue from the media and marketing rights associated with this tournament. The multi-year broadcast agreements with CBS and Turner (running through 2032) are collectively valued at roughly $8.8 billion, or about $1.1 billion per year, with the tournament’s media rights alone accounting for the lion’s share of annual income.
March Madness generates approximately $900 million of the NCAA’s roughly $1.2 billion in total annual revenue, meaning the success of a three-week basketball event underwrites the association’s entire budget. Much of that revenue is then redistributed to member conferences and schools based on performance, with conferences like the SEC earning tens of millions of dollars from tournament units; the NCAA also uses its broader revenue base to fund dozens of other championships and governance functions across all sports. This massive financial footprint anchors the NCAA’s relevance in the college sports ecosystem, giving it leverage that stems less from legal clarity than from economic centrality.
Sources: How much the NCAA earns from March Madness and media rights:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/031516/how-much-does-ncaa-make-march-madness.asp
The NCAA’s current media rights deals valued and extended:
NCAA revenue distribution and reinvestment in member schools and championships:
https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2021/5/11/division-i-finances.aspx
When conferences become litigants
This shift is no longer confined to the NCAA’s national office. Conferences themselves are now turning to courts to defend rules they can no longer enforce cleanly on their own.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey recently submitted an affidavit supporting the NCAA’s position in the Charles Bediako eligibility case, urging the court to uphold existing rules and warning that allowing exceptions would create competitive imbalance and unfairness. Bediako, a former Alabama basketball player who entered the NBA Draft, went undrafted, signed multiple NBA contracts, and played in the G League, obtained a temporary restraining order allowing him to compete while the case proceeds.
Reporting on Sankey’s intervention is here:
https://www.on3.com/college/alabama-crimson-tide/news/greg-sankey-asks-for-courts-to-uphold-the-ncaa-eligibility-rules-in-charles-bediako-case/
When conference leadership moves from enforcing rules internally to advocating for them in court, that is a clear signal that internal governance tools are no longer sufficient. The conference is no longer governing eligibility exclusively through its own processes. It is asking judges to do so on its behalf.
Eligibility by injunction
At this point, the pattern is hard to miss:
An athlete is denied eligibility.
The athlete seeks emergency judicial relief.
A court grants a temporary restraining order or injunction.
The athlete competes while the case remains unresolved.
Institutions warn of chaos while quietly relying on courts to manage it.
Basketball has become the most visible stress test, but football is quickly following the same path.
Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss was denied a sixth year of eligibility by the NCAA and is now headed to state court after his appeal failed. Reuters reports that his case is scheduled to be heard beginning February 12.
https://www.reuters.com/sports/ole-miss-qb-trinidad-chambliss-appeal-6th-season-denied-by-ncaa--flm-2026-02-05/
Tennessee quarterback Joey Aguilar secured a temporary restraining order allowing him to compete, with a judge finding a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of his claim that NCAA eligibility rules improperly counted his junior college seasons.
https://www.reuters.com/sports/tennessee-qb-joey-aguilar-gets-restraining-order-against-ncaa--flm-2026-02-04/
Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia won an injunction allowing him to play in 2025, prompting the NCAA to issue a blanket waiver for similarly situated athletes—while his lawsuit continues to press for eligibility in 2026.
Even when the NCAA ultimately prevails, the instability is revealing. In the Third Circuit’s decision vacating Rutgers player Jett Elad’s injunction over the five-year rule, eligibility still turned on legal maneuvering, timing, and forum selection rather than settled administrative authority.
This is an expensive, slow, and unequal way to govern. It advantages athletes and institutions with the resources to litigate aggressively and turns eligibility into a function of legal strategy rather than coherent policy.
Why state courts matter
One underappreciated feature of this shift is where these cases are being decided. Recent reporting notes that many of the most consequential eligibility injunctions are coming from state courts, not federal ones, where standards for emergency relief can be more flexible and timelines faster.
Front Office Sports explains why state courts have become the preferred venue for these challenges:
https://frontofficesports.com/why-state-courts-may-be-the-key-to-winning-more-ncaa-eligibility/
That matters because it further fragments authority. Instead of one national rule applied consistently, eligibility increasingly depends on state law, venue choice, and local judicial interpretation.
Narrative control as a substitute for authority
As enforcement becomes less predictably binding, institutions increasingly fall back on narrative control.
When NCAA leaders (rationally) insist that “the rules are clear,” they are not simply describing the rulebook. They are trying to preserve legitimacy in a system where outcomes increasingly contradict that claim. Narrative becomes a way to hold authority together rhetorically after it has already begun to fracture operationally.
This is why public emphasis on clarity, consistency, and “playing by the same rules” has intensified precisely as eligibility outcomes are being decided by injunction. The audience is not judges, who deal in legal standards and evidence. It is member institutions, fans, donors, and lawmakers.
But narrative can only stretch so far. Once athletes and schools internalize that lawsuits are the path to playing time, assertions of clarity start to sound less like governance and more like denial.
Why institutions tolerate this
At first glance, it seems irrational for institutions to tolerate a system in which their own rules are routinely overridden.
The reason is that litigation allows institutions to avoid making binding political choices.
As long as courts resolve disputes case by case, the NCAA and its members can maintain that the core rules remain intact in principle, avoid comprehensive eligibility reform, defer responsibility for distributional tradeoffs, and preserve flexibility while projecting consistency.
From a game-theoretic perspective, litigation functions as a kind of commitment-avoidance strategy. No one wants to be the first mover in redefining eligibility, professional boundaries, or athlete labor status. Courts absorb the immediate costs and political blame.
This dynamic mirrors other areas of college sports governance, including the destabilizing effects of the transfer portal, which I’ve discussed previously:
https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/why-the-transfer-portal-in-college
The paradox of “clarity”
Clarity is being invoked because it is one of the last remaining sources of symbolic authority. It reframes resistance as defiance rather than evidence of system failure.
But clarity without consent is not durable governance.
Recent efforts to expand enforcement capacity in the wake of the House settlement—including the $2.8 billion athlete compensation agreement—highlight this. Institutions are investing in policing at the same time that buy-in is eroding. Historically, that combination leads either to formalization through law or bargaining, or to fragmentation through exit, forum shopping, and endless litigation.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, enforcement only works when it is collective:
https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/enforcement-is-the-real-collective
What litigation as governance really means
Courts have not intruded on college sports governance. They have been invited in.
Institutions rely on litigation to draw boundaries they cannot politically draw themselves, to enforce rules unevenly without owning the consequences, and to absorb blame for outcomes they want but cannot justify.
That strategy buys time. But it carries a cost. Once judges become frequent and consequential interpreters of eligibility rules, institutional authority becomes more derivative than original.
The real question is no longer whether the rules are clear.
It is who actually governs—and how long that ambiguity can last.
Absent structural reform—most plausibly through some form of collective bargaining that stabilizes incentives—this cycle will continue:
https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/how-collective-bargaining-could-stabilize
Congress could intervene, but the NCAA’s all-or-nothing lobbying posture has so far ensured gridlock. In the meantime, litigation fills the vacuum.
NB: This essay is written in my capacity as a political scientist who studies institutions, incentives, and collective action, not as an institutional spokesperson.