Monday night the SCORE Act got pulled before the House Rules Committee could meet. Thursday afternoon, at the UGA Athletic Association spring board meeting at Lake Oconee, Jere Morehead (UGA’s president, longtime NCAA insider, the SEC president most institutionally embedded in the governance-restructure conversation) told reporters he’s prepared to vote next week at Destin on creating an SEC enforcement mechanism with its own rules.
The quote, since it’s the news:
“If we don’t get federal legislation, in my opinion, we’re going to have to do this conference-by-conference because we can’t allow the Wild West to continue any longer. So I’m prepared next week in Destin to be ready to vote on creating an SEC mechanism and SEC rules, and that’s what we have to do. Congress isn’t going to act as they should.”
Three things to notice. First, the date. The SEC spring meetings at Destin run May 27-29, three working days from now. Second, the framing. “Conference-by-conference” is to say: in lieu of an NCAA. Third, what he’s not saying. Morehead isn’t hedging. He isn’t framing this as a hypothetical or a future possibility or a contingent plan. He’s saying he’s prepared to vote. The vote is on the calendar.
And here’s the part that I didn’t notice until now: this is at least the third time he’s said it.
Run the tape back six months and Morehead’s argument has escalated in steps so deliberate it almost looks choreographed.
Late 2025 / early 2026, he told Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports that if the NCAA couldn’t enforce tampering and if Congress couldn’t pass the SCORE Act, the SEC “may have to go our own way to create rules.” Conditional. Permissive. The kind of thing a flagship-program president says when he wants the conversation to happen without yet committing to where it lands.
January 2026, at UGA’s winter board meeting, he sharpened it a bit. “I think we’re getting to a point that the Southeastern Conference is going to have to create its own set of rules.” Declarative now, not conditional, paired with a public critique of CSC enforcement and an open acknowledgment that NCAA rules existed but weren’t being enforced. Georgia AD Josh Brooks nodded along when Morehead said he expected the same sentiment among SEC athletic directors. The 247Sports reporter who covered the winter meeting noted that Morehead’s pitch had a critical-mass framing: it would take the SEC reaching “a critical number that’s willing to go down that path” before commissioner Greg Sankey acts.
Thursday at Lake Oconee, Morehead committed to a vote. The argument moved from “this is going to have to happen” to “I’m ready to cast the vote.” Date on the calendar. Venue specified.
The same meeting produced AD-level confirmation. UGA athletic director Josh Brooks went on the record with his own version of the same diagnosis. On the CSC’s structural problem: “We don’t have a true mechanism to ensure that everyone is reporting deals. That’s my frustration.” On accountability: “If we can’t hold people accountable, that’s the first thing.” On the operative question: “How do we give ourselves the opportunity to govern ourselves on some of these issues?” Same diagnosis Bjork was making at Ohio State, Chun at Washington, Bevacqua at Notre Dame. Different conference. Same meeting room as Morehead, twenty feet away. The AD-level posture had moved to where the president-level posture was.
Three statements. Six months. And, well, the argument didn’t change, but the conditions to act on it did. And the proximate condition that finally landed was the SCORE Act collapse Monday night.
Morehead has been just waiting for the trigger. That’s what political actors do.
So, it would be tempting to read what Morehead’s about to do at Destin as something genuinely new. A flagship-conference president publicly committing his conference to operating outside the NCAA’s governance umbrella. That’s a big deal, the kind of thing that gets called unprecedented in the post-game punditry.
Except history has been here before.
Noah Henderson at The College Front Office published a careful piece yesterday arguing that what we’re watching now is the same institutional cycle college athletics has produced since at least 1929. The whole thing is worth your time. The historical arc he traces is worth absorbing before we go further.
The short version, in my words (but go read it, it’s really good): In 1929 the Big Ten voted to expel the University of Iowa for slush funds: alumni-organized funds paying football players “upkeep” stipends and tuition reimbursements in violation of conference amateurism rules. Iowa got reinstated within a year. The Carnegie Foundation’s investigation of college athletics revealed that seven of the nine remaining Big Ten schools were doing essentially the same thing. You can’t expel one member for conduct everyone else is engaged in. The expulsion held until the auditing caught up, then it collapsed.
By the late 1940s, the NCAA tried to convert itself from advisory body to central enforcer. The 1948 Sanity Code required athletes to be admitted on academic merit and to receive financial aid through the same channels available to non-athletes. The 1950 “Sinful Seven” case (Maryland, Virginia, Virginia Tech, VMI, The Citadel, Villanova, Boston College) was the test. NCAA members voted 111-93 to expel them. Majority support. Below the two-thirds threshold. The expulsion failed.
One year later, in 1951, the NCAA voted to repeal the Sanity Code’s financial aid restrictions entirely. By 1956, Walter Byers had formalized athletic scholarships and the amateur fiction had been quietly rewritten. The centralized enforcement attempt ended in accommodation rather than confrontation. The members couldn’t be made to comply with the rules they’d written, so the rules got changed to fit the conduct.
Skipper Heard, the LSU athletic director, said the part out loud at the 1946 NCAA convention. If you prohibit the coaches from recruiting, he warned the delegates, the alumni and other key people will just do the recruiting instead. That’s the structural problem. It’s been the structural problem the whole time.
Henderson’s argument: every era of college sports thinks its crisis is uniquely modern. Every era produces the same cycle. Economic pressure outpaces institutional restraint. Enforcement becomes selective and politically inconvenient. The definition of amateurism gets rewritten to fit the new reality. The CSC’s Nebraska arbitration win this past Monday plays the same role in this cycle that the Sinful Seven vote played in the last one: a centralized enforcement body winning on paper while losing operationally because the institutions it nominally governs are already negotiating the terms of their own forgiveness.
One disanalogy worth flagging before the rhetoric runs ahead of the analysis. The 1929-1956 cycle was about amateurism enforcement: schools cheating on rules that prohibited compensation.
The 2026 cycle is about post-compensation governance: institutions negotiating the architecture for paying athletes that the House settlement already requires. Different underlying question, similar surface pattern of members-versus-central-body. The cycle frame applies in form. Whether it applies in substance the same way is its own question, one I think the post needs to acknowledge before leaning on it.
Henderson’s right about the cycle, with that caveat. What I want to add today is something about why this iteration probably moves faster than the previous ones did, and why the speed matters, because it really does matter.
The historical cycles Henderson catalogs played out over decades. The Sanity Code took three years to fully collapse. The Iowa-Carnegie cycle took roughly a year. The amateur ideal eroded across half a century before scholarship rules formalized in 1956. Slow. Painful. But eventually the institutions got around to rewriting the rules to fit what was actually happening on the ground.
The current iteration is structured to move faster than the previous ones, though institutional cycles in college sports have a way of dragging. The structural conditions for resolution are compressed in ways they’ve never been. Whether the resolution actually arrives in months or years depends on whether the conferences can coordinate beyond the SEC-Big Ten core, and that’s a real open question.
The acceleration that’s possible is structural, and it’s the thing I’ve been working up to in the briefing for a couple of weeks. The conferences are bigger than the NCAA now in the way that matters most for one specific kind of institutional confrontation: making and enforcing their own rules for revenue sports. They’re bigger in revenue. They’re bigger in vote share on the committees that set rules. They’re bigger in the kind of operational capacity that running a conference league requires.
One qualifier: Bigger in those ways doesn’t mean independent in every way. The conferences still depend on the NCAA for non-revenue sport championships, eligibility certification, anti-doping programs, and a dozen other administrative functions the national office runs. Bigger in revenue plus bigger in votes plus bigger in some operational capacity doesn’t equal “ready to leave.” It equals “ready to write their own rules for the part of the operation that matters most to them and still use the NCAA infrastructure for the rest.” That’s what Morehead is actually proposing.
NCAA total revenue is approximately $1.6 billion, depending which year you look at. About 64% of that comes from the CBS/Turner March Madness deal. The rest comes from championships, services, and member fees. The bulk of NCAA revenue flows back out to schools and conferences as distributions. The national office keeps a smaller operating slice, a few hundred million dollars depending how you count.
FY25 conference revenue numbers landed this week, and they sharpen the comparison considerably. Per Brent Schrotenboer’s reporting in USA Today: Big Ten $1.47 billion. SEC $1.11 billion. Combined, the P2 pull in $2.58 billion. That’s roughly a billion dollars larger than the NCAA’s entire revenue base. And critically: the conferences keep their football TV revenue. That money never touches the NCAA. The biggest revenue stream in college athletics is conference money, not NCAA money. The Big Ten alone, in FY25, brought in nearly as much revenue as the entire NCAA. The Big Ten’s year-over-year revenue increase was $540 million, more than the entire FY25 revenue of the Big 12.
For the institutional financial data underneath these conference numbers (what each school keeps after distributions, what fraction of institutional revenue athletics consumes, where the structural divides sit), the D1 athletics map I built with Greg Chick at NILnomics covers all 358 D1 programs in FY24-25.
The governance vote share is its own structural inversion. Under the new D1 architecture rolled out in August 2025, the autonomy conferences (the P4) hold approximately 65% of weighted voting on each committee except the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. The voting structure puts seven conferences at three votes each, four conferences at 1.5 votes, the rest at 1.14. The autonomy block is dominant by design. The P2 is the largest single bloc inside the autonomy block. The math: if SEC and Big Ten coordinate inside the P4, they have effective veto power and routinely-pass authority on essentially every committee that matters. Which is to say: the NCAA’s “authority” on revenue-sharing rules, transfer rules, eligibility rules, and enforcement runs through committees the P2 already controls.
The cycle Henderson describes assumed approximate parity between the central enforcer and the member institutions. The Big Ten could expel Iowa in 1929 because the Big Ten as a conference was the enforcement body and Iowa as a member was approximately commensurate in size. The NCAA could try the Sinful Seven because the NCAA’s footprint in the 1950s was approximately equal to the individual schools’ operating capacity.
The parity is gone, folks. The conferences are bigger than the central body. The P2 alone is bigger than the central body. The P2 already controls the votes that would have to ratify or reject any centralized rule. And the conferences operate their own TV revenue streams that the central body has zero claim on.
When a member is bigger than the institution it nominally answers to, the institution’s authority is borrowed authority. It exists as long as the member finds it useful to lend it. The Iowa-1929 cycle and the Sanity Code cycle both played out under conditions where the member institutions were smaller in scale than the central body. The current cycle is playing out under the inverse condition. Which is why it’ll resolve faster. The conferences have more weight than they used to. The NCAA has less.
Morehead’s Thursday statement gets more weight from what else happened the same week. The Big Ten’s spring meetings were running at the Ritz-Carlton in Rancho Palos Verdes. The ACC’s spring meetings were running, at the same time, at the Ritz-Carlton in Amelia Island.
Three flagship-conference meetings. Same week. Different venues. Mostly-aligned posture.
Rancho Palos Verdes produced two on-record quotes that wouldn’t have come out of a Big Ten AD a year ago. Ohio State’s Ross Bjork: “we cannot govern nationally right now.” Washington’s Pat Chun calling the current NIL market “fraudulent.” Sharp public language. Not framed as concerns. Flat declarations that the centralized governance model has failed and the conference has to do something about it.
Underneath the public statements, the Big Ten was also actively discussing a 10-game conference schedule with its football coaches this week. Ross Dellenger reported it Friday. The framing inside the Big Ten was explicit: this was being discussed “as the league and SEC explore self-governance models.” That’s a different kind of move than a public statement. A 10-game conference schedule (up from nine) is an operational commitment to playing more of each other and less of everyone else. It’s the schedule equivalent of conference self-governance. If the conferences are about to set their own rules, they’re also about to play more of their own games.
And the substance underneath the schedule talk goes further than I’d initially appreciated. Per Yahoo Sports reporting, the Big Ten spent three full days of its Rancho Palos Verdes meetings discussing what the conference could “actually do on its own and what it could legally defend.” Petitti didn’t rule it out. Bjork confirmed it internally. That’s not signaling. That’s three days of structural planning by the conference’s senior leadership about how to operate a parallel governance architecture. The Big Ten isn’t waiting for the SEC to vote at Destin. The Big Ten is doing its own version of the same work, at the same time, from inside the same week.
A concrete number anchors the picture. Per the same Yahoo Sports reporting, the SEC and Big Ten together have submitted more than $200 million in NIL deals to the CSC since January. A large portion has been rejected or remains under review. That throughput problem is what’s driving the conference-mechanism conversation at the operational level. The CSC isn’t moving fast enough or rejecting deals consistently enough to satisfy the conferences whose schools are submitting most of the volume.
Amelia Island produced something different. Per Henderson’s piece yesterday, P4 commissioners discussed a one-year amnesty for schools that have blown past the rev-share cap. Bjork (same Bjork, also quoted in SBJ) said the governance structure needs to be “rethought, reimagined.” Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua got more specific. The cap, he told the magazine, isn’t operating the way it’s intended and it needs to be raised. The CSC’s Nebraska arbitration win (issued Monday) was effectively being negotiated past by Wednesday afternoon.
The CSC’s response is its own data point. CEO Bryan Seeley, asked about the cap-amnesty discussion, said his office enforces the rules the universities themselves wrote. If the universities want to change the rules, fine. Until they do, the office enforces what’s on the books. That’s the CSC publicly admitting it has no independent authority. It exists as a service the conferences purchased. They can return it.
So in one week: Big Ten ADs publicly stating the system can’t govern nationally, ACC governance leadership negotiating a cap amnesty, the CSC publicly framing itself as a service rather than an authority. Convergence isn’t quite the right word for it. The conferences are running parallel plays in consecutive meeting cycles. The plays look the same because the structural pressure is the same. And Morehead, on Thursday, is doing what the pressure was always going to make some flagship president do. Putting a vote on the calendar.
Morehead’s proposal is narrower than a full break though. The SEC creates its own rules and operates its own enforcement mechanism for revenue sports. The SEC stays inside the NCAA championship infrastructure for non-revenue sports. Olympic-sport athletes still compete in NCAA championships. The non-revenue side of athletic departments still gets the benefits of NCAA membership.
What changes is that the SEC writes its own rules for the football and basketball revenue-sharing setup, and enforces them itself. The NCAA’s CSC apparatus, the Cousins-pending settlement enforcement framework, the broader NCAA rule-making: all of that becomes background noise the SEC can ignore for purposes of governing the commercial side of its conference.
The legal cover for this move is marginally sturdier than it was a year ago, though each piece of the stack has real limits. Heitner walked through some of this in Vol 185 this week. McCann’s been making related points. Run quickly through what’s stacking up, with appropriate caveats.
Choh v. Brown University in the Second Circuit. The court upheld the Ivy League’s policy prohibiting athletic scholarships and affirmed dismissal of an antitrust lawsuit by former athletes against the league. Choh suggests a doctrinal pathway for a conference to set internal rules, including rules that constrain athlete compensation, without automatic antitrust liability. The caveats are real: it’s a Second Circuit decision, not Supreme Court precedent, and not binding in the Eleventh Circuit where the SEC primarily operates. The Ivy League doesn’t pay athletes through any mechanism; the SEC does. The doctrinal context is meaningfully different. Choh is persuasive cover, not a shield. The Big Ten has been quietly anchored on it for months. The SEC has it available too.
Plaintiff-side openness to conference-level caps. Dellenger reported Monday that Jeff Kessler and Steve Berman, House class counsel, would not stand in the way of conferences proposing higher caps or different cap designs, as long as the result benefits the athletes covered by the House class. The conditional is doing work in that sentence. Kessler and Berman aren’t going to bless a conference enforcement mechanism that constrains athlete compensation. They’ve already rejected proposals along those lines. What the openness removes is the assumption of immediate opposition. It doesn’t establish active cooperation.
The “follow the rules that already exist” frame from McCann, picked up by Heitner this week. The federal pathway has been functionally closed since 2020: 40-plus bills introduced, zero advanced beyond committee. The operative move isn’t waiting for an antitrust exemption that’s never going to materialize. It’s operating within existing antitrust and employment law, which in practice means either (a) a collectively bargained framework that triggers the non-statutory labor exemption, or (b) conference-level rules that fit within Choh-style doctrinal cover. Morehead’s proposal lands on path (b). It’s the version of “follow the rules” that doesn’t require athlete employment recognition. McCann’s frame is journalistic argument, not legal doctrine. It carries weight in shaping the conversation. It doesn’t carry weight in court.
And the CSC Participation Agreement that has now failed to gain P4 school consensus twice. The Participation Agreement is the contract that would have bound P4 schools to CSC enforcement. The schools the CSC was designed to govern have refused to sign onto the binding agreement. That’s a foundational problem more serious than any single arbitration outcome. It also cuts both ways: the same conferences that refused to sign onto a binding NCAA-aligned enforcement architecture will face the same coordination problem if they try to build their own. The CSC has been operating without formal commitment from its largest members for months. Morehead’s “I’m prepared to vote” line is partly an acknowledgment that the existing setup has been running on conference forbearance rather than conference commitment. The forbearance is running out.
Put those together and the legal foundation for a Destin vote is meaningfully better than it would have been a year ago, even if the pieces are individually partial. Whether the SEC actually takes the vote is one question. Whether the vote produces operational rules rather than aspirational ones is the harder question. Creating new rules is one thing. Enforcing them across 16 schools with different priorities and incentives is something else entirely. The CSC was built to enforce. It’s not enforcing. An SEC mechanism would face the same enforcement problem in a smaller venue.
So, yes, the frictions are real. Keep them in mind as Destin either delivers or doesn’t.
Morehead’s got a critical-mass problem though. He said it himself, both in January and Thursday: the SEC has to reach a critical number of presidents willing to go down this path before Sankey acts. One UGA president speaking publicly isn’t the same as the conference moving. We don’t know whether the rest of the SEC presidents have aligned. Brooks nodding along is a useful signal but it isn’t a vote. The Destin agenda might list a vote and the vote might fail to reach quorum or majority. Or it might not get to the agenda at all.
The intra-SEC CFP divergence is a real tell. On the 24-team CFP question, Sankey and the SEC presidents are aligned in opposition. The SEC football coaches (Kirby Smart at Georgia, Josh Heupel at Tennessee) are publicly aligned with the Big Ten coaches in favor. Morehead is publicly opposing his own football coach on this question. That’s a different kind of conference-internal split than a unified SEC-vs-everyone-else play. If the conference can’t get to alignment on CFP expansion at the same Destin meeting, the broader “SEC moves as a bloc” story gets more complicated.
Cross-conference enforcement is a hard problem. Morehead acknowledged Thursday: if the SEC sets its own rules, what does the SEC do when a Big 12 school or an ACC school does something flagrant against an SEC school’s interest? Tampering across conferences is genuinely hard if the SEC is enforcing alone. Morehead’s answer was that the SEC could “call out” cross-conference violations, but calling out isn’t enforcement. The cross-conference enforcement gap is the same gap that produced the NCAA’s centralized model in the first place.
The Big 12 and ACC posture matters. The Big Ten has been moving in parallel: Bjork, Chun, the Rancho Palos Verdes signaling. The ACC is in the cap-amnesty conversation, which is a softer version of the same trajectory. But the conference-by-conference framing depends on at least three P4 conferences moving together, not just the SEC running ahead. If the Big 12 and ACC settle for cap amnesty as a status-quo accommodation rather than backing a parallel conference-mechanism move, Morehead’s “I expect other leagues will follow suit” becomes more conditional than confident.
Olympic and non-revenue sports complicate the simple version. The SEC doesn’t want to leave NCAA championship infrastructure. The non-revenue sports rely on it. So whatever the SEC creates at Destin has to be compatible with continued NCAA participation for everything that isn’t football and men’s/women’s basketball. The architecture is more complex than a clean break.
And the legal risks aren’t zero. Choh gives doctrinal cover, but it doesn’t immunize the SEC from antitrust litigation if the conference’s rules are challenged. The plaintiff bar has been remarkably active across every adjacent surface for two years. A new SEC enforcement mechanism is a new potential defendant. The cost of being right is litigation.
Real frictions. None of them fatal on their own.
Destin runs May 27-29. A short watch list, at least what I’m watching anyway.
Whether the vote actually happens. Morehead said “I’m prepared to vote.” That doesn’t mean the SEC presidents will put it on the formal agenda. Sankey controls a lot of what gets voted on. If the agenda includes a vote on an SEC mechanism, that itself is a major signal. If the agenda doesn’t include it but the topic comes up in closed session, that’s a different signal: momentum-building rather than decision-making.
Whether Sankey signals public alignment with the presidents. Sankey’s been careful for months to position the SEC as ready to act if federal legislation fails without committing the conference to any specific design. Post-SCORE-pull, the trigger condition Morehead has been waiting for has landed. Whether Sankey moves from procedural caution to operational commitment is the inflection point. Watch for any public statement between now and Wednesday that frames the Destin agenda in terms of “SEC mechanism” rather than “discussions among presidents.”
Whether the Big Ten’s Rancho Palos Verdes work produces aligned action. Bjork and Chun’s statements were strong public language but they didn’t include votes or specific proposals. The Big Ten’s next move is the test. If the Big Ten announces its own parallel process by the end of next week (a working group, a vote target, a proposed mechanism), the cross-conference convergence becomes operational. If the Big Ten meetings end without a parallel commitment, the SEC’s move is solo. Solo plays in college athletics history are harder to sustain than convergent ones.
One more thing worth flagging before this gets too long. The conference-mechanism move Morehead is putting on the Destin agenda isn’t the only restructure being pursued. Another track has been running in parallel, and it landed in print this week too.
Two University of Texas faculty (Michael Granof in accounting, Martin Luby in the LBJ School of Public Affairs) published an op-ed in Governing magazine on Thursday arguing universities should formally spin off their athletic departments into corporations, sell equity stakes to outside investors while retaining controlling interest, pay athletes directly as employees of the corporation at market rates, and drop the requirement that athletes be students at all. They cite Kentucky’s Champions Blue LLC as the live precedent for the structural form. They cite UT football’s $2.38 billion valuation as the financial argument. And they cite Senator Cantwell’s published request to review athletic-department tax-exempt status as the regulatory wedge.
The conference-mechanism pathway and the corporate-spin-off pathway are parallel responses to the same underlying diagnosis. Morehead’s move keeps the basic institutional form and changes the governance layer. Granof and Luby’s argument changes the institutional form entirely. The cycle Henderson describes can resolve through either pathway. Or both, at different speeds, at different institutions.
I’ll maybe write up the corporate-spin-off pathway as its own piece next week, after Destin gives us a read on where the conference pathway lands. For now: the borrowers calling in the loan aren’t all calling it in the same way.
The NCAA’s authority has always been borrowed authority. That’s shorthand for a more complex institutional dynamic perhaps, but it’s still real. The NCAA is a voluntary association of its members. Its authority is delegated authority. It exists as long as the conferences find it useful to delegate. That’s been true since the IAAUS formed in 1906. The Iowa cycle ran its course because the members eventually rewrote the rules. The Sanity Code did too.
What’s new now isn’t that the conferences are tired of the arrangement. (They’ve been tired for a while, it would seem.) What’s new is that the conferences now have the financial scale, the vote share, and the operational capacity to act on what they were always going to act on. The NCAA’s weight has been declining for decades. The conferences’ weight has been growing for the same period. The two lines crossed somewhere in the last few years. We’re on the other side of the crossing.
Morehead at Lake Oconee on Thursday was a flagship-conference president saying he’s done waiting. In public. With a vote date attached. He doesn’t need the NCAA’s permission to set the SEC’s rules. He doesn’t need the NCAA’s enforcement to enforce them. He needs the SEC presidents to align. He thinks they will. Whether he’s right about that is the next four days.
Whether the vote happens at Destin is the next question. The structural argument doesn’t depend on this particular meeting. The cycle Henderson described will resolve regardless of what happens on the May 27-29 agenda. The voluntary-association structure of the NCAA means exit isn’t free. There are interlocking commitments, championship infrastructures, dispute-resolution processes the conferences still rely on for non-revenue sports. The borrowers don’t get to walk away cleanly. They get to renegotiate the terms.
What this post is about is the timing. Why it’s happening now. Why it’s happening fast. Why “now” looks materially different from any previous round of the same cycle. Whether the resolution comes in months or years remains the open question. The structural conditions are in place. The institutional coordination is the variable.
A century of the cycle. A week of meetings. Five days from a vote.
The borrowed authority is being called in, and, well, the terms of repayment of that debt are what’s actually being negotiated.
Background reading: Noah Henderson's There is Nothing New Under the Sun at The College Front Office is the historical-cycle piece this post leans on. Granof and Luby's Why College Sports Should Go Corporate in Governing is the corporate-spin-off-pathway companion read; I'll maybe write up that pathway next week. The Morehead Lake Oconee remarks were reported across multiple outlets Thursday and Friday; the AJC and 247Sports versions both have the operative quote. Heitner Vol 185 (The Rules Were Always There) is the legal-track companion.
If you’re finding this analysis useful, share it with someone trying to make sense of where college sports governance is going. The immediate prequel is Why the SCORE Act Got Pulled (and What That Means for Cantwell-Cruz), which set up the post-pull political math this piece extends to the conference-mechanism move at Destin. The longer structural framework is Five Roads Out and Why Most of Them Dead-End, which has been the analytical spine since March.
If you’re new to Sacred Cow BBQ, subscribe. I post several times a week on political economy and college athletics, plus occasional pieces on higher education, polarization, and trust in institutions.
This is an ongoing series applying political economy analysis to the college sports reform landscape. Recent entries:
Why the SCORE Act Got Pulled (and What That Means for Cantwell-Cruz) (Tuesday)
Three Federal Tracks (and Why the House SCORE Vote Is the Easy Part) (last Thursday)
What the White House (Newly) Wants for College Athletics (and Why It’s Stuck) (May 11)
Reader Feedback: Geathers, the Cap, and the Final Payment Trap
What the 1933 NCAA Handbook Says about College Athletics
Five Roads Out and Why Most of Them Dead-End
How Collective Bargaining Could Stabilize College Football (the flagship)
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.
The money is clearly there to be able to take the big sports out of college completely for standalone professional leagues that feed into the majors, then they can do whatever they want. Quit the farce and do what should have been done decades ago at this point