In the letter Charlie Baker sent to NCAA member schools on April 16, he used a phrase that did more work than he probably intended. The current governance environment, Baker wrote, is “a fragmented patchwork of state laws and constant efforts to erode critical eligibility standards through litigation.”
The letter’s purpose was to convince membership to lobby Congress for the SCORE Act. The phrase’s purpose, whether Baker meant it that way or not, was to describe what’s been happening in state capitals for the last four months.
Yesterday’s post “No One Is Waiting” covered the federal half of the story. This post is the other half: what Baker is calling the patchwork, what’s actually in it, and why the NCAA’s own lobbying operation has now put the word “fragmented” in writing.
Start with the thing that’s easy to miss. The House v. NCAA settlement, approved in 2024 and operative July 2025, created a single national obligation: every Division I school that opts in commits to sharing up to $20.5 million per year directly with athletes. Every Power 4 school opted in. The number grows roughly 4% per year for a decade, reaching close to $33 million by the mid-2030s.
That $20.5 million is the floor, not the ceiling. The actual cost of competing has moved past it. Top-tier football programs are spending $40–60 million on rosters this season, with analysts quietly discussing $100 million rosters as a next-wave inevitability. On the basketball side, high-major coaches and general managers tell The Athletic that a competitive men’s roster for 2026-27 runs $10–12 million. The settlement cap is a minimum; the market sets the real number. Schools that don’t find the extra money lose recruiting battles they used to win.
What the settlement did not do is identify where the money comes from. It named the obligation. It didn’t name the payer.
This kind of mismatch isn’t unique to college athletics. Uniform obligations imposed on diverse institutions without matching funding is the ordinary pattern of federal policy: Title IX compliance, ADA compliance, research-grant overhead rates, even unfunded education mandates. What makes House distinctive is the scale, the direct-to-athlete channel, and the fact that most of the institutions asked to pay are public, which drags state political systems in.
So for the last four months, roughly 67 Power 4 schools plus the broader Division I opt-in universe have been finding their own answers to the same question. Because most of them are public universities, the state has to sign off. At different layers, through different mechanisms, with different political frictions. That’s the patchwork Baker is warning Congress about. It exists in part because the NCAA accepted a settlement that defined a cost without defining a source of payment, and in part because institutions chose to respond by finding more money rather than by reducing spending. That’s a choice with its own politics, and we’ll come back to it.
Here’s the sixteen weeks the phrase is describing.
January 28, 2026. The University of Arkansas Board of Trustees passes a 7-3 resolution mandating $15 million in new annual support for athletics from the general university budget. The chancellor opposed the resolution publicly; the board voted over him.
February 25. The Mississippi House passes HB 4014, which would exempt NIL income earned by college athletes from state income tax. The bill is about recruiting advantage. Mississippi’s SEC competitors in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas don’t have state income tax at all, so athletes playing there are already paying less.
March 9. Arkansas’s board approves another $3.4 million diversion into athletics, on top of the $15 million resolution from six weeks earlier.
Mid-March. The Mississippi Senate Finance Committee kills HB 4014. Shelved for the session.
March 27. The Mississippi Supreme Court denies the NCAA’s interlocutory appeal in Chambliss v. NCAA, letting stand a trial court finding that the NCAA “operated in bad faith” when it denied Trinidad Chambliss a sixth year of eligibility.
April 1. Both chambers of the South Carolina legislature override Governor McMaster’s (R) veto to shield universities’ revenue-sharing deals with athletes from state public records requests.
April 8. Tony Evers (D) signs a Wisconsin bill sending $14.6 million per year of general-purpose revenue to the University of Wisconsin’s athletic department for facility debt service. The same bill exempts NIL contracts and revenue-sharing records from the state’s public records law. Two moves in a single piece of legislation.
April 14. The Louisiana House Committee on House and Governmental Affairs votes 9-3 to advance HB 608, which would be the state’s first public records exemption for public spending.
April 15. The NCAA Division I Cabinet declines to vote on the age-based five-year eligibility concept that has been the subject of months of staff work. Next Cabinet meeting: May 22.
April 16, 1:46 PM. Charlie Baker’s letter to NCAA membership goes out, with the “fragmented patchwork” phrase inside it.
April 16, 3:08 PM. Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman grants Oklahoma linebacker Owen Heinecke a preliminary injunction against the NCAA. Second state-court judicial finding of NCAA misconduct in three weeks.
That’s the four-month window Baker’s phrase captures. Calling it a patchwork is almost generous. The state-level responses are coordinated in the weak sense that they’re all answering the same question the settlement created. They are not coordinated with each other. What you end up with is a stack of parallel answers to the same funding question, each shaped by the local authority that could act.
Let’s walk it by category.
Universities and states funding the rev-share obligation
This is the big one, and it’s happening at multiple levels of governance. Wisconsin did it through the state legislature. Florida did it through the Board of Governors, which last June authorized state universities to redirect up to $22.5 million per year in auxiliary funds (housing, parking, dining) to athletics for revenue sharing. Six Florida FBS schools are eligible.
Further down the authority chain: the University of Kansas reversed a three-decade pattern in which KU Athletics transferred roughly $15 million annually to the university general fund, and is now running money in the other direction. The faculty senate responded with a no-confidence vote in the chancellor. Washington State’s Board of Regents voted 8-1 in March to fill a $20 million athletics deficit from general university funds for FY26, described as one-time bridge funding. Kentucky’s board approved a $141 million internal loan ($110 million for capital, $31 million for operating) and spun up a new LLC, Champions Blue, to run the commercial side.
Arkansas’s 7-3 resolution lands here too, and so does USF’s internal loan of up to $22.5 million. Michigan’s Board of Regents rolled $15 million in university support into the FY26 athletic budget. At Duke, where we don’t get the public-records view because it’s private, the athletic department has publicly acknowledged institutional commitment for the new era. Texas Tech has been running a $1.2 billion campaign that explicitly includes revenue-sharing capacity.
Count only the explicit authorizing actions (state legislation, state-board authorizations, university-board resolutions, or institutional loan approvals, not general fundraising campaigns) and the list runs to roughly a dozen schools across ten states, moving non-athletic money into athletics to meet a legal obligation the schools voluntarily accepted. None of them coordinated with any of the others. Each one looks at its peer schools and does the version available to it.
The governance-friction variable is where the funding source touches politically sensitive money. Arkansas’s 7-3 vote was contested because it came from general funds over a chancellor’s objection. Colorado tripled a student athletics fee and is projecting a $27 million deficit. Clemson’s 10-3 vote on a mandatory $150-per-semester student fee had Nikki Haley among the dissenters. Donor-funded investment faces almost no friction. Fee-funded and subsidy-funded investment produces contested votes, op-ed dissent, and occasional faculty no-confidence motions. Every institution is finding its own answer to the same question, and every answer hits its own political wall.
The tax-exemption race
Arkansas is the only state to have closed this loop. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an NIL income tax exemption in 2025, effective January 2025. Arkansas is still the only state to have carved NIL earnings out of state income tax.
The logic is recruiting. Athletes playing for SEC schools in Texas, Florida, and Tennessee pay no state income tax on their NIL deals because those states have no income tax at all. Arkansas athletes had been paying up to 4.4%. The exemption closes a gap Arkansas didn’t create.
Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama have all introduced similar bills. Mississippi’s passed the House in February and died in the Senate Finance Committee in March. Georgia and Alabama remain stalled.
The race here is horizontal, state against state, and every income-tax state in the SEC’s footprint is watching the scoreboard. Arkansas is both the first mover and, so far, the only state willing to eat the foregone revenue to keep up.
Oklahoma as the counter-example
One state has drawn a different line. Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), backed by Senate Bill 1786 (passed 2024), signed an executive order that allows Oklahoma’s universities to pay athletes directly but prohibits the use of state-allocated funds for those payments. Oklahoma’s public schools can play the NIL game, but they have to raise the money from foundations, not state budgets. The order expires if federal NIL law is enacted.
Oklahoma is the category of one. Wisconsin passes a subsidy. Oklahoma forecloses one. If every state did what Oklahoma did, the arms race would slow. Because only Oklahoma did it, Oklahoma’s own schools now compete against Wisconsin’s, Florida’s, and everybody else’s subsidized programs with one hand tied behind their back.
Transparency walls
This category expanded fastest in April. At least eleven states shield college athletics financial records from public view. Six of the eleven got there before 2026. Five more are either new this year or still moving.
The older set: Louisiana (NIL contract confidentiality, predating the current Louisiana HB 608 discussed below), North Carolina (HB 378, driven by UNC and NC State requesting it), Colorado, Arizona, Kentucky, Texas (HB 2804), and Florida have all built some version of a records exemption into state law. Many of these provisions track each other’s language closely, which is its own data point. The state-level playbook has been getting passed around.
The April 2026 cluster: South Carolina’s April 1 veto override added revenue-sharing records to the state’s exempt list. Wisconsin’s April 8 bill includes sweeping language covering “any revenue or expenditure” related to an athletic program. Tennessee’s General Assembly passed a two-part bill (74-6 in the House, 29-0 in the Senate) that indefinitely extends the state’s exemption for “information relating to game or player integrity” (playbooks, practice recordings, call signals) and adds a new exemption for commercial contracts whose disclosure would affect competitive economic advantage. As of early April the Tennessee bill was awaiting Governor Bill Lee’s signature. Louisiana’s HB 608, advanced April 14, would be the state’s first general-spending records exemption, broader than the existing NIL-contract confidentiality law. Several of these bills had been in committee for weeks or months before April, so the “cluster” is a clustering of signings rather than of legislative filings. The pattern was building before April; April is when it landed.
There’s an operational layer beneath the statutes. Even where no specific exemption exists, universities are refusing NIL-records FOIAs by invoking FERPA (the federal student-privacy law) on the theory that athlete contract data is an “education record.” UCLA, South Carolina, and Florida State have all cited FERPA this way. Andy Wittry documented the pattern in detail last year: the statutes matter, and so does the institutional habit of refusing by default and waiting to be sued.
Put the statutes and the FERPA-refusals together and the transparency wall looks less like a fragmented patchwork and more like a unified corporate strategy being built one state at a time, with the federal privacy law running underneath as fallback.
Agent regulation, across every layer of government at once
Of all the categories, this is the one where multiple levels of government are acting simultaneously rather than states filling a federal vacuum. The result isn’t coordination; it’s overlap.
At the federal level, the FTC sent compliance letters to twenty universities in late March under the Sports Agent Responsibility and Trust Act (SPARTA, enacted 2004). Responses were due March 23. It was the first significant SPARTA enforcement in the statute’s two-decade existence. SPARTA requires specific agent disclosures to athletes and 72-hour notification to schools after any contract signing. The FTC letters are how a long-dormant federal statute woke up in the NIL era.
Separately, Trump’s April 3 executive order directed the NCAA to create a national agent registry. That directive runs alongside the SPARTA regulatory track and the existing state-level frameworks, and it’s unclear how the registry will interact with either.
At the NCAA level, the Division I Cabinet adopted a rule on April 15 allowing prospects to sign with agents before college enrollment. The existing rule had limited pre-enrollment agent representation to narrow hockey and baseball exceptions. Opening the pre-enrollment market changes which deals the FTC, state registrars, and university compliance offices are tracking, and for how long.
At the state level, Louisiana’s Senate Commerce Committee advanced a bill on April 12 requiring agents who represent college athletes to register with the state, complete training, pass background checks, and maintain contract records for five years. The state would gain the power to deny or revoke registration certificates for fraud or harm to athletes. The bill also covers high school athletes, which is a jurisdictional stretch worth watching.
California’s Miller-Ayala Athlete Agents Act already requires agents to register with the Secretary of State, file a disclosure, pay a fee, and post a $100,000 surety bond. It’s the most restrictive state agent framework in the country and has been in place for decades in various forms. Roughly thirty states have adopted some version of the Uniform Athlete Agent Act as a lower baseline.
On the other side of the equation, Nebraska §48-3603 prohibits any association (the NCAA, conferences, the College Sports Commission) from penalizing athletes for NIL participation. Nebraska’s ongoing arbitration with the College Sports Commission over rejected Playfly deals is running straight into that statute. State law constraining national enforcement, in real time.
And market actors are responding to the governance gap on their own terms. Darren Heitner has flagged that third-party marketing intermediaries are routing brand NIL deals through contracts that look like guaranteed compensation but function as options — “up to $X, contingent on campaign assignment at our discretion.” He’s refusing to let clients sign. Other agents are holding back. The market is disciplining itself while the regulators argue over jurisdiction.
Federal statute, executive order, NCAA rule, state registration law, state anti-enforcement statute, and market self-policing. Six ways of trying to govern the same agent ecosystem at once, each from a different angle. The Louisiana bill is just the most recent overlay on a stack that already existed. This is the category where “patchwork” undersells it. Patchwork suggests disconnected pieces. This is more like several organizations laying pipe through the same intersection without a shared map.
Private equity, and the fight over who signs off on it
This is the category where the governance layers actually collide, so it’s worth slowing down here.
In December 2025, the University of Utah Board of Trustees unanimously approved the first private equity deal involving a public university’s athletic department. Otro Capital would inject over $500 million into Utah athletics and a newly created for-profit entity, Utah Brands & Entertainment LLC. The deal needed sign-offs from the Board of Trustees, the Utah Board of Regents, and the NCAA. It got all three. Expected to close in 2026.
In February 2026, Rep. Jason Kyle (R-Huntsville) introduced HB297 in the Utah Legislature. The bill would require the state legislature’s approval before any public university’s athletic department could enter a private equity arrangement, and it would extend to renewals and amendments. It was written in direct response to the Otro deal. The University of Utah’s spokesperson noted, carefully, that the university had not sought the legislation but was “in conversation with the bill sponsor.” HB297’s effective date, if passed, is May 6, 2026.
Two ways to read this. The sharper read: it’s a fight over which state body decides. Regents approved; legislature wants a veto for the next deal. The milder read: HB297 is normal legislative oversight of a novel financial instrument involving public assets, not a conflict between branches. Both might be true. Even in the mild version, the effect is the same: the next PE deal at a Utah public university has to run through both the Board of Regents and the legislature, which creates a governance chokepoint the Otro deal didn’t face. Welcome to federalism inside a single state, or at least an expanding version of it.
At the conference level, the Big 12 is in advanced talks with Collegiate Athletic Solutions, a fund backed by RedBird Capital and Weatherford Capital, on a roughly $500 million facility that would give each of the Big 12’s sixteen member schools a roughly $30 million line of credit. No equity transfer, no grant of rights. Time-limited to the conference’s current media deal. Final approval is weeks away. If it closes, it’s the first conference-level PE arrangement in college athletics.
And the negative case: the Big Ten was reportedly close to a $2.4 billion deal with UC Investments, the investment arm of the University of California pension system. Michigan’s Board of Regents chair Mark Bernstein called the proposal “a payday loan.” USC’s board opposed it. The deal stalled on individual-university-board opposition, not on state legislative action.
Three different PE structures, three different governance battles at three different levels. The Otro deal is university board versus state legislature. The Big 12 deal is conference consent versus individual-school opt-out. The Big Ten deal died at the university-board layer. The shape of where these deals land is being determined less by economics than by which state or institutional body has the final word, and whether that body wants to use it.
One obligation, fifty answers
Baker’s phrase is doing two things at once. It names something real — more than a dozen states, six categories of action, four governance layers, all moving at different tempos in uncoordinated directions. And it’s asking Congress to wipe out the patchwork through federal preemption.
The House settlement is the thing the patchwork is responding to. Every state doing one of these things is answering the same question the settlement created (how do we pay the $20.5 million?), and the answer depends on which state body has the authority to act. When the answer is the state legislature, you get Wisconsin. When it’s the state board of regents, you get Florida. When it’s the university board, you get Arkansas or Kansas or Kentucky. When it’s donors or private capital, you get Utah or the Big 12 or the programs burning through donor fatigue. And when one state draws a line against using public money at all, you get Oklahoma.
None of these answers adds up to a coherent national framework. They weren’t supposed to. The settlement created a uniform legal obligation without a uniform source of payment, dropped it on the Power 4 and the broader Division I opt-in universe, and the states started filling in the blank.
Baker wrote to Congress asking it to fix the patchwork. Congress could. Federal preemption of entrenched state frameworks isn’t unprecedented. ERISA preempted state pension law in the 1970s; the Telecommunications Act and airline deregulation both overrode decades of state regulation. The constitutional authority is there. What’s missing is the political coalition, which (as Friday’s post worked through) has been stuck on the employment question and the antitrust-exemption question in ways that don’t resolve themselves by waiting. The preemption difficulty is political, not structural. But politically, every additional week of state action raises the cost of a federal bill that would have to override it. Senators from states with new subsidies or new records exemptions will protect their states’ choices, and the coalition math gets harder.
I’ve got more on the federalism mechanics for another post. For today: when the NCAA’s president calls the governance environment a fragmented patchwork, he isn’t really describing a problem with states. He’s describing the predictable result of a settlement his organization accepted in lieu of worse legal outcomes, a settlement designed under pressure from plaintiffs’ counsel and a court, not ex nihilo by the NCAA. The NCAA wasn’t free to draft a settlement with a uniform funding mechanism. Its agency was constrained. But the result, however it came to be, is what we’re looking at: a single national cost with no single national way to pay it, and fifty state-level answers being drafted in parallel.
The states aren’t waiting either. The patchwork is the system now.
If you’re finding this analysis useful, share it with someone trying to make sense of the governance mess. Yesterday’s companion piece on the federal-side stall is here — the two posts pair.
This is an ongoing series applying political economy analysis to the college sports reform landscape. Recent entries:
No One Is Waiting (yesterday)
The Week Everyone Tried to Govern (last Friday)
How Collective Bargaining Could Stabilize College Football (flagship)
Five Roads Out and Why Most of Them Dead-End
Enforcement Is the Real Collective Action Problem
The Executive Order That Tells You Exactly What It Can’t Do
NB: This essay is written in my capacity as a political scientist who studies institutions, incentives, and collective action, not as an institutional spokesperson.