For more than a century, college football occupied a place in American life unlike any other sport. It was not simply about determining a champion. It was about identity.

Fans inherited allegiances from parents and grandparents. Rivalries stretched back generations. Entire communities organized fall weekends around games that connected them to schools, regions, and traditions. The sport's emotional power came not from parity or competitive balance, but from the authenticity of those connections.

Today, however, the foundations of college football are being systematically dismantled. The forces driving the sport are no longer primarily tradition, geography, alumni loyalty, or school pride. They are money, television revenue, donor influence, legal challenges, and player compensation systems that increasingly resemble professional sports without the safeguards that make professional sports viable.

It has already become something fundamentally different. The question now is whether it becomes something unrecognizable.

What made college football different

The sport's appeal was never rooted exclusively in elite competition. College football has always had powerful programs and weaker programs. Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Notre Dame, and USC enjoyed advantages long before NIL existed.

What made the sport special was the relationship between players and institutions.

A player chose a university and largely remained there. Alumni identified with the athletes because they attended the same school. Fans watched a freshman grow into a senior. Players became part of the history of a program rather than temporary assets acquired for a season.

Most players were not future NFL stars. The overwhelming majority understood that football would not become their profession. They competed because they loved the game, valued the opportunity provided by their scholarship, and took pride in representing their university.

That shared experience forged a bond between players and fans that professional sports could never fully duplicate. College football felt authentic because, for most participants, it was.

The sport's greatness emerged from continuity, loyalty, and institutional identity rather than pure commercial value.

A fair objection deserves acknowledgment here: college football has never been fully clean. Booster influence, under-the-table payments, preferential admissions, and recruiting advantages for wealthy programs predate NIL by decades. A skeptic could argue that NIL merely legalized and exposed practices that already existed. That argument is partially correct — the incentives changed in scale, not necessarily in kind. But the difference in scale is the point. What was once hidden, episodic, and subject to at least nominal enforcement is now open, structural, and legally protected. The informal advantages of the past were a distortion of the system. The current arrangement is the system.

The rise of the super donor

No figure better symbolizes the transformation of modern college athletics than Nike co-founder Phil Knight.

Knight's support for the University of Oregon has been extraordinary. Over decades, he and his family have contributed more than a billion dollars to the university through both academic and athletic initiatives, helping transform Oregon from a regional football program into one of the most recognizable brands in college sports.

Knight himself is not the problem. He has been remarkably generous to educational and charitable causes, and Oregon was fully within its rights to accept that support.

The issue is what the Oregon model reveals about the broader direction of college athletics.

For most of the sport's history, success depended on coaching, recruiting, player development, institutional support, facilities, and tradition. Today, a growing portion of competitive advantage stems from access to billionaire benefactors capable of underwriting spending levels that few programs can match.

The result is an escalating arms race. Programs increasingly compete not merely for players but for financial backers. Donor networks become as important as coaching staffs. Recruiting conversations revolve around compensation packages. Wealth accumulation becomes a competitive strategy in itself.

College football has always tolerated unequal resources. What it has never fully confronted is a world in which private fortunes can exert such direct influence over competitive outcomes. A sport once defined by schools and communities is increasingly shaped by a handful of individuals capable of spending at levels unimaginable a generation ago.

The House settlement and the Protect College Sports Act address a great deal, and the Senate-passed bill does take aim at the super donor problem through associated-entity provisions and a revenue-sharing cap. But those provisions are untested, and the broader question of whether any framework can effectively constrain third-party collective spending remains open. The super donor problem overlaps with labor law, NIL regulation, and jurisdictional questions — but at its core it is a spending cap problem, and no existing mechanism has yet proven it can hold. Until a hard limit exists on what third-party collectives can contribute on behalf of any single program, the Phil Knights of college football remain free to operate without constraint. That is the specific gap a spending cap must close. The reason that gap is so difficult to close comes down to how the bill defines an associated entity. The PCSA's provisions are designed to capture school-connected collectives — organizations that coordinate with the athletic department, use school resources, or operate under the school's effective control. A booster collective that works in close coordination with Oregon's coaching staff to recruit players almost certainly falls within that definition. But Phil Knight does not need a booster collective. He can fund a fully independent LLC, hire his own staff, negotiate NIL deals directly with players, and never touch the school's infrastructure at all. Whether that entity is “associated” with Oregon for purposes of the cap turns on questions of coordination and control that the bill's language leaves genuinely unsettled — and that no court has yet resolved. A sufficiently sophisticated donor with independent legal counsel may be able to structure around the associated-entity definition, depending on how “coordination,” “control,” and “associated entity” are interpreted and enforced. That is why the provision is untested in the most important sense: the scenario it was designed to address — a billionaire pouring $100 million a year into a program's NIL pipeline through a legally independent vehicle — may be difficult to reach if the donor can avoid coordination, control, or other ties that bring the vehicle within the bill’s associated-entity rules.

How television money reordered the sport

The rise of super donors changed recruiting. Television money changed everything else.

Conference realignment over the last decade has exposed the true governing force of modern college athletics: media rights revenue. Schools no longer choose conference affiliations primarily based on geography, institutional similarity, or traditional rivals. They choose based on television distributions. The Big Ten's multibillion-dollar media agreements and similar deals across major conferences have become the central driver of expansion and realignment decisions.

The consequences have been profound. Historic regional conferences have fractured. Longstanding rivalries have disappeared. Student-athletes travel across the country for routine conference contests. Game times are increasingly selected according to television windows rather than campus traditions and fan convenience.

The collapse of the Pac-12 may ultimately be remembered as the defining moment. Schools abandoned generations of history because larger media distributions existed elsewhere. Television economics overwhelmed institutional loyalty.

College football once generated television value because of its traditions. Today many of those traditions are being sacrificed in pursuit of television value. The relationship has been reversed.

NIL, the transfer portal, and the era of permanent free agency

Athletes deserve the right to profit from their name, image, and likeness. That principle is both legally and morally correct.

The problem is not NIL itself. The problem is the absence of a coherent system governing how NIL operates alongside transfer rules.

When unrestricted compensation is combined with broad transfer freedom, the result is perpetual free agency. Every roster is temporary. Every player becomes a recruiting target after every season. Coaches no longer build programs over multiple years; they manage annual talent acquisitions.

Professional sports long ago recognized that free agency only functions within a larger framework that includes contracts, salary structures, tampering rules, dispute-resolution systems, and collective bargaining agreements. College football has adopted free agency while largely ignoring the institutions that make free agency sustainable. The resulting chaos was inevitable.

The Demond Williams Jr. case study

The brief saga involving University of Washington quarterback Demond Williams Jr. provides perhaps the clearest illustration of the current system's dysfunction.

Following a breakout 2025 season, Williams reportedly agreed to a new NIL and revenue-sharing arrangement worth approximately $4 million and publicly committed to remain at Washington. Within days, he announced his intention to enter the transfer portal. Washington explored legal remedies, the Big Ten became involved, accusations of tampering surfaced, and serious questions arose regarding the enforceability of NIL contracts and player obligations.

Williams ultimately elected to remain at Washington, ending the immediate controversy.

But the episode exposed deep structural problems. Universities are expected to commit millions of dollars while receiving little certainty in return. Programs are forced to assume that every player can be recruited again moments after signing an agreement. Allegations of improper contact become extraordinarily difficult to police. Fans increasingly view roster management as a year-round bidding war rather than college athletics.

Most importantly, the Williams situation demonstrated that nobody is satisfied with the current framework. Schools want enforceable agreements. Players want compensation and mobility. Conferences want order. Fans want stability. The system currently provides none of those things.

The lesson is not that athletes should be paid less. The lesson is that compensation without structure produces instability for everyone involved.

The House settlement and the search for order

Recent reforms suggest that college athletics has begun acknowledging the need for rules.

The House settlement received final judicial approval on June 6, 2025. It is a consent decree — a court-supervised agreement between the plaintiffs and the defendant institutions — not a statute passed by Congress. It binds the NCAA and the conferences that are parties to it. It does not bind state legislatures, the NLRB, or the federal courts in future antitrust cases. It can be modified, challenged, or superseded. It is enforceable as a court order, but it is not law in the legislative sense, and it carries none of the permanence that legislation would provide.

Within those limits, the settlement accomplished real things. It authorized direct revenue sharing between schools and athletes, created annual compensation limits for participating institutions, and established new oversight mechanisms for NIL transactions. Schools participating in the framework can distribute more than $20 million annually to athletes, with reporting requirements and review procedures governing many NIL agreements.

These developments represent genuine progress because they move compensation into a more transparent institutional structure. They also reflect an unavoidable truth: college athletics can no longer rely on amateurism as its governing principle.

Yet a major problem remains unresolved. Third-party NIL spending remains largely uncapped, allowing donor-backed collectives to supplement compensation far beyond institutional limits. Because the settlement is a consent decree rather than legislation, it has no mechanism to reach spending by entities that were not parties to the lawsuit. As a result, the formal revenue-sharing cap increasingly resembles a floor rather than an effective competitive restraint. Without additional reforms — including legislation or a collective bargaining agreement — the wealthiest programs will continue accumulating disproportionate advantages.

Why a salary cap is necessary

The next logical step is a comprehensive national cap on NIL spending.

This proposal is frequently criticized as anti-player. It is nothing of the sort. The objective is not to prevent athletes from earning compensation. The objective is to preserve competitive integrity and create financial predictability.

Several major professional leagues — the NFL, NBA, and NHL among them — have adopted salary caps or other spending restraints, typically through collective bargaining, because unrestricted spending distorts competition. Major League Baseball relies on a different mechanism, a competitive-balance tax rather than a hard cap, but the underlying principle holds: some form of spending structure is necessary to prevent the wealthiest franchises from permanently dominating the rest. The same logic applies to college football. A meaningful NIL cap would discourage bidding wars, reduce donor influence, improve transparency, and create a more stable environment for both athletes and institutions. Most importantly, it would align compensation with a sustainable competitive framework rather than an unlimited marketplace.

Why multi-year contracts must become standard

In addition to spending controls, college football needs enforceable multi-year agreements.

Players receiving substantial NIL or revenue-sharing compensation should commit to two- or three-year contractual terms, subject to reasonable exceptions.

Such agreements would provide benefits for all parties. Athletes would receive guaranteed compensation and greater financial security. Universities would gain roster stability. Coaches could invest in player development without fearing annual departures. Fans could once again build meaningful attachments to players.

The objective is not to eliminate player movement. The objective is to ensure that commitments operate as actual commitments rather than temporary arrangements subject to immediate renegotiation. Without contractual stability, college football becomes a continuous transfer market rather than a seasonal sport.

The missing piece: collective bargaining

Many observers stop their reform proposals at salary caps and contracts. In reality, those measures create an important legal problem.

How can college football impose compensation limits, transfer restrictions, or mandatory contract terms without violating antitrust principles? The answer is that unilateral NCAA restrictions face serious antitrust exposure — as NCAA v. Alston confirmed — and that the most durable legal foundation for the reforms described here is a combination of federal legislation and collectively bargained agreements, not unilateral association rules.

The legal history that produced the current NIL era was driven largely by judicial hostility toward unilateral NCAA restrictions. Courts repeatedly concluded that many traditional compensation limits could not withstand scrutiny.

As a result, the reforms necessary to save the sport may require something many traditionalists dislike: unionization and collective bargaining. A collective bargaining agreement could establish salary structures, transfer rules, tampering regulations, contract standards, grievance procedures, and competitive restrictions in a legally defensible framework. Ironically, the people most opposed to professionalization often advocate reforms that are easiest to achieve through professional labor structures.

The destination is a single certified bargaining unit representing all college football players — the NFLPA model applied to college athletics — and getting there will not be easy. The NFL didn't arrive there cleanly: it took decades of litigation, two work stoppages, and sustained conflict between owners and players before a durable collective bargaining structure emerged. The argument here is not that college football can skip that process — it's that the chaos of building toward a unified structure is preferable to the permanent chaos of a system with no structure at all.

This piece assumes Congress cannot mandate that athletes form a union, and it cannot condition athletic eligibility on union membership. The First Amendment's freedom of association runs in both directions — workers have the right to organize, but they also have the right not to. The NLRA itself is built on voluntary organizing. What Congress can do is clear the path: establish athlete employee status by statute, condition federal funding on schools recognizing a certified union if one forms, and preempt state laws that currently block public university athletes from organizing. Those are powerful tools. But the organizing itself has to happen voluntarily, which means the players have to want it badly enough to do it.

The challenge of convincing elite players

The strongest objection to unionization is obvious. Why would a star quarterback earning $5 million annually support a union that appears designed primarily to help lower-paid athletes?

The answer is that successful unions do not simply redistribute income. They provide certainty, protection, and leverage.

Elite players have interests beyond maximizing immediate compensation. They benefit from enforceable contracts, injury protections, health coverage, licensing rights, revenue guarantees, dispute-resolution procedures, and clearly defined transfer rules. A star player who sacrifices some freedom of movement in exchange for contractual certainty and long-term protections may ultimately benefit more than he would under an unregulated marketplace.

The challenge is not necessarily elite players versus lower-paid players. It may instead be football players versus participants in non-revenue sports, whose economic interests often differ dramatically. Even so, some form of collective representation increasingly appears necessary if college football hopes to create a stable long-term system.

The harder question is what happens if elite players simply refuse to join. The theoretical answer is the one organized labor has always had: the majority. Schools cannot field a team with five players. The walk-ons, the depth players, the special teams contributors — those athletes have the most to gain from guaranteed contracts and injury protections, and their collective refusal to play is leverage that no individual NIL deal can replace. The honest caveat is that this assumes a level of solidarity that has been extraordinarily difficult to sustain in practice. A depth player who strikes risks his scholarship and his eligibility; the star sitting out has a guaranteed NIL deal and a first-round draft grade. The proposal assumes that solidarity is achievable. History suggests it is possible. Whether it is probable in this specific context is a harder question, and the article does not pretend otherwise.

The looming separation of sports and academics

The uncomfortable reality is that college football may be moving toward a future in which its connection to higher education becomes largely symbolic.

Revenue sharing, NIL compensation, employment litigation, collective bargaining discussions, and contractual labor relationships all point toward greater professionalization. It is increasingly possible to imagine a future in which football and men's basketball operate as independent commercial enterprises affiliated with universities but only loosely connected to academic life.

Players could become employees. Their primary responsibility would be generating revenue rather than pursuing an education. Universities would effectively operate sports businesses under academic branding. If current trends continue unchecked, that future may arrive sooner than many expect.

A proposal to save the sport

College football cannot return to the twentieth century. Athletes deserve compensation, mobility, and legal rights that previous generations lacked. The goal should not be restoration. It should be preservation.

The sequence matters. These six reforms must be understood not as a menu of options but as a layered framework — each step creates the conditions for the next.

Step 1: Establish collective bargaining. This is the most durable foundation for the reforms that follow. Federal legislation can establish statutory rules on compensation, transfers, and NIL — and the Senate-passed Protect College Sports Act demonstrates that Congress can move without waiting for a union to exist first. But legislation alone cannot negotiate a CBA, define grievance procedures, or create the injury protections and enforcement mechanisms that make athlete rights real in practice. Collective bargaining is not a legal prerequisite for every other step, but it is what makes the overall framework enforceable and self-sustaining rather than dependent on continued litigation and congressional action.

The primary obstacle is jurisdictional fragmentation: the NLRB governs private universities but has no authority over public ones, which means a CBA at Notre Dame or USC could not be imposed on Alabama, Michigan, Ohio State, or Texas — all of which are public institutions beyond the NLRB's reach. Any workable framework must either find a mechanism to bind public institutions or accept that the system will be uneven from the start. The most realistic path forward starts with the Power Four conferences and their private-school members. Notre Dame, USC, Stanford, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Duke, Wake Forest, and Boston College are all private institutions already subject to NLRB jurisdiction. Athletes at those schools could attempt to organize under existing federal labor law without waiting for Congress to act, assuming they are treated as statutory employees and the NLRB asserts jurisdiction. A certified union at even a handful of Power Four private schools would create the legal precedent, the organizing template, and the political pressure that public-school athletes and state legislatures would find increasingly difficult to ignore. The PCSA's federal framework would address much of the jurisdictional gap by creating national statutory rules applicable across public and private institutions, though it would not itself create a union or collective-bargaining relationship — but federal legislation moves slowly and unpredictably. Organizing at private schools is something that can happen now, and it is the most concrete first step available.

Step 2: Negotiate a nationwide NIL spending cap. Once a collective bargaining agreement is in place, a comprehensive cap on NIL spending — covering both institutional revenue sharing and third-party collective contributions — can be implemented without the legal exposure that has doomed previous NCAA restrictions. This is the single most important competitive reform. The primary obstacle is coverage: a CBA binds the parties who sign it, but incoming recruits have not yet signed anything. The NFL's rookie wage scale offers a useful analogy here — it applies to players who were not yet employed when the CBA was negotiated, and courts have upheld it because the NFLPA bargained on behalf of all players, including future ones, within a fully established and judicially validated labor relationship. That is exactly the model college football should be building toward. The difference is that the NFL got there after decades of litigation, two work stoppages, and a mature collective bargaining structure that courts have repeatedly affirmed. College football has none of that yet. Until a certified union with exclusive bargaining authority exists and a CBA has been validated by the courts, it is not clear that the non-statutory labor exemption would extend to pre-enrollment compensation the same way it does in the NFL — which means a recruiting cap could still face antitrust challenge even after a CBA is in place. The NFL precedent is the destination. The work is getting there.

But the cap negotiation does not have to wait for a fully mature CBA to begin. The PCSA already includes a revenue-sharing cap structure as a statutory floor — a ceiling on what schools can distribute to athletes annually. That floor can be written into federal law without a union in place. What collective bargaining then adds is the structure on top: the enforcement mechanisms, the grievance procedures, the ability to negotiate the cap level upward over time as broadcast revenues grow, and the legal insulation that makes the whole framework durable against antitrust challenge. The practical sequence is therefore: push for the PCSA's cap provisions to survive the House intact as a statutory baseline, organize at private schools to build the labor relationship that gives athletes a seat at the table, and use the first CBA to convert that statutory floor into a collectively bargained agreement that courts will protect. That is how the NFL's system actually works — statute sets the floor, the CBA builds the architecture — and it is the model college football should be replicating.

Step 3: Negotiate multi-year contracts inside the CBA. This is not a separate structural step — it is a bargaining item, and it belongs in the collective bargaining agreement from the start. Once a union exists and a CBA is being negotiated, multi-year player contracts are exactly the kind of provision that gets hammered out at the table. Players want roster security and guaranteed compensation; universities want the stability that makes long-term investment in player development rational. A two- or three-year agreement serves both interests, which is why it is a natural fit for collective bargaining rather than a legislative mandate. The central issue to resolve at the table is injury: a player who signs a three-year deal and suffers a career-ending injury in year one needs guaranteed compensation protections, and universities need clarity on their obligations. Players' advocates will push hardest on exactly this point. But that is an argument for getting to the bargaining table, not an argument against multi-year contracts — it is precisely the kind of problem collective bargaining exists to solve, and it is the kind of problem that cannot be solved any other way.

Step 4: Codify strong anti-tampering rules with independent enforcement. Contracts are only as good as the rules that protect them. A dedicated enforcement body — independent of the conferences and the NCAA — must have authority to investigate and penalize tampering violations. Without this, multi-year contracts become unenforceable in practice. The primary obstacle is institutional. The NCAA spent decades as that enforcement body and failed comprehensively — undermined by conference self-interest, legal challenges, and the unwillingness of powerful programs to accept penalties. A new body faces the same structural pressures unless it is funded independently, insulated from conference influence, and given genuine punitive authority that programs cannot simply litigate away.

Step 5: Maintain direct revenue sharing. Athletes must participate in the wealth they help generate. This is not in tension with the cap; it is the floor beneath it. Revenue sharing ensures that compensation remains meaningful and transparent rather than driven underground by unregulated donor collectives. The primary obstacle is distribution: revenue is not generated equally across programs or sports, and any sharing formula will produce winners and losers among both athletes and institutions. Determining what counts as shareable revenue, how it is divided between football and non-revenue sports, and what floor guarantees exist for athletes at smaller programs are questions that will consume years of negotiation.

Step 6: Preserve genuine academic participation requirements. The final step is also the most philosophical. A meaningful connection between universities and their athletes — real enrollment, real academic progress — is what distinguishes college football from a minor professional league operating under university branding. Without it, the sport loses the identity that made it matter. The primary obstacle is credibility: academic requirements have been systematically hollowed out at major programs for decades through eligibility management, course clustering, and institutional accommodation of athletes who are students in name only. Restoring meaningful requirements demands not just rule changes but a willingness to enforce them against programs whose athletic departments generate nine-figure revenues — an enforcement appetite that has never existed and shows no sign of emerging.

These reforms would not eliminate every problem. They would, however, preserve what made college football worth preserving in the first place.

What the settlement accomplished — and what it left unresolved

The House settlement advanced two things the proposal depends on: it created the $20 million annual revenue-sharing framework that forms the foundation of Step 5, and it built the NIL oversight infrastructure — reporting requirements, review procedures — that Step 2 would extend into an actual spending cap. On those fronts, the settlement is a starting point, not a solution.

Where the settlement falls short is equally specific. It created a revenue-sharing floor without a spending cap, which means the competitive distortions it was meant to address continue through uncapped third-party collective spending. It does not create contractual obligations between athletes and institutions, leaving Steps 3 and 4 entirely unbuilt. And the most complicated tension is with Step 1: the House settlement was a civil antitrust resolution, not a labor agreement. Some legal scholars argue that by resolving the antitrust claims that gave players their greatest leverage, the settlement may have weakened the pressure that would otherwise drive programs toward collective bargaining. The settlement may have made Step 1 harder to achieve, not easier — a significant structural problem given that Step 1 is the foundation on which everything else depends.

The proposal is not a rejection of the settlement. It is an argument that the settlement, while necessary, is not sufficient.

The legislation already in motion

While this article was being written, Congress moved. On September 28, 2026, the United States Senate passed the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act by a 77-22 vote. The bill creates national statutory rules for college athletics covering NIL deals, athlete compensation, recruiting, eligibility, and transfer standards. It now heads to the House for final consideration.

This is not a minor development. It is the most significant federal intervention in college athletics in the sport's history, and it directly addresses the core argument of this piece: that the current system is ungovernable without a binding national framework.

The 77-22 margin is striking. That is not a partisan squeaker — that is a near-consensus vote in a body that rarely agrees on anything. It reflects how broadly the dysfunction of the current system has registered, and how urgently legislators believe the NCAA's self-governance has failed.

The legislation matters for the proposal outlined here in two specific ways. First, statutory NIL and compensation standards would accomplish through law what the NCAA has been unable to accomplish through policy — a uniform national floor and ceiling that applies to every school regardless of conference affiliation. Second, federal standards would provide the legal foundation that makes collective bargaining viable. A union negotiating within a statutory framework has far more leverage and legal clarity than one operating in a regulatory vacuum.

The Protect College Sports Act is not a complete solution. Legislation rarely is. The details of implementation — how NIL caps are set, how transfer windows are defined, how disputes are adjudicated — will determine whether the law actually stabilizes the sport or simply creates a new set of workarounds. But the direction is correct, and the vote suggests that the political will to act is real.

The question is whether the House moves quickly enough, and whether the final bill retains the structural teeth the Senate version contains. College football cannot afford another decade of half-measures.

What the legislation will accomplish — and what it leaves unresolved

The Senate-passed bill includes a revenue-sharing cap with associated-entity rules designed to prevent schools and school-connected entities from routing money around the cap — addressing the super-donor problem more directly than the House settlement did. It includes recruitment and tampering provisions, transfer protections, a retention fund, and athlete representation on governing boards. What it does not do is impose a universal ceiling on every independent third-party NIL payment. The cap governs institutional revenue sharing and attempts to close coordination-based loopholes, but it does not reach a donor who structures his spending through a genuinely independent vehicle with no formal ties to the school. The retention fund exceptions also soften the cap's practical effect. The bill is a meaningful step toward constraining the arms race — but it is not the all-source cap this article proposes. On Steps 2, 4, and elements of Step 6, the legislation — if it retains its structural teeth in the House — moves those steps from aspiration toward binding federal law. Its most significant contribution is jurisdictional: the NLRB cannot reach Alabama, Michigan, Ohio State, or Texas, but Congress can, and a statutory framework would apply to every school regardless of public or private status.

The distinction is worth spelling out for anyone who has watched the NFL operate under a hard salary cap and assumed Congress could simply impose the same thing on college football. The NFL's salary cap is legal primarily because it is the product of collective bargaining between team owners and the NFLPA. That agreement enjoys protection under what courts call the non-statutory labor exemption to antitrust law: when competing employers and a union negotiate compensation limits together, those limits are shielded from antitrust challenge in ways that a unilateral employer agreement would never be. Without a union and a CBA, an agreement among competing schools to cap player compensation would look a great deal like a cartel — exactly the kind of arrangement antitrust law exists to prohibit, and exactly what the Supreme Court signaled in NCAA v. Alston it would not tolerate. Congress has broad Commerce Clause authority and could theoretically legislate a hard cap directly, but that cap would face immediate antitrust challenge unless Congress also created an explicit antitrust exemption for college sports — a heavier political and legal lift than the PCSA itself. Baseball has such an exemption, but it is a 1922 judicial accident that the Supreme Court has repeatedly called anomalous and refused to extend to any other sport. The Court explicitly declined to apply it to football in 1957. No one designing a legal framework from scratch would use it as a model, and Congress has shown no appetite for replicating it.

What the Senate bill does instead is impose a fair-market-value and business-purpose test on NIL deals — a fundamentally different instrument from a salary cap. Under this framework, Nike could potentially pay a star quarterback several million dollars if it can demonstrate that the payment reflects genuine commercial value: national recognition, merchandise impact, advertising campaigns, social media reach. The size of the payment alone does not make it illegal. What the bill targets is the arrangement with no real business rationale — a booster-funded collective paying a five-star recruit $5 million immediately after he commits to a school, with minimal advertising activity and no obvious commercial purpose. That looks less like an endorsement deal and more like a signing bonus, and the bill's fair-market-value requirement is designed to reach it. Even if Congress created a clean antitrust exemption tomorrow, it still would not build the enforcement infrastructure that makes a cap durable in practice: the grievance procedures, the injury protections, the ability to renegotiate the cap level as broadcast revenues grow. That architecture is not constitutionally required to come from collective bargaining — Congress could write it into statute — but a collectively bargained agreement builds both the legal insulation and the operating machinery simultaneously, and it can be updated by the parties who live inside it without requiring an act of Congress every time broadcast revenues shift. The Senate bill is a meaningful constraint on bad-faith NIL arrangements. It is not a salary cap, and it was not designed to be one.

There is a deeper constitutional constraint worth naming directly. The Tenth Amendment limits Congress's ability to extend NLRB jurisdiction to public universities — Alabama, Michigan, Ohio State, and Texas are state instrumentalities, and direct federal labor mandates run into serious structural problems when applied to them. This is why the spending-clause approach matters: Congress can condition federal financial aid on schools agreeing to recognize a certified union if one is formed, and it can preempt state laws that block public employee organizing in athletics. That is constitutionally solid ground. What it cannot do is order athletes to join a union, require schools to bargain with a union that does not yet exist, or mandate union participation as a condition of playing college sports. Any legislation that attempted those things would face immediate and serious First Amendment and Tenth Amendment challenges. The PCSA's value is not that it creates a union — it is that it establishes the statutory framework that makes a union's eventual CBA legally durable and nationally applicable, once the players organize on their own terms.

What the legislation cannot do is create the labor relationship. It is expressly neutral on whether athletes are employees — it does not establish a union, negotiate a CBA, or define the grievance procedures and injury protections that make athlete rights enforceable in practice. Step 1 remains the work that legislation alone cannot finish. And on Step 5 — long-term revenue sharing tied to broadcast deals — the legislation addresses the continuation of the revenue-sharing cap but does not replace the House settlement framework or guarantee its expansion.

On Step 6 — governance reform — the legislation is also incomplete. Statutory rules constrain what the NCAA and conferences can do, but they do not restructure who makes decisions or how. A governance model that gives athletes meaningful representation in rulemaking requires either a CBA or a statutory mandate that the bill does not currently contain.

The most honest assessment mirrors what was said about the settlement: the Protect College Sports Act, if enacted with its structural provisions intact, advances Steps 2 and 4 meaningfully, creates conditions for Steps 1 and 3, and leaves Steps 5 and 6 essentially where they were. It is not a solution. It is the most significant legal step toward making a solution possible — one that clears the jurisdictional obstacles that have made uniform reform impossible, without completing the reform itself.

Think of it this way. The revenue-sharing cap in the Senate bill is to the school what the NBA salary cap is to the Los Angeles Clippers. It limits what the institution can pay directly. When Nike signs Kawhi Leonard to a shoe deal, that contract does not violate the salary cap — it is a third-party commercial arrangement between a player and a company that has nothing to do with the Clippers' payroll. The cap does not reach it, and it was never designed to. What the cap does prohibit is the Clippers secretly funneling money to Leonard through a shell company to disguise additional compensation as something other than salary. The Senate bill works the same way. Nike can pay a star quarterback at Oregon whatever the market will bear, so long as the deal reflects genuine commercial value and is not a scheme to route school money around the revenue-sharing cap. What the bill targets is the booster collective with no real advertising activity paying a five-star recruit $5 million the week he commits — the college football equivalent of a team owner paying a player through a front company. The fair-market-value test is the anti-circumvention rule. A CBA, by contrast, could go further: it could agree to strict per-school and per-player all-source limits covering every dollar from every source, with enforceable penalties — including eligibility bars — imposed on schools and players who violate them. That is a categorically different instrument, and it is the one this article argues the sport ultimately needs.

What it is actually going to take

The proposal above is coherent. The path to executing it is long, and the obstacles are real. What follows is an honest accounting of where the resistance will come from — and why it does not change the case for trying.

The necessary catalyst is the Power Four conferences, and they are the actors with the least incentive to move. The SEC and Big Ten have spent the last decade consolidating power, eliminating competitive constraints, and capturing an ever-larger share of television revenue. A reform framework that imposes spending caps, transfer restrictions, and independent enforcement is a framework that limits exactly the advantages those conferences have spent years building. They will not lead this effort voluntarily. They will resist it until the alternative becomes worse than the cure.

Congress has been the other candidate for catalyst, and the Senate's 77-22 passage of the Protect College Sports Act is the most encouraging sign in years. But a Senate vote is not a law. The House must act, the details of implementation will be contested, and the lobbying pressure from conferences and programs that benefit from the current disorder will intensify as the bill moves forward. The political will exists in the Senate. Whether it survives the House, and whether the final bill retains structural teeth, remains genuinely uncertain.

The window problem is real and it is closing. The House settlement bought some time by creating a formal compensation structure, but it did not stop the underlying competitive arms race. Every year that passes without a CBA framework is a year in which the gap between the eight or ten programs that can sustain $30 million annual athlete payrolls and everyone else grows wider. At some point — and that point may be closer than most administrators want to admit — the incentive for those programs to preserve a unified structure disappears entirely. A breakaway super-league of thirty to forty programs — the current SEC and Big Ten footprints, plus or minus a handful of others like Notre Dame — is not a fantasy. It is a rational economic outcome if the current trajectory continues.

What failure looks like concretely is worth naming. It is not simply that college football loses its soul — a phrase that sounds abstract until you specify what it means. It means the end of meaningful competition outside a small cartel of programs. It means mid-major football becoming a developmental circuit with no realistic path to national relevance. It means the bowl system collapsing as a meaningful institution rather than a revenue-sharing mechanism. It means universities quietly eliminating non-revenue sports to fund football employment obligations, accelerating a process that is already underway. It means the relationship between athletes and institutions becoming purely transactional in ways that make the current NIL era look quaint.

The settlement and the legislation together represent real progress — more than the sport has seen in decades. What they do not do, and cannot do, is create the labor relationship that makes everything else enforceable. That is Step 1. And without Step 1, the spending cap that closes the super donor gap, the multi-year contracts that give athletes genuine security, and the independent enforcement that gives the rules actual teeth all remain aspirational. The six-step framework is not a rejection of what the settlement and the legislation accomplished. It is the argument that those accomplishments are a foundation, not a finish line.

The six-step proposal will not be executed overnight, and the obstacles are real. The Power Four conferences have spent a decade consolidating advantages they will not surrender voluntarily. Collective bargaining requires organizing athletes who have never had a union. A federal framework requires a House vote that is not yet guaranteed. None of that is a reason to abandon the framework — it is a description of the work that remains.

The Senate's 77-22 vote is evidence that the political will exists when the dysfunction becomes undeniable enough. The House settlement is evidence that courts will impose structure when institutions refuse to self-govern. The transfer portal era, for all its chaos, is evidence that athletes will organize their own interests when given the legal space to do so. The conditions for reform are not absent. They are incomplete. The six-step proposal is a map of what completing them looks like.

College football has survived worse crises than this one. It survived the brutality scandals of the early twentieth century, the integration battles of the mid-century, the academic fraud revelations of the 1980s, and the early NIL chaos of the 2020s. Each time, the sport adapted because enough people with enough power decided that adaptation was preferable to collapse.

That calculation is available again. The question is whether anyone in a position to make it will do so before the window closes.

The sport's greatest strength has never been television revenue, booster money, corporate sponsorships, or media contracts. Its strength has always been the bond between players, schools, fans, alumni, and communities.

College football became great because it offered something professional sports could not. It represented shared identity rather than simple entertainment.

What it is actually going to take is not complicated to describe, even if it is hard to execute. A certified players union — starting at private Power Four schools where federal labor law already applies. A true all-source compensation cap — covering institutional distributions, school-connected NIL spending, and donor-backed payments through independent vehicles — that goes beyond the Senate bill’s narrower revenue-sharing and anti-circumvention framework. No carve-outs for super donors who have spent the last five years buying rosters, and no retention fund exceptions that blunt the cap’s teeth before it is even tested. Multi-year player contracts with guaranteed injury protections, negotiated at the bargaining table rather than mandated by legislation. And the federal framework — the PCSA or something like it — to bind public universities that would otherwise sit outside the reach of any CBA. The players have to organize. Congress has to hold the line on the cap structure. The Power Four conferences have to accept that the era of uncapped donor spending is over. None of those things happen on their own, and none of them happen without the others.

If college football continues on its current trajectory, it may soon become nothing more than a professionally operated talent marketplace attached to university trademarks. It will generate unprecedented revenue while sacrificing the traditions, loyalties, and relationships that gave the sport its meaning.

The tragedy would not be that college football changed. The tragedy would be that it abandoned the very qualities that made it matter.

The honest forecast

This piece has laid out what saving college football actually requires. It has also identified the only parties who can do it: the players — which means the elite players, because without them there is no union with enough leverage to matter — and the schools — which means the elite schools, because without the SEC and Big Ten any agreement is a framework that governs the programs that matter least. The solution requires the people at the top of the system to voluntarily accept constraints that limit what they can individually extract from it. That is the whole problem, stated plainly. They probably will not do it. Here is why.

The players most capable of organizing a union are five-star recruits at Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, and Michigan. Those players are already receiving $3 to $5 million in NIL before they play a single college snap. A union that negotiates an all-source cap would, by definition, cap them. Why would they vote for that? The answer is that most of them would not, and the solidarity problems that have historically made low-revenue athlete organizing so difficult are even more acute when the highest-paid players have the most to lose from the very agreement that would protect everyone else.

The elite schools face the identical question from the other side of the same transaction. The SEC and Big Ten are printing money precisely because they can spend without a ceiling — more spending attracts better players, better players produce more wins, more wins generate more television revenue, more television revenue funds more spending. It is an arms race, and a cap is unilateral disarmament. The athletic directors and conference commissioners running those programs are not going to volunteer to stand down out of concern for the broader ecosystem. They have every incentive to protect the current arrangement — or to formalize it on their own terms, outside the NCAA's governance structure entirely. A breakaway super-conference of the twelve to sixteen wealthiest programs, operating under its own revenue-sharing rules with its own television deals and its own eligibility standards, is not a paranoid scenario. It is the logical endpoint of every financial trend of the last decade. What remains would look something like what the Big 12 and ACC are already becoming: a second tier with smaller rosters, smaller NIL pools, and a fundamentally different product.

Strip away the legal architecture and what remains is a collective action problem with a very old answer. When have the most powerful participants in a self-reinforcing system voluntarily agreed to constrain themselves for the benefit of the whole? The historical record is not encouraging. The Gilded Age robber barons did not embrace regulation until the Progressive Era forced it on them. The NFL owners did not agree to revenue sharing out of altruism — they did it because competitive imbalance was threatening the product that made them rich. The major record labels did not adapt to streaming on principle; they were dragged there by a decade of piracy destroying their margins. In every case, the powerful parties extracted maximum value until the cost of not changing exceeded the cost of changing — and even then, they shaped the reform to preserve as much of their advantage as possible. But those historical arms races had two possible endings: mutual constraint through negotiation, or one side collapsing under the weight of escalation. College football has a third. Both sides could win the arms race — the elite players get their uncapped money, the elite schools get their super-league, the television contracts get signed — and in doing so they destroy the thing they were both competing over. Not a collapse. A collective victory that produces collective ruin. The host dies. There is no reason to expect college football's elite schools and star players to behave differently than every powerful actor before them. The question is not whether they will voluntarily accept constraints. They will not. The question is which ending comes first — negotiated constraint, one side's collapse, or mutual victory over a corpse — and whether anything worth saving will still be there when the answer arrives. The one force that might reverse this is the market itself — and it is not a reliable one. If the breakaway tier produces something that feels less like college football and more like a minor-league NFL with university logos, viewership may decline. Casual fans who watch because of regional loyalty and generational tradition may not follow the money the way the money assumes they will. Declining ratings mean declining broadcast revenues, and declining broadcast revenues mean the financial case for the breakaway weakens. It happened to the USFL. It happened to every professional football league that tried to compete with the NFL by offering a similar product at a lower price point. The super-conference model is not immune to that dynamic — but it would take years of viewership erosion to make the financial pain acute enough to force a reckoning, and a lot of what makes college football matter would be gone by then.

The sport that produced the traditions, the rivalries, the marching bands, the alumni bonds, and the regional identities that made it the second most watched sport in America was built on something that cannot be legislated back into existence once it is gone. The framework in this piece is the right one. The window to use it is closing.