The state of college sports in eight days:
April 7: A district court judge in California signals her willingness to approve the settlement terms of an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA that would create revenue sharing between schools and athletes.
April 12: Tennessee parts ways with its starting quarterback, Nico Iamaleava, who held out of spring practice while attempting to renegotiate his reported $2.4 million NIL contract.
April 14: Reports surface of separate lawsuits filed in North Carolina by former football players seeking additional seasons of eligibility even though they received the standard five-years-to-play-four treatment used by the NCAA for decades.
What’s next, playing college football after a career in the NFL?
Well, actually …
“We’re seeing more and more that plaintiffs are testing the boundaries, and the NCAA is getting worried,” said Sam Ehrlich, an assistant professor of legal studies at Boise State and former attorney specializing in antitrust and sports employment law.
“They feel like they need some structure. The problem is that structure violates antitrust law. It’s between a rock and a hard place.”
Except in this case, the rock is Sisyphus’ boulder and the hard place is El Capitan.
Following decades of strategic missteps and legal faceplants, the NCAA is facing an existential crisis that plays out in courtrooms across the country each week with plaintiffs targeting ancient rules governing amateurism, eligibility, compensation and player movement.
“The NCAA made a huge mistake not reversing its NIL position years ago,” said Jay Ezelle, an attorney for the Birmingham-based firm Starnes Davis Florie who has extensive experience with college sports cases and antitrust law.
“Now, it’s dealing with very difficult questions and realities for the student athletes, depending on the sport they play and their university.”
The three instances cited above reflect demolition on numerous levels.
The House v. NCAA case in Oakland will forever alter the economic model by redirecting more than $20 million annually to the athletes at each school in the four major conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC).
The Iamaleava situation cuts to NIL payments and player movement (via the transfer portal).
The North Carolina cases take aim at the traditional definition of eligibility.
When the barrage of lawsuits and kneecapping of NCAA rules will end, nobody knows. But how they will end seems fairly clear, for there are only two paths out of the mayhem:
— Congress swoops in with antitrust protection for the NCAA.
College sports leaders, including the power conference commissioners, have been seeking help from Capitol Hill for years, to no avail. That could change under the Trump administration. Or not.
— A collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the NCAA and the athletes.
The CBA would create parameters for all the thorny issues, from revenue sharing formulas to transfer portal windows, and it would insulate college sports from legal challenges in the same fashion as CBAs in the NBA or NFL.
But in order to collectively bargain, Ehrlich noted, the athletes would need to unionize.
And in order to unionize, they would need to be deemed employees.
And the NCAA, which represents the schools and enforces rules they created, does not want the athletes to be declared employees under any circumstances.
“It’s easy to say that employment and a CBA would solve everything, but that’s not really true,” Ezelle said. “If the world is football players, basketball players and what you would need to do to satisfy Title IX requirements, how do you do that? Who is the CBA with?
“The issues facing power conference football players are different from the issues facing players in the Southland Conference. The issues for a rower in the power conferences are different from the issues for a football player in the power conferences. In fact, they might conflict.
“A CBA for all sports at all levels is impossible. The NFL can do it because it has uniformity.”
Another factor: College football and basketball players seemingly have little incentive to unionize. The anarchy rooted in years of NCAA bumbling has spawned a golden era for athletes.
Assuming the House case is approved this spring, athletes in the 2025-26 competition year will be entitled to traditional scholarships, revenue sharing, true NIL from endorsement and promotional opportunities and, most likely, fake NIL — the pay-for-play cash exchanges that could continue in the new era. Also, athletes can transfer as often as they like without having to sit out.
All of which suggests any future CBA would result in football and basketball players being worse off than they are now.
It seems one of the two paths to law and order across the land is effectively “impossible.”
That leaves antitrust protection from Congress as the only viable alternative.
Otherwise, the doom loop will continue.
“Without antitrust exemption or collective bargaining,” Ehrlich said, “It’s just circling the drain.”
How much more chaos could enter the system in coming years through antitrust lawsuits? How far could athletes push the envelope of traditional amateurism?
Three nightmare situations — nightmares for the NCAA, not necessarily the athletes — spring immediately to mind:
— In-season transfers with immediate eligibility.
Imagine a quarterback leading his team one week, then transferring and competing against that team the following week.
Actually, you don’t need to imagine it, because a golfer, South Florida’s Holly McLean, took the NCAA to court over the transfer rule that prevents athletes from playing for two schools in the same academic year.
The lawsuit was filed in early 2025 but has been voluntarily withdrawn, according to Ehrlich.
“She had a pretty good case,” he said. “It wasn’t unreasonable.”
— Unlimited eligibility.
The North Carolina cases noted above are not the only current lawsuits targeting the NCAA’s five-years-to-play-four eligibility clock. Rutgers safety Jett Elad is seeking an injunction to block the clock with a case filed in U.S. District Court in New Jersey.
The judge, Zahid N. Quraishi, has been “hostile” toward the NCAA in the past, according to Ehrlich.
Both the North Carolina and New Jersey cases can be traced to Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia’s successful challenge (last year) to rules that required junior college seasons to count against the eligibility clock at four-year institutions.
Ezelle is skeptical.
“I don’t see the courts preventing the conferences from having eligibility requirements,” he said, adding that unlimited eligibility could impact scholarship availability. “How many people want to see a 30-year-old compete against an 18-year-old?
“I believe things will get better, not worse. A lot of the (issues) we’re talking about can be addressed through better contracts.”
— Competing in college following a professional career.
This is the whopper, the holy grail of utter mayhem.
Granted, there are pro-competitive reasons to prevent, for example, a defensive linemen from playing five years in the NFL, then returning to college football.
But Ehrlich believes “you could potentially see it.”
“We’re going to see more challenges to what amateurism means, more chipping away at the NCAA’s eligibility matrix until there’s judicial pushback or antitrust protection.”
Until then, expect the chaos to continue, unabated.
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