Washington politicians love a good panic. Whenever a multi-billion-dollar enterprise outgrows the archaic zoning laws designed for amateur hobbyists, Congress rolls up its sleeves, gasps at the chaos, and drafts a bill to save everyone from themselves. The latest Senate crusade to regulate the so-called wild west of collegiate athletics is no different. Lawmakers look at the current landscape of Name, Image, and Likeness deals, transfer portals, and multi-million-dollar athletic departments and cry foul. They want federal oversight, uniform rules, and statutory boundaries to restore some mythical era of purity.
It is a complete waste of time built on a foundational misunderstanding of how capital works.
I spent years advising athletic departments and watching booster collectives throw cash at eighteen-year-olds like Silicon Valley venture capitalists funding pre-revenue apps. The pearl-clutching in Washington pretends that this system is broken because it is chaotic. The truth is much harsher. The system is chaotic because it is finally free. For a century, the NCAA ran a cartel disguised as an educational trust, artificially suppressing labor costs under the guise of amateurism while universities pocketed billions in television contracts. Now that the courts have smashed the cartel, politicians want to step in and rebuild the cage using tax dollars and federal statute.
Let us dismantle the lazy consensus driving this congressional panic.
The Myth of the Level Playing Field
The central argument of every proposed sports bill on Capitol Hill is the desperate need for parity. Senators warn that without federal intervention, wealthy athletic departments with deep-pocketed alumni will buy up all the talent, turning college football and basketball into a gilded oligarchy.
Here is the reality check. College sports was never a level playing field.
For decades, the top tier of the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten operated as an elite club backed by regional television monopolies, sneaker conglomerates, and state-funded facilities that rivaled professional franchises. Mid-major schools never competed on merit; they competed on scraps. The only difference today is that the athletes are finally getting a direct cut of the revenue they generate instead of trading their labor for a textbook stipend and a parking pass.
When critics whine about competitive imbalance, they are mourning a system where schools could tamper with amateur status behind closed doors while keeping the kids broke. Regulation will not fix parity. It will only enshrine an oligarchy by locking the current power structures into federal compliance codes that smaller institutions cannot afford to navigate.
The NIL Panic Is Just Wage Anxiety
Listen to athletic directors talk about Name, Image, and Likeness collectives, and you would think the apocalypse arrived via direct deposit. They complain that players are mercenaries, hopping schools for the highest bidder, completely devoid of institutional loyalty.
Let us drop the hypocrisy. College coaches sign multi-million-dollar buyout clauses and skip town for a better job the moment their agent fields an offer. Athletic directors trade conferences overnight for media rights payouts. Loyalty in collegiate sports has always been a one-way street demanded of the labor force while management chased maximum yield.
Athletes leveraging the transfer portal and NIL market are simply acting like rational economic actors in a trillion-dollar industry. When a quarterback pulls in a million dollars from a booster-backed collective, he is not destroying the integrity of the game. He is correcting a decades-long market distortion.
Of course, the model has flaws. Unregulated bidding wars create cash-flow problems for athletic departments that rely on student fees and ticket sales to fund non-revenue Olympic sports. But federal legislation will not solve that. Antitrust exemptions and congressional caps on compensation will only invite lawsuits that will tie the courts in knots for another decade. The market is pricing itself. Let it correct.
Stop Writing Rules for a Business That Refuses to Incorporate
The core absurdity of the current debate is that everyone treats college sports like an extracurricular activity when it is actually a professional minor league system for the NFL and NBA.
Universities want the brand value, the television ratings, and the alumni donations that come with big-time sports, but they refuse to accept the legal responsibilities of running professional franchises. They want to call these young men and women student-athletes while broadcasting their games on national networks that pull in nine-figure rights deals.
Congress wants to patch this leaky boat with federal oversight committees and standardized agent registries. It will not work. You cannot regulate a multi-billion-dollar entertainment product with rules written for academic institutions.
The only real solution is the one nobody in Washington wants to say out loud. Cut the cord entirely. Spin the athletic departments off into separate corporate entities owned by the universities or private equity partners. Sign the players to collective bargaining agreements with clear salary caps, revenue sharing, and binding employment contracts. Treat them like the professionals they already are.
If schools want to keep actual amateur sports—where students play for the love of the game, pay their own tuition, and practice on Tuesday nights after organic chemistry—they can drop down to a division that actually resembles higher education.
As for the big-time spectacle? Stop trying to save it. Stop looking to Capitol Hill for salvation from free market economics. Let the boosters spend their money, let the players chase their market value, and let the bloated, hypocritical cartel finally collapse under the weight of its own greed.
The wild west is messy. But it beats a federally mandated cage.
