Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on May 12, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Let us take for granted that the NCAA in its prime was greedy, hypocritical, reactionary, schoolmarmish, tone-deaf, and more than a little absurd. That case is not difficult to make, and I have made it before, fairly drowning in examples.
Nevertheless, having come out the other side of NCAA v. Alston, the 2021 Supreme Court ruling that stripped the association of much of its enforcement power, fans of college athletics are beginning to concede that the ancien régime was perhaps slightly less awful than previously thought. Though the comparison is ill-mannered, one is reminded of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The old villain had his flaws, but who else could have held together Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Baathists, and other assorted members of that doomed Mesopotamian state?
In the same way, college sports have collapsed into anarchy in the absence of a single, dominating authority. Whereas—former—University of Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava would have been smote from the face of the planet had his recent saga unfolded in, say, 2019, the sporting world barely blinked when the young man forced his way out of Knoxville earlier this spring following an unsuccessful “Name, Image, and Likeness” money grab. Similarly, the NCAA of old would have had Bill Belichick tarred and feathered before it let him give his 24-year-old girlfriend even unofficial duties at the University of North Carolina. About this, more to follow.
Every week, it seems, brings new affronts to conventional ideas of fairness, stability, and campus tradition. In February of this year, University of Oklahoma golfer Holly McLean filed a lawsuit challenging the prohibition against playing for two schools in the same academic year. In April, former UNC and Duke football players brought action against the NCAA’s eligibility limits, arguing that the longstanding five-year-to-play-four-seasons rule violates their constitutional rights.
To game out this litigation is to foresee both in-season trades and the return of former NFL pros to Division I fields. It is, in other words, to envision the final ruin of college sports as we have known them. Will Congress, the president, the courts, or a hobbled NCAA stand up to such madness? I suppose it’s possible. Yet the schools themselves almost certainly won’t. All of the energy—all of the incentives—are flowing in exactly the opposite direction.
Take, for example, last month’s development in the Bluegrass State. Determined to break new ground in the pursuit of off-the-field advantage, the University of Kentucky (UK) has transformed its athletic department from a division of the nonprofit institution to a separate, for-profit LLC, henceforth to be known as Champions Blue. While UK is the first American college to make such a move, it will surely not be the last, particularly if, as university spokesman Jay Blanton recently promised, the shift “unlock[s] new revenue streams through public-private partnerships and … real estate.”
To be clear, Kentucky is doing something novel in the history of college sports. While both the University of Florida and the University of Georgia have long spun their athletic programs into legally separate entities, both the UF Athletic Association and UGA Athletics retain nonprofit status—for now. No mere bookkeeping measure, Kentucky’s evolution is different in kind, not just degree. Champions Blue will eventually have a Fortune 500-style CEO. It will presumably pay executives and shareholders high-dollar bonuses. Its founding document gives lip service to “student-athletes” but fairly buzzes with pecuniary lingo: “financial,” “revenue,” “funding,” “dollars,” “capital,” et cetera.
And what of those sports that can’t pull their own profit-making weight? As Forbes recently speculated, Kentucky’s ultimate goal appears to be “accepting private capital into athletics.” However, “private capital means new expectations and priorities, such as growth and return targets.” Since many college sports (e.g., women’s swimming) barely finish out of the red, “what happens if cutting a sport would improve the bottom line?” Throw in Title IX regulations, and one has a recipe for investor complaints and political agitation. To ask who will look out for Jane’s and Joe’s actual education seems so quaint that the question may as well be served with gingerbread and tea.
Where Kentucky goes, other big-name schools will follow. So, too, will Uncle Sam, as recently explained in the darkly amusing Alabama Law Review article, “The Taxable Future of College Sports.” Thus will university athletics settle into a new dispensation. The feds get revenue. Top athletes get paid. Investors get profits. And schools and students get … what, exactly?
Continue reading on the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Image: “Television camera on a mobile platform used for sideline shots at the 2007 Auburn University vs. Vanderbilt University college football game” by JGlover on Wikimedia Commons
