By Dr. Thomas Orr
Our experts at the Center for Sport Policy and Conduct have become extremely concerned about the rapid changes made to college sports. Specifically, the professionalization of college athletes and the change to unrestricted open free agency that has occurred. Student athletes are working full time jobs for NIL collectives becoming spokespersons and doing all kinds of nonsense other than attending class and professors are complaining while coaches apologize. Our top college athletes are not going to class because their professional sports full time schedule is impossible to balance.
Richard Sherman said it best when he went through the schedule of a college athlete and that was before they were paid 6 million dollars a year to endorse products and make appearances in todays profit driven climate {Click here for video}. Students who do not like coaches, playing time or classes, quickly jump to another program or simply drop out and fall into the portal without finding a new home. Those that stay in school brag about not going to class as they drive sport cars and live in fancy houses in open defiance of any sanctity of a student athlete being a student.
Our well titled article, Building the Plane While Flying the Plane written over a year ago has presented many ideas that we have seen come to fruition as the NCAA does just what the analogy presents {Click here for article}. The subtitle cuts like a Wusthof filet knife through warm butter shining light on the source of the problem; Radical Judicial Pressure is Forcing the NCAA to make Major Changes that We don’t know the Consequences for. The O’Bannon ruling followed by the House settlement was a wrecking ball to the foundation of college sports. The settlement itself made no sense to our experts as it had no way to adapt and did not seem cognizant of the reality of sport and business. The NCAA should have fought the lawsuit. If they lost because of the judge, they could have appealed to the next round and possibly won. They could have appealed to the Supreme Court and had an even better chance of victory based on our analysis. To not fight it and think that paying some athletes a chunk of money would help seemed like a misfire then and has aged like milk since then. The advocacy and ideas agreed upon seemed like the reason that courts should not advocate how sports are played unless it is not congruent with laws such as title nine, then they should enforce.
Especially concerning when it came to advocating, was the lack of understanding by the judge in her statements that undermined over fifty years of progress with college sports and female athletes. Expecting colleges to do the right thing and balance budgets between Women and Men’s opportunities without being told to was extremely naïve of a federal judge. Though there are examples of some female college athletes who have taken advantage of the NIL deal, the vast majority of money goes to men who play the high revenue sports. We are seeing cuts to all kinds of programs, especially centered on non revenue sports already. As the money continues to flow to those select sports the Olympic Sports as well as womens sports become less appealing when focusing on profit. On an even larger scale, Universities are now fighting their own alumni for dollars as they pull their donations from academic and large scale projects and use the money for NIL payments to college athletes to play football or basketball for the school. It is starting to look like a civil war of sorts between alumni and alumni relations.
In an attempt to fix the plane an interesting proposal will reduce the time one has to play college sports to five years. There are exceptions however this would make students enroll quickly after graduation and not allow hockey players for example to play junior hockey until they are 20-21 like they currently do. It is typical for hockey players to receive this extra training so the group of coaches would like this to continue with the lack of standardized good hockey at the high school level throughout the United States and Canada. The junior system is the pipeline feeder so this change is huge for hockey as a sport. Hockey is still reeling and learning from a series of changes we wrote about including allowing professional hockey players to participate in college hockey along with Canadian Major Junior Players. {Click here for article on hockey}
A major issue with this new change is looking to alienate an entire sport and there does not appear to be much concern. College hockey coaches voted 63-0 against the proposed 5-5 rule that would take away the traditional junior hockey path and disrupt their entire processes and programs in ways that they prefer not to happen. Many big names in hockey are calling for college hockey teams to pull away from the NCAA and start their own league.
The junior hockey industry, though not always perfect, has been a willing partner to communities and players for decades. Young players develop their skills and learn to be better players and citizens while the teams provide relatively cheap and affordable entertainment for all kinds of towns in Canada and the U.S. Thinking about some of the amazing owners I have met such as the Greg and Nancy Odde family and what they contribute to their communities with these teams and the experiences they provide to young people it is disappointing to know that this entire model could be taken down by a policy that is so unpopular that one would question in a country calling for “No More Kings” we can allow the NCAA and one president to destroy one of the fabrics of our lives and a great way for people to pursue happiness and success despite where they came from and who they come from. The NCAA is relinquishing power on things that make you scratch your head while then exercising power so willingly that they may lose an entire sport like hockey?
Richard Sherman Interview Link; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP0FYeO1N2A
Link to our article; (https://www.sportpolicycenter.com/news/2025/2/28/building-the-plane-while-flying-the-plane)