Last fall, I stood at the center of what would have been one of the biggest deals in sports: a $2.4 billion public pension fund investment in the Big Ten Conference. In the end, it failed. Congress fired off letters, and trustees balked. The deal was an attempt to provide schools with the capital to compete like professionals; its collapse was one data point in a season of upheaval. That same fall, Lane Kiffin walked out on an 11-1 Ole Miss team weeks before its first playoff game, lured to LSU by a war chest the Rebels couldn’t match.
A month into the new season, last winter’s transfer portal jumpers are starring in new colors, Coach Kiffin’s latest exploits have put LSU at odds with its own league, and administrators are chasing lawsuits, lifelines, and someone to blame. Everyone agrees the sport is in crisis. Most are wrong about why. The turmoil doesn’t stem from a shortage of money or rules. It stems from the fact that universities haven’t learned how to run their most valuable franchises.
If the histrionics coming out of Washington are any indication, the discord won’t abate soon. The Protect College Sports Act, from Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell, has cleared the Senate and now awaits consideration in the House. Mr. Cruz says the PCSA, the latest of a half-dozen other college sports fixes Congress floated in the past year, is “the last train leaving the station.” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise says the bill “need[s] to be fixed,” a task the House likely won’t get to until after the midterms.
Whatever and whenever Washington decides, the courts have already established that athletics departments have to pay near top dollar for top talent. Student athletes now earn more than $2 billion a year in revenue sharing and marketing deals. Top college football coaches command NFL-caliber salaries; fired head coaches alone have collected over $1 billion in severance since 2015. These sums fuel a wilder free agency than any pro league would tolerate: one in five football players transfers each year, and the most brazen riders of the coaching carousel swap schools midseason.
The Cruz-Cantwell bill would tighten restrictions on athlete pay and transfers, bar in-season coach poaching, and dangle antitrust exemptions before Power Conference schools willing to pool media rights with smaller colleagues. None of it would alter the sport’s long-term cost structure. College football is the nation’s second most valuable sports media property. The market for players (and coaches) will inevitably settle closer to NFL and NBA rates than schools pay today.
University leaders sprinting to Capitol Hill should heed the warning of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, who famously eschewed government intervention: if we have to bring in “government to beat our competition, then we deserve to go broke.” The truth is that college athletics is now subject to genuine market forces, but schools have barely begun the sorts of investments that will be required to adapt, let alone win.
What might those investments look like? Ask the pros. 25 years ago, Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s proved that an innovative franchise outgunned on payroll in a hidebound industry could out-maneuver its competition; “Moneyball” is now standard operating procedure across pro sports. The strongest NFL organizations invest relentlessly in the competitive infrastructure that players and coaches don’t control: player development, capital allocation, data analytics, and sports science that buoy an organization even as its talent comes and goes.
College programs neglect that groundwork, and it shows. The Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks employ nearly three times as many non-uniform football operations personnel as the College Football Playoff champion Indiana Hoosiers. After a last-second win over the Colts last season, coach Mike MacDonald awarded a game ball not to a player but to Brian Eayrs, the team’s Director of Football Analysis and Special Situations, whose timeout strategy preserved the clock for Seattle’s winning drive. (Microsoft now features Eayrs in its national ad campaign for Copilot.) Even the best college programs subscribe to a nonproprietary printed manual for in-game strategy — and coaches are praised for using it at all.
The most storied coaches in college sports were institution builders whose regional, relationship-driven networks of high school coaches functioned as proprietary talent pipelines decades before teams used spreadsheets. As recruiting migrates from Friday Night Lights to the transfer portal, that old infrastructure has crumbled. No one in higher education has built its modern replacement.
The pros have. The Oklahoma City Thunder employ the NBA’s largest operations staff from the league’s third-smallest market, and woo talent with distinctive offerings like concierge health care for players’ families. Major athletics departments instead spend toward sameness, waging arms races to build lookalike weight rooms.
Modernizing raises two harder questions.
First, who is leading our schools? NFL general managers have the owner’s ear; university presidential tenure has declined for two decades. As power migrates from the head coach’s office, universities must relocate it —to the president, elsewhere in the athletics department, or the board.
Second, what is the point of a college education? As public trust collapses and Washington moves to fund the individual scientist over legacy institutions, universities would be wise not to assume that exceptional students need them—whether they wear lab coats or shoulder pads.
The moment this season ends, the multi-billion-dollar college bidding war will resume. NIL payments for promising players will rise; so will severance checks for failed coaches. Most universities will keep chasing the quick fixes in hiring and firing that Colorado coach Deion Sanders likened to Brazilian butt lifts. With or without Congress, the fix isn’t more politics. It’s college leaders who start competing and investing, like the pro owners who do this for a living.
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