Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent

The university on the hill above this city has a hundred-thousand-seat stadium, a football budget that would run a mid-sized county for a decade, and a general manager, which is a title that did not exist in college athletics five years ago and now sits in every power-conference building between the head coach and the compliance office. I live with that gravity every day; the university is the largest thing in Knox County and its football program is the largest thing in the university, and the question of whether the past two years have changed or corrupted the character of what it does is one I have thought about more than I would like, because my daughter is young and I would like her to grow up in a town that has a football team rather than a town that is a football team’s host city. So let me say what I think has actually happened, as plainly as a county engineer can, and then say what I think about the people trying to regulate it.

What has happened is that the thing was always a business and has now been allowed to say so. The settlement that took effect in July of last year lets schools pay athletes directly, up to a cap that sits a little above twenty million dollars this year, and lets athletes sign outside deals that are supposed to be real endorsements rather than salary in disguise. Every program in the league has responded the way a business responds to a new rule, which is to find the rule’s edges: the cap covers what the school pays, so the school’s multimedia-rights partner pays more; the outside deals must clear a review, so the money is paid before the review; the transfer window is fifteen days in January, so the recruiting of other schools’ players happens in October and November and is called something else. The program here is not an outlier in any of that. It is a competent participant in a market whose rules were written by lawyers who had never run a roster, and its general manager is doing the job he was hired for, which is to assemble the best football team the budget allows under rules the budget can outrun.

Is that corruption? I want to answer carefully, because the word has been thrown around by people who liked the old arrangement, in which the same money flowed through boosters and bag men and nobody wrote it down. The old system was corrupt in the plain sense: it was a lie, and everyone involved knew it was a lie, and the lie fell on the players, who did the work and were paid in secret or not at all. The new system is not a lie. It is a market, with contracts, and the players are paid in the open, and the money that used to buy a quarterback’s uncle a truck now buys the quarterback a contract he can enforce, or try to, which is what the Duke dispute this year was about. That is a real improvement for the people who were being used. What it is not is a college sport in the sense the word used to carry, and the people mourning that are not wrong about the loss. The team on the hill this fall has a good share of its two-deep made up of players who were somewhere else last year and will, several of them, be somewhere else next year, and the student who paints his chest for them is painting it for employees on one-year deals, and he knows it, and he does it anyway, which tells you something about what the attachment was always to. It was to the hill, not the roster. The roster was always for rent. Now the rent is published.

Now the enforcement, which is the part of the question I can speak to as a man who has watched regulators try to govern a thing they do not control. The College Sports Commission was created by the conferences to police the deals and the cap, and it has, in fifteen months, built a reporting platform, rejected hundreds of deals, issued guidance, opened inquiries into LSU and Nebraska in January and into as many as ten programs now, and imposed no penalties. It has not imposed penalties because it cannot be sure they would survive a lawsuit, and it cannot be sure of that because the agreement it asked every school to sign, waiving the right to sue, has not been signed by every school, because several states told their universities not to. So the commission investigates and the schools calculate, and the calculation, by every account I have read from the people who do it, is that the risk of being caught is low and the penalty is unknown and the cost of not spending is losing, and a general manager who loses does not keep the job long enough to be investigated. The transfer window, which was consolidated into fifteen days in January to reduce chaos, produced the most chaotic cycle anyone has seen, with more than six thousand players in the portal and the deals struck weeks before it opened, because the window governs when a player can enter his name and nothing governs when a coach can call his agent. The enforcement is a specification without an inspection, which in my shop is the definition of a drawing nobody intends to build to.

The Senate passed a bill two weeks ago that would give the commission federal backing and the cap the force of law, and the House has not acted, and I would note two things about it from a county that has watched a lot of federal fixes arrive. The first is that it was negotiated with the two richest conferences, and it raises the amount schools can pay rather than lowering it, which tells you whose problem it was written to solve. The second is that a federal cap enforced by a body the conferences created is a cap the conferences will enforce on each other exactly as hard as they wish to, and the record of fifteen months suggests how hard that is. The President’s order in April threatened federal funding over NIL practices, which is the kind of threat that makes a university’s lawyers nervous and its football office indifferent, because the football office does not run on federal funding and knows it.

So my answer is that the past two years have not corrupted major college sports so much as they have ended a pretense, and that the thing underneath the pretense is a professional league attached to universities for reasons of history and tax treatment, which it has been for a long time and now admits. The character has changed in the sense that the attachment is now visibly to the place and not the players, and I think that is more honest and less charming and will not reverse. The enforcement is not working, in the sense that nothing has been enforced, and the reason is structural: the regulator was built by the regulated and given no power the regulated did not consent to, and the regulated have declined to consent. The Senate bill may change that. I would not pour a footing on it. From the hill above my house the stadium will be full tomorrow, the roster will be half new, the general manager will be on the phone with an agent before the game ends, and the county will absorb the traffic, as it always has, for a team that belongs to the town in every way but the one that used to matter.

Long Island, New York Correspondent

I want to begin with the document that nobody outside college athletics has read and that explains the enforcement question completely, which is the ten-page University Participation Agreement the College Sports Commission sent to every power-conference school last November. The agreement asks each school to accept the commission’s authority to investigate, audit, and punish, with penalties up to postseason bans and the withholding of conference revenue, and to agree that any dispute over a penalty goes to arbitration rather than to court. It takes effect only when every school signs. Not every school has signed, because several state attorneys general and legislatures told their universities that waiving the right to sue a private body created by their competitors was not something a public institution could do, and so eleven months later the commission is investigating programs under rules those programs have not agreed to be bound by, and has imposed no penalty, because the first penalty will be the first lawsuit and the commission’s lawyers know exactly how that lawsuit goes. That is the enforcement picture in a paragraph. It is a regulator without a consent decree, trying to govern parties that have declined to consent.

Let me explain why the consent matters, because the public conversation treats the commission as if it were a government agency and it is nothing of the kind. The NCAA’s rules on athlete pay were struck down, in effect, by the antitrust cases that produced the House settlement, and the settlement itself was approved by a federal judge in California in June of last year as the resolution of a class action, not as a grant of regulatory authority. The settlement permits schools to pay athletes up to a cap and permits a review of outside deals for fair-market value, but the permission runs to the parties to the settlement, which are the NCAA, the conferences, and the plaintiff class of athletes. It does not bind a school that was not a defendant except through the school’s membership in a conference that was, and it does not bind a state, and it certainly does not bind a booster or a sponsor or a multimedia-rights company, none of whom were in the courtroom. So the commission, which the conferences created to administer the settlement’s terms, has exactly the authority its members give it and no more, and its members are the schools it is supposed to police, and the schools have discovered that the authority is optional. I spent ten years in a prosecutor’s office. A prosecutor who needs the defendant’s signature to bring a charge is not a prosecutor. She is a mediator with letterhead.

Now the question of character, which the law illuminates in a different way. The settlement did not create a market in athletes. It recognized one that the courts had already found to exist and that the NCAA had been suppressing in violation of the antitrust laws for decades. The corruption, if that is the word, was the suppression: a cartel of schools agreeing not to pay the labor that generated billions in revenue, enforced by an association that punished the players for accepting what the market would have paid them. The settlement ended that, and it ended it because federal judges in several circuits had concluded that it was illegal, and the schools settled rather than lose the trial. What the question calls corruption is the market operating after the cartel was dissolved, and the chaos it describes, the transfers and the cap circumvention and the tampering, is what every labor market looks like in its first years without a cartel: prices find their level, contracts are short because nobody trusts the rules, and the parties with the most money bid the most. That is not corruption. It is the thing the law requires when a cartel is broken, and it is uncomfortable because the cartel was comfortable, for everyone but the players.

The transfer question has its own legal history that the coverage skips. The NCAA’s rule requiring a year of residency after a transfer was enjoined by a federal court in 2023 at the request of several state attorneys general, and the association abandoned it. The single transfer window adopted for this January was the association’s attempt to impose order on a market it no longer has the legal power to restrict, and the result, six thousand seven hundred players in fifteen days with the deals struck weeks in advance, was predictable, because a rule governing when a player may enter his name in a database does not govern when his agent may talk to a coach, and the courts have made clear that the association may not punish the talking. Wisconsin’s suit against Miami over tampering is the first attempt to use ordinary contract law, tortious interference, where the association’s rules have failed, and it is the model for how this will actually be policed: school against school, in state court, over a signed agreement. That is a market with enforceable contracts. It is not a league with rules, and the difference is the whole story.

On Washington, the paralegal’s reading of the bill the Senate passed two weeks ago. It would give the cap federal force, require sponsors and multimedia partners to certify that their deals are not funded by the school, and designate the commission as the enforcer, with the antitrust protection the schools have wanted since the first lawsuit. That would, if the House passes it, cure the consent problem by statute: the schools would be bound because Congress said so, not because they signed. It would also, by the Senate’s own summary, roughly double the amount schools may pay, which tells you what the two richest conferences demanded as the price of their support. And it would leave the enforcer as the body the conferences built, with the record of fifteen months and no penalties behind it. A statute can give an agency authority. It cannot give it nerve, and the nerve is the thing that has been missing.

So my answer is that the past two years have changed the character of major college sports by ending an illegal cartel and exposing the professional market that the cartel had concealed, which is a change the law required and the public finds distasteful; and that the enforcement efforts are not working because the enforcer has no authority its subjects did not grant and its subjects have withheld the grant, which is a structural failure that only a federal statute can cure, and the statute is in the House with the conferences’ preferred terms attached. I read a great many agreements that depend on every party signing. The ones in which one party can defeat the whole by declining are not agreements. They are proposals, and the Participation Agreement has been a proposal for eleven months, and the general managers have read it as one, and the commission’s inquiries into ten programs this month are the mediator with letterhead discovering that the letterhead is all she has.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa Correspondent

I kept the books for a plant for thirty years, and the first thing I did when the settlement took effect last summer was ask the question nobody at the two state universities an hour from here wanted to answer in public, which is where the twenty million dollars comes from. A cap is a payroll line, and a payroll line has to be funded, and the athletic departments in this state were not sitting on twenty million dollars of idle cash when a federal judge told them they could pay their players. They have found it the way any operation finds a new line it did not budget for: by raising prices, which is ticket and seat-license increases that the alumni have mostly swallowed; by cutting other lines, which at a lot of schools means the sports that do not sell tickets and at some means staff; by borrowing against future media money; and by going to the donors, who used to give to the collective and now give to the department, which is the same money with a better tax receipt. I say that first because the question asks whether the character has changed, and from a ledger the answer is that the character of the money has changed, from hidden to disclosed, and the character of the enterprise has not changed at all, because it was always a business that pretended otherwise and the pretense was the only thing the settlement removed.

Let me be specific about the ledger, because I distrust arguments about college sports that do not have numbers in them. The cap this year is a little over twenty-one million dollars, and the reporting from the programs at the top of the sport puts their actual roster spending well above that, with one Southeastern Conference school’s football roster alone reported at twenty-five to thirty million before the coach’s salary. The difference between the cap and the spend is the outside money, the endorsement deals that are supposed to be real commerce and are reviewed by a clearinghouse that has rejected hundreds of them and approved a great many more, and the multimedia-rights partners that have discovered they can pay players for appearances that the school would otherwise have paid for under the cap. An accountant recognizes that structure immediately. It is an off-balance-sheet entity, and it exists for the reason every off-balance-sheet entity exists, which is to keep an obligation off the books that everyone involved knows is really the books. The commission that reviews the deals has issued guidance saying substance over form, which is what the accounting standards board said in 2002 after Enron, and the schools have responded the way the companies did, which is to restructure the form.

Now the two schools near me, because the question asks about major college sports and Iowa has two programs in the top conferences and one that is not, and the three of them tell the whole story. The university in Iowa City and the one in Ames are both paying to the cap this year, both have general managers, both have raised prices, and both lost players in January to schools with more outside money and gained players from schools with less, and both will tell you, off the record, that they are a mid-market team in a market that no longer has a floor. The university in Cedar Falls, which plays at the level below, has no realistic path to the cap, has lost its best players to the two schools up the road and to schools farther away, and is deciding, as every program at that level is deciding, whether to keep pretending it competes in the same sport. The retention data from this year’s transfer cycle, which I have read because I read that sort of thing, shows the gap between the top conferences and the rest widening, which is what a market does when the cap is a ceiling for the rich and a fantasy for everyone else. That is not corruption. It is consolidation, and I watched the same thing happen to the plants in this state when the rules changed, and the small ones closed and the big ones got bigger and everybody called it the market.

On enforcement, I will give the auditor’s view, which is short. An auditor asks three questions: are the rules written, are the transactions recorded, and is anyone checking. The rules are written. The transactions are recorded, at least the ones above six hundred dollars that get reported, which by the collectives’ own admission is not all of them and not on time. Nobody is checking in any way that produces a consequence, because the body that would check has imposed no penalty in fifteen months and cannot be sure a penalty would survive a court, because the agreement that would let it punish without being sued has not been signed by every school, because several states told their schools not to sign. The commission is investigating as many as ten programs this month, by the reporting, including teams in the playoff race, and I will believe a penalty when I see one and I will believe it survives when the appeal is denied, and until then the general managers are doing what any operator does when the auditor has no authority, which is to keep two sets of expectations, the one for the clearinghouse and the one for the recruit.

The transfer window I will treat as a payroll cycle, because that is what it is. The league consolidated it into fifteen days in January to reduce the chaos, and the chaos moved to December and November, because a window that governs when the employee may sign does not govern when the employer may call, and more than six thousand players entered in two weeks with their deals already made. That is a labor market with annual contracts and no non-compete, which is what the courts have said it must be, and an accountant does not object to it; an accountant simply notes that one-year contracts in a business with four-year inventory, which is what a recruiting class is, produce exactly the volatility we have, and that the only fix is longer contracts, which the schools are afraid to sign because the players can leave anyway and the schools are not sure they can collect, which is what the Duke matter this year was about.

So my answer is that the past two years have changed the character of the money and exposed the character of the enterprise, and that the enterprise was always a professional league with a tax exemption and a student body, and now says so. The corruption, such as it was, lay in the pretense and in who it was practiced on, and the pretense is gone. The enforcement is not working, in the plain sense that nothing has been enforced, because the auditor has no authority and the audited know it, and the Senate bill that would fix that would also double the payroll, which tells you who wrote it. I vote like someone who watched a payroll disappear, and I will tell you that the payroll in college football has not disappeared; it has been disclosed, and disclosure is the thing I spent a career insisting on, and it is also the thing that makes a man see what he was paying for all along. The two schools up the road will fill their stadiums tomorrow. The one in Cedar Falls will fill most of its own. The books are open now. Nobody who reads them will mistake the business for a school.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent

I write insurance, and in insurance there is a thing called moral hazard, which is what happens when a party is protected from the consequences of its own conduct and behaves accordingly, and I want to start there because the two years since the settlement have been the purest demonstration of moral hazard I have seen outside my own claims files. The schools were told they could pay players up to a cap. They were told outside deals would be reviewed. They were told a new commission would enforce the rules. And then the commission asked them to sign an agreement promising not to sue it, several states told them not to, the agreement never took effect, and the schools looked at a regulator that could not punish them and did what any insured does when the policy has no deductible, which is to spend. Programs across this part of the country are reported to be carrying roster budgets well above the cap. The oil money behind the collective in Lubbock has turned a program that was a mid-tier team for a generation into one that recruits against anyone in two years, and the people who did it have said in public that they are following the rules, and they are, in the sense that the rules have no enforcer and therefore no edge. That is not corruption. It is what rational actors do when the referee has no whistle, and the question of whether the character of the sport has changed is really the question of what the character was when everyone was pretending.

So let me say what I think it was, from a state where football is a civic religion and I have sat in enough school-board meetings to know how the religion is practiced. It was a professional sport with an unpaid workforce, financed by television and boosters, in which the money reached the players through channels that everyone knew about and nobody wrote down, and the enforcement, such as it was, fell on the players and the small programs while the large ones bought their way out of trouble with lawyers. My kids go to public school and their high school has a stadium that cost more than the elementary school, and the quarterback has been talked to by a half dozen collectives since his junior season, and the talking is now legal and the money is now disclosed and I will not pretend the old way was better, because the old way was a lie and the lie was told to seventeen-year-olds. The character has changed in that the lie is gone. What remains is a business that the universities are not equipped to run and have handed to general managers, and the general managers are running it as a business, and the fans in this state have decided they do not care as long as the team wins, which is the only character the sport ever had in Texas.

Now the enforcement, and I will do it as an underwriter does, by asking whether the controls exist and whether they are tested. The controls exist on paper: a cap, a clearinghouse for outside deals above six hundred dollars, a reporting requirement, a commission with investigators. The controls are not tested, because in fifteen months the commission has rejected deals and issued guidance and opened inquiries, into LSU and Nebraska in January and into as many as ten programs now, and has not imposed a single penalty, and it has not because the first penalty will be litigated in a state court by a public university that never agreed to arbitrate, and the commission’s own lawyers have presumably told it how that ends. An insurer who finds that a client’s controls have never once produced a consequence does not credit the controls. He prices the risk as if they were not there, and that is what every general manager in the country has done. The transfer window, which was supposed to contain the chaos by shrinking to fifteen days in January, contained nothing, because the deals were made in November and the window governed only the paperwork; more than six thousand players entered in two weeks and the tampering that preceded it was so general that one school has sued another over it in ordinary court, which is where this will all end up, because ordinary court is the only forum with an enforceable judgment.

Who pays? This is the question I always ask and the answer here is instructive. The players are paid, finally, which is the one unambiguous good in this whole business and I will not let anyone take it back. The fans pay, in ticket prices that have risen to fund the cap, and they have paid without complaint because they are being asked to pay for the thing they want. The small schools pay, because the cap is a ceiling for the rich and a cliff for the rest, and the programs below the top conferences are losing their best players every January to schools that can pay what they cannot. The non-revenue sports pay, in programs cut to fund the roster, which is a cost that lands on the swimmers and the wrestlers and the women’s teams whose scholarships were the thing the old system could point to when asked what the money was for. And the taxpayer pays, a little, in the public universities that are borrowing against media money and raising fees, and will pay more if the thing goes wrong. The people who do not pay are the general managers and the collectives and the agents, who are the ones who built the market and who are the only parties to it with no downside, and in my business the party with no downside is the one who writes the policy.

On Washington, briefly, because the bill the Senate passed two weeks ago came out of the office of this state’s senior senator and I have read it. It would give the cap federal force, which is needed; it would make the commission the enforcer, which has not worked; it would require the sponsors and the rights partners to certify that their deals are not funded by the school, which is a certification that any collective lawyer can draft in an afternoon; and it would, by the committee’s own account, roughly double what schools may pay, which is what the two richest conferences demanded and received. A bill that raises the cap and leaves the enforcer unchanged is a bill that has decided the problem was the number and not the compliance, and I think that is backward, and I think the senators know it, and I think they took the deal because the conferences would not support anything else. The House has not acted. The President’s order in April threatened federal funding, which the football offices do not run on.

So my answer is that the past two years have ended a lie and revealed a business, that the business has no referee because the referee was built by the players and given no whistle, and that the enforcement efforts are failing in the precise sense that fifteen months have produced zero penalties and a transfer cycle wilder than any before. The character of the sport in Texas is unchanged, which is to say it is about winning and always was, and the people who are mourning a purer time are mourning a time in which the money went to the uncles instead of the players. I would rather it go to the players. I would also like somebody to blow a whistle, and nobody has, and until somebody does, the question of effective enforcement is a question about a policy with no deductible, and I have never written one of those that did not produce a claim.

Billings, Montana Correspondent

Montana has two Division I football programs and neither of them is in the conversation the question describes, which is the first thing I want to say, because the conversation is about a dozen schools and the rules it is arguing over are being applied to more than two hundred and sixty, and the view from the ones at the bottom is clearer than the view from the top. The Grizzlies in Missoula and the Bobcats in Bozeman play at the level below the big conferences, in stadiums that hold twenty-five thousand people on a good Saturday, in a state where their rivalry game is the largest sporting event of the year and where a kid from Miles City who starts at linebacker is more famous than the governor. Neither program can pay anywhere near the cap. Both lost players in January to schools that could, and both gained players from schools that could not. I adjust insurance claims and write the civic column for a weekly paper, and I have spent two years watching a national argument about whether college football has been corrupted by money, and the argument has not once mentioned the programs that are being quietly hollowed out by it, because they were never the ones with the money.

So let me describe what the past two years look like from a stadium in Bozeman. The settlement lets schools pay players up to a cap that sits above twenty million dollars. Montana State’s entire athletic budget is a fraction of that, and the football program’s share of it would not cover one quarterback at a school in the Southeastern Conference. The outside deals that are supposed to be real endorsements are, in Montana, actually real, because a car dealer in Billings paying a Bobcat lineman to appear at a sales event is doing exactly what the rules imagine, at a scale that would not register on the clearinghouse’s radar. And every January the best players on both rosters receive calls, from agents working for schools two levels up, offering them money that no collective in this state can match, and some of them go, and the ones who go are replaced by players from Division II and the junior colleges who are themselves hoping to be called next year. The programs here have become what the economists call a feeder system and what a rancher would call a cow-calf operation: raise them, sell them when they are worth something, and start over. That is a change in character, and nobody in the national argument has noticed it, because the national argument is about who buys the calves.

Now the question of corruption, which I will take as a man who writes a civic column and has watched a lot of institutions change under money. The old system was dishonest and everyone knew it, and the dishonesty fell on the players, and the end of the dishonesty is good, and the players at the top are now paid what they are worth, and I will not pretend to mourn the arrangement that preceded it. But the question asks about character, and the character of college sports in a state like this was never the money, because there was never much. It was that the team belonged to the place, that the players were there for four years, that a man in Great Falls could follow a kid from his high school through a career in Missoula and feel that the career was partly his. That is gone, or going. The rosters turn over every year now, at every level, because the market does not distinguish between a school that can pay and one that cannot when it tells players they may leave. The attachment that made college football a civic institution rather than a minor league was built on continuity, and the continuity was the first casualty of the market, and the market did not ask Montana whether it wanted to trade the one for the other. It did not have to. The rules were written for the schools with the money, and the rest of us live under them.

On enforcement, I will be brief, because from here it is almost comic. The College Sports Commission exists to police a cap that no school in this state can approach and to review outside deals that in this state are mostly genuine. Its investigations, into LSU and Nebraska in January and into as many as ten programs now, are investigations of a market that operates two levels above the one the Bobcats play in, and its failure to impose a single penalty in fifteen months is, from here, confirmation of what everyone in a small program already knew, which is that the rules bind the schools that cannot afford to break them and do not bind the schools that can. The participation agreement that would let the commission punish anyone has not been signed by every school, because the states with the big programs told their schools not to sign it, and a program at Montana’s level was never sent one, because nobody intended to investigate it. That is how regulation works on the people at the bottom of any industry I have ever adjusted claims in. The transfer window, consolidated into fifteen days in January to reduce the chaos, concentrated the chaos into the two weeks when a small program is least able to respond, and the tampering before it was so open that the programs here simply budgeted for the loss.

I want to say what I think the Senate bill does for Montana, since it passed two weeks ago and the House has it now. It would codify the cap and roughly double it, by the committee’s account, which raises the ceiling for schools that were already far above anything a Montana program could reach and changes nothing for a program that cannot reach the floor. It would make the commission the enforcer, which has not worked. It would protect the conferences from antitrust suits, which is the thing the conferences wanted and the reason they supported it. Nothing in it addresses the level below, except by making the gap wider and more lawful. That is not a complaint about the senators, who wrote a bill for the problem in front of them. It is an observation that the problem in front of them was the problem of twelve schools, and the other two hundred and fifty are an afterthought in Washington as they have been in every conversation about this for two years.

So my answer is that the past two years have changed the character of college sports most profoundly at the level nobody is watching, where the money is small and the continuity that made the sport a civic institution has been dissolved by rules written for programs that never had it anyway; and that the enforcement efforts are not working, and could not work from here even if they did, because they police a market two levels above the one most of college football actually plays in. The Grizzlies and the Bobcats will play in November in front of the largest crowd in the state, and the rosters will be half new, and the kid from Miles City may or may not be there next year depending on a phone call from an agent in a city he has never seen. The game will still be the game. The thing around it, which was the point, is being sold off by the head, and the people doing the selling have not been to Bozeman and do not intend to come. I fix fences badly. This one has been down for two years, and nobody is coming to mend it, and the stock has been walking through.

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent

I spent years on the labor side of a bargaining table, and I want to say at the outset that the past two years in college sports are the most complete labor victory I have witnessed in my lifetime, that the workers who won it did so without a union, through the courts, against the most entrenched employer cartel in American life, and that the people now wringing their hands about the character of the sport are, nearly all of them, people who were comfortable when the labor was free. That is my bias and I am stating it. For sixty years the universities and their association ran a business on television money and ticket money and booster money and paid the workforce in tuition and meals while the coaches made millions, and they called the arrangement amateurism and prosecuted the kids who took a hundred dollars from a booster, and the whole edifice was a lie that fell on the only people in it who could not afford to be lied to. A federal judge ended it last summer. The players are now paid. Whatever else has happened, that happened, and I will not let the rest of this column pretend otherwise.

Now the rest, because a labor man who only celebrates is not doing his job. What has replaced the cartel is a market with no union, and a market with no union is a market in which the strongest individual workers do very well and everyone else takes what is offered, and that is exactly what the past two years look like. The quarterbacks and the pass rushers at the top programs are making seven figures, with agents and contracts and the ability to leave for a better offer every January, and the backup lineman at a mid-major is making a stipend and hoping to be noticed. There is no collective bargaining, no minimum, no pension, no grievance procedure, no health coverage that outlasts eligibility, and no one at the table for the players as a class, because the association spent decades making sure they were not employees and the settlement preserved that fiction while paying them anyway. The transfer window, six thousand seven hundred players in fifteen days with deals struck in advance, is what a labor market looks like when every worker is a free agent every year and no one bargains for the group. The top of the market loves it. The middle and the bottom are churned, and the churning is the chaos the question asks about, and the chaos is not a flaw in the market. It is what a market without a union does.

The schools, meanwhile, have discovered that they are employers and have hired the people employers hire, which is general managers, and the general managers have done what management does when the rules are soft, which is to find the edges. The cap is a little over twenty-one million dollars this year and the top programs are spending well past it through outside deals that are supposed to be real endorsements and are, in a great many cases, salary with a sponsor’s logo on it, routed through the schools’ own media partners. I have seen that trick before. It is the subcontractor arrangement: the company does not pay the workers, the subcontractor pays them, and the company pays the subcontractor, and when the auditor comes the company’s payroll is clean. The College Sports Commission has issued guidance saying it will look at substance over form, which is what every labor board has said about every subcontractor arrangement since the 1930s, and the schools have responded the way companies always respond, which is to restructure the form again and to decline to sign the agreement that would let the commission punish them.

That is the enforcement question, and from the labor side it has a short answer. A regulator that depends on the regulated’s consent is not a regulator, and the commission asked the schools to consent, and several states told their schools not to, and the agreement never took effect, and the commission has imposed no penalty in fifteen months because the first one will be litigated by a university that never agreed to arbitrate. The investigations into as many as ten programs this month, including teams in the playoff race, are the commission trying to establish authority by exercising it, which is a thing I watched the labor board try for years against companies that had decided the board was optional, and it works only when a court finally says the authority is real, and no court has. The Senate bill passed two weeks ago would make the authority real by statute and would also, by its own summary, roughly double what the schools may pay, which is the two richest conferences writing the terms of their own regulation, and I have sat across from management while it wrote the terms of its own regulation, and the terms are always generous to management.

I want to say what the Ohio Valley sees in this, because the university in Morgantown is this state’s largest institution and its football program is the state’s largest shared experience, and the people here have watched it with a particular eye. West Virginia is not a rich school in a rich conference. It is a mid-market program in a conference that was built out of the wreckage of another one, and it has spent two years losing players in January to schools with more outside money and signing players from schools with less, and its fans, who are the most loyal in the country by any measure that counts, have watched the roster turn over and have kept coming, because the attachment was to the state and the stadium and the color of the jerseys and not to the kids wearing them, which they always knew and now admit. That is the change in character, in a place that never had money to corrupt. The sport belongs to the place. The players are passing through, paid, which is right, and gone, which is new, and the people in the stands have made their peace with it the way a company town makes its peace with a plant that changes owners: the whistle still blows, the name on the gate is the same, and the men inside are strangers.

So my answer is that the past two years have ended the most durable wage theft in American sport and replaced it with a market that rewards the strong and churns the rest, that the churning is the chaos the question describes and is not a bug, and that the character of the sport has changed in the only way it could once the lie was removed, which is that everyone now knows what they are watching. The enforcement is not working and will not until a statute or a court gives the commission authority the schools did not grant, and the statute on offer was written by the schools. What is missing, and what nobody in Washington or the conferences will propose, is the one thing that has ever made a labor market both fair and stable, which is a union, and the players will get one eventually, because every workforce that has been paid in the open eventually asks who is bargaining for it, and the answer right now is nobody. I have been in rooms where that question got asked. It changes everything in the room. It will change this one, and the general managers know it, and that is the fight that comes after the one the question describes.

Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent

The sportsbooks in this town take more money on college football than on anything but the pros, and I want to begin there because it tells you what the sport actually is in the one place where people are required to be honest about it. A book does not care whether a quarterback is an amateur. It cares whether he will be in the lineup on Saturday, whether he was in a different lineup last Saturday, and whether anyone knows something about him that the line does not reflect, and for two years the books have been pricing a sport in which the answers to all three questions have become more volatile than at any time in the game’s history. Rosters turn over by the dozen every January. Players sign with schools they have never visited. A quarterback at a Texas program this spring had his season clouded by a betting investigation. A player in Mississippi got a court order to keep playing after his eligibility ran out. The books have adjusted, because books adjust, and the adjustment is the most honest answer to the question anyone has offered: college football is now priced as a professional sport with unusually unstable rosters and unusually weak governance, and the lines have widened accordingly, and the house, as always, is fine.

So let me take the question’s two halves from the floor. Has the character changed or been corrupted? I dealt cards for six years and I can tell you the difference between a game that is honest and a game that is rigged, and the old college football was rigged in the specific sense that the rules said one thing and everyone played by another, and the players, who were the only ones not in on the fix, were the ones punished when the fix was discovered. That was corruption. What exists now is a game in which the rules say the players are paid and the players are paid, and the schools have hired general managers to manage the payroll and the agents have arrived to represent the labor and the whole thing operates in daylight, and the character has changed in exactly the way a casino changes when it goes from a back room to a licensed floor: the same game, the same money, and now a regulator, a tax bill, and a sign over the door. The people who liked the back room liked it because it was theirs. The floor is for everyone, and it is louder, and the regulars complain.

Now the regulator, because this is the part the question actually asks about and it is the part this town understands better than any other. Nevada regulates gaming through a commission with the power to pull a license, and the power is real because every operator signed for it as the price of entering the state, and no operator can decline to be bound and keep its doors open. The College Sports Commission was built on the same idea and left out the one part that makes it work. It asked the schools to sign an agreement accepting its authority and waiving their right to sue, and it made the agreement effective only when every school signed, and several states told their schools not to, and so the commission has spent eleven months as a regulator whose licensees never took out licenses. It has a reporting platform, a clearinghouse that has rejected hundreds of deals, guidance that says substance over form, inquiries into LSU and Nebraska in January and into as many as ten programs now, and no penalties, because the first penalty is the first lawsuit and the commission knows what a lawsuit from a public university in its home state court looks like. In this town we would call that a gaming board with no power over the games, and we would not call it a gaming board for long.

The transfer window I will treat as what it is to a book, which is an information problem. The league consolidated the window into fifteen days in January to reduce chaos, and the chaos, from the floor, was reduced in exactly one respect: it was scheduled. Six thousand seven hundred players entered in two weeks with their deals struck in November, and the tampering before the window was so general that one school sued another over it, and the lines for next season could not be set until February because nobody knew who would be where. For a book that is a cost of doing business. For a sport that depends on fans knowing who they are cheering for, it is a problem the window did not solve, because the window governs the paperwork and the deals govern the players, and a rule about paperwork does not change behavior any more than a rule about when you may sit at a table changes when you decided to gamble.

I want to say something about the money the question does not mention, which is ours. The legalization of sports betting since 2018 has put a sportsbook in the pocket of every college student in thirty-some states, and the sport that is now paying its players openly is also the sport those players’ classmates are betting on openly, and the collision has already produced a betting investigation involving a starting quarterback and will produce more. A professional league with paid players and a regulated book is a manageable thing; the pros have been managing it since the point-shaving scandals, with integrity monitoring and bans and a players’ union that enforces the rules on its own members. A college sport with paid players, no union, a regulator that cannot punish, and a book on every phone is a thing nobody has managed before, and the commission that cannot enforce a salary cap is not going to enforce a betting rule, and the conferences that would not sign the participation agreement are not going to sign an integrity one. That is the risk this town sees that the national conversation does not, and it is the one that could actually corrupt the game in the old sense, rather than merely professionalize it.

So my answer is that the character of major college sports has changed from a rigged back room to a licensed floor, which is better for the players and worse for the people who liked the room, and that the enforcement efforts are failing in the way every regulator fails when the regulated can decline to be regulated: fifteen months, hundreds of rejected deals, ten open investigations, no penalties, and a transfer window that scheduled the chaos without reducing it. The Senate bill two weeks ago would give the commission authority by statute and would also, by its own account, roughly double the cap, which is the operators writing their own gaming regulations, and I have watched that happen here too, and it ends with a commission that regulates what the operators permit. The house is fine. The lines are wide. The players are paid. And somewhere in a dorm a kid with a phone and an app is deciding whether what he knows about a teammate is worth more than his scholarship, and nobody in college sports has built the thing that would stop him, and that is the enforcement question that matters, and it is not on anyone’s agenda, and in this town we know how that story ends because we wrote the first draft.

Dublin, Ireland Correspondent

Every August two American universities fly their football teams, bands, and several thousand supporters to Dublin to play a game at the Aviva Stadium, and the city makes a great deal of money from it, and I have gone, and I want to begin there because it is the only direct contact most Irish people have with the thing the question describes, and the contact is instructive. The visitors are perfectly pleasant and spend freely and explain, when asked, that the players are students. Nobody in the stadium believes this, in the way nobody in Dublin believes that a Premier League footballer is an apprentice, and the explanation is received with the politeness one extends to a visitor’s national myth. The question asks whether the past two years have changed or corrupted the character of American college sport. From here the answer is that the myth has been retired and the thing underneath it was always what everyone outside America could plainly see, which is a professional league operating inside universities for reasons of history and tax, and the change is that Americans are now permitted to say so, and are finding it uncomfortable.

Let me offer the comparison that Americans least like to hear, which is their own soccer. The rest of the world has run professional sport attached to amateur institutions before and has mostly stopped, because it does not work: the players are exploited until they are paid, and once they are paid the institution either admits it is a club or pretends it is not and spends a generation in litigation. Rugby union went professional in 1995 after a century of pretending, and the pretense collapsed in about eighteen months once the money was legal, and the sport is better for it and the people who ran the amateur era still complain. The American colleges have arrived at the same point by a longer road, through the courts rather than a governing body’s decision, and the settlement that took effect last year is the moment the pretense ended. What has followed, the transfer chaos, the cap circumvention, the agents and the general managers, is what followed in rugby and in every other sport that made the same transition: a market finding its prices in the absence of the institutions, a players’ association above all, that professional sports elsewhere built to manage it.

Now the enforcement, which is the part of the question I can speak to professionally, because I spend my days on compliance regimes that sell into American buyers and I know the shape of a regulator that cannot regulate. The College Sports Commission was created by the conferences to police a cap and review outside deals, and in fifteen months it has built a reporting platform, rejected hundreds of deals, issued guidance that says substance over form, opened inquiries into LSU and Nebraska in January and into as many as ten programmes this month, and imposed no penalties. The reason is a document: a participation agreement that would bind the schools to arbitration rather than litigation and takes effect only if every school signs, and several American states have forbidden their universities to sign it, and so the commission investigates parties who have not agreed to be bound. In European terms that is a self-regulatory body whose members have declined to join, and the comparative lesson is unambiguous: self-regulation in sport works when the governing body controls access to the competition, as UEFA does, and fails when the competitors can walk out, which is why the American conferences, which can walk out of anything, have never been successfully regulated by anyone. The commission does not control access. The conferences do. The commission is therefore the conferences’ instrument, and it will enforce against the conferences exactly as hard as they wish.

The transfer question has a European answer too, and it is the one Americans are now discovering. Since the Bosman ruling in 1995, European footballers have been free to move at the end of their contracts, and the result was a decade of chaos, a widening gap between rich and poor clubs, and then a settlement in which contracts lengthened, transfer windows were fixed by the governing body, and the players’ unions negotiated the terms. The American single window this January, fifteen days and six thousand seven hundred entrants with the deals made weeks in advance, is Bosman in its second year: the freedom has arrived and the institutions that would make it orderly have not. Wisconsin suing Miami for tampering is a club suing another club for a thing that European football governs through a window and a registration system with real penalties. The Americans will get there. They will get there faster if they stop pretending the governing body they built can govern without the power to exclude.

I want to say something about the legislation, because American politics is my professional interest and the Senate’s bill two weeks ago is a specimen of it. It would give the cap federal force, which is the thing the sport needs; it would make the commission the enforcer, which has not worked; and it would, by the committee’s own summary, roughly double what schools may pay, which is the price the two richest conferences exacted for their support. A European observer notes that this is how American regulation of concentrated industries usually proceeds: the industry writes the terms, the legislature ratifies them, and the regulator is staffed by the industry’s choice. It is not corruption in the Irish sense of the word, which involves envelopes. It is capture, which is legal and more durable, and which the Americans practise with a candour that is almost admirable. The President’s executive order in April threatening federal funding is the other American habit, which is to threaten the universities with the one lever the football programmes do not depend on.

So my assessment is that the past two years have not corrupted American college sport but have ended its pretence, that the thing revealed is a professional league that the rest of the world had always seen and that Americans are now obliged to look at, and that the chaos is the ordinary first phase of any sport’s transition from amateur fiction to professional fact, as rugby and football both demonstrate. The enforcement is failing because the enforcer lacks the one power that makes sporting regulation work, which is control over who may compete, and the Senate bill would give it statutory authority while leaving the conferences in charge of the gate. The Americans will build the institutions eventually, a players’ association first, because every paid workforce eventually asks who bargains for it. In the meantime they will fly two teams to Dublin every August, and the players will be paid, and someone will explain to me that they are students, and I will nod, as I always have, at a myth that has now retired but has not yet been told.