the BigAmateurism monologues

The voluntary regulation of college is in an unprecedented power vacuum. The NCAA Division I Board of Director’s Transformation Committee will decide the future of voluntary regulation and likely the future of college sports. Perhaps the most pressing issue for the Transformation Committee is how it sees its regulatory authority on athlete compensation limits, whether through the lens of tradition...

March Madness is in full swing. The NCAA and its corporate sponsors are set to make a killing in New Orleans. But the Madness of the Division I men’s basketball tournament pales in comparison to the broader college sports chaos narratives that in-system stakeholder market participants are spinning for public consumption. From deregulated NIL to the impact of the Alston ruling, to the power vacuum...

In this episode, I indulge some nostalgia and reflect on Coach K’s historic 42-year career as Duke’s head basketball coach. His success and influence shouldn’t be measured solely by wins, losses, championships, All-Americans, and gold medals. Perhaps Coach K’s most significant legacy is his loyalty to the institutions that shaped his life and career. The principles of Duke’s original motion offens...

On Friday, February 25, 2022, Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby spoke at an Aspen Institute forum on college sports and the possibility of athletes as university employees. Bowlsby’s comments provide insight into the difficulty in-system stakeholder beneficiaries now face in articulating a forward-thinking, coherent position on the future of college sports, particularly regarding the fundamental rel...

For seventy years, the NCAA and in-system stakeholders-beneficiaries have militantly enforced their classification of athletes as “students” rather than employees. There is scant evidence that the NCAA/Power 5 have budged from that position. This episode frames the athletes as employees debate from a values-based perspective. I use NCAA/Power 5-friendly hearings in the Senate in 2020 and two piece...

The NCAA Constitution Committee hailed the make-over of the NCAA Constitution as a transformative event for the NCAA and college sports regulation. In that framing, the NCAA, Power 5, and in-system stakeholders suggest the “new” NCAA is the product of original thinking. In fact, the recently ratified NCAA Constitution is a carbon copy of the Power 5’s 2013-2014 campaign for the Autonomy classifica...

Heads Up for this Episode: I have an extended introductory montage comprised of clips from two sets of Senate hearings, one in 1997 and the other in 2003. Both hearings focus on anticompetitive behavior by big-time football conferences and schools in the post-season bowl market. While the post-season bowl marketplace provides context, the testimony of in-system stakeholder-beneficiaries arguing to...

Past is prologue for the evolving college sports marketplace and regulatory model. This episode offers a curated history of modern college sports from World War II to the present. As with nearly all aspects of big-time college sports, big-time football is at the center of every crucial milestone.

Big-time college football is the king of college sports culturally and financially. Because Power 5 football resides under the NCAA regulatory umbrella, these fundamental facts are often obscured. Lost in discussions about the NCAA as a national regulator and the future of college sports regulation is the dominance of football revenue in the overall business model. This episode looks at big-time f...

In this episode, I look at the role of the NCAA and Power 5 as propagandists in their quest for federal, protective intervention in college sports, emphasizing their target audience: the Senate Commerce Committee. Commerce has original legislative and oversight jurisdiction for sports-related matters and has been the epicenter of the NCAA/Power 5 campaigns to obtain unprecedented federal protectio...

January 20th marked the official beginning of SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey’s new role as the unofficial czar of college sports when the NCAA membership voted to ratify the new NCAA constitution. As co-chair of the Division I Board of Director’s Transformation Committee, Sankey (and co-chair Julie Cromer, athletics director at Ohio University) will utilize Division I’s new authorities to operate la...

As a prelude to the NCAA’s vote today on the proposed constitution, I look at three things over the last week that may portend choppy waters going forward: (1) the ACC’s announcement that it seeks a year-long pause on CFP expansion talks; (2) an op-ed in USA Today by Knight Commission leaders that align with the ACC’s announcement; and (3) an NCAA podcast episode that tempers expectations on what...

The NCAA is in full propaganda mode for its upcoming convention from January 19th – 22nd. The convention’s centerpiece is a vote to ratify the new NCAA constitution. This episode discusses the convention, its action items, its portrayal by the NCAA, and the likely consequences/next steps after ratifying the new constitution.

Alabama coach Nick Saban and Georgia coach Kirby Smart used a joint presser before tonight’s CFP championship to lobby for federal NIL regulation. Rather than dismiss such policy talk as a distraction from the game, Saban and Smart made it clear that they were on the same page regarding the federalization of the NIL marketplace. Their primary justification was to prevent the “haves” in college foo...

For over seventy years, the NCAA and in-system stakeholder beneficiaries of the big-time college sports marketplace have proclaimed that any challenge to the NCAA’s regulatory authority or basic amateurism-based business model would result in the fatal collapse of college sports. From capitulation to the full athletics scholarship in 1956 to the name, image, and likeness debate in 2021, the NCAA h...

On June 21st, 2021, the United States Supreme Court powerfully delivered a long-overdue course correction to the NCAA in its 37 year-long (post-Board of Regents) imperial march through the federal judiciary. While the Court was not asked to put amateurism out of its misery for good, it rejected the NCAA’s core argument(s) that the NCAA was entitled to absolute judicially created antitrust immunity...

The countdown continues… In this episode I reveal items 5, 4, and 3 on my Top Ten list. Enjoy!

What were the most important events in college sports in this remarkable—perhaps historic—year of 2021? Let’s start the countdown. In this episode, I reveal in reverse chronological order numbers 10 through 6. I also toss in some honorable mentions at the beginning of the episode to set the tone. Enjoy!

This week, the US Supreme declined to hear the Gatto appeal, which marks the end of the legal proceedings arising from the 2017-2018 college basketball “scandal.” In this episode, I discuss the impact of those prosecutions and whether they should have been brought in the first place. I focus on 2nd Circuit judge Gerard Lynch’s dissenting opinion in which he subtly questions the wisdom of pursuing...

On December 10, 2021, the NCAA Committee on Infractions (COI) issued a head-scratching decision in the Auburn University basketball “scandal” case. Despite finding that Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl committed a Level I (most egregious) violation because of his failure to adequately monitor lead assistant coach Chuck Person—a former Auburn and NBA basketball star—Pearl received a merely tap on the...

When the NCAA released its initial draft constitution on November 8th, 2021, it hailed the document as a transformative step forward for athletes’ rights and athletes’ physical and mental “well-being.” Now, after “feedback” from in-system stakeholders, the revised draft (released Tuesday, December 7th, 2021) eliminates or waters down athlete-friendly provisions. Specifically, the revised draft (1)...

In late October 2021, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors announced the creation of a Division I “Transformation Committee.” An October 28, 2021, press release on the NCAA website said the Committee was “charged with making recommendations to the [Division I] board for how to address the Division I’s most significant challenges and more effectively meet the needs of current and future student-a...

On November 19, 2021, a Constitution Committee representative from each of the three NCAA divisions sat for an interview in the NCAA.com Social Series podcast. The Constitution Committee is now in the public spin phase, and the Social Series episode is a case study in NCAA/Power 5 propaganda. The podcast host and Committee representatives painted a picture of association-wide consensus on the draf...

Since the 1970s, the powerful football interests have sought to protect their financial interests under the NCAA umbrella by threatening to leave the Association unless they got their way. Given the current and unprecedented weakness of the NCAA and the shift in power from the NCAA national office to the Divisions, why don’t the Power 5 leave the NCAA and start a new association? This episode iden...

The format of this episode is a bit unusual. When I initially recorded (November 8th), the NCAA had not released its draft constitution. However, before going live with the episode, the NCAA released its draft constitution. My original episode was a discussion of the composition and purpose of the Constitution Committee and recorded with the assumption that the Committee would not release its work...