College Sports Has a Governance Problem, Not Just an Eligibility Problem

Strategic Analysis | September 11, 2026

For years, the organizational chart of college sports was complicated in the way a family tree is complicated: there were a lot of names on it, but everyone generally knew who sat at the top.

The NCAA wrote the national rules. Conferences added their own. Schools administered both. Athletes followed them—or at least knew whose decision they were appealing.

That description was never perfectly accurate. But it was accurate enough to make the system work.

It is becoming much less accurate now.

College sports in 2026 is governed simultaneously by the NCAA, individual conferences, the newly created College Sports Commission, hundreds of member institutions, private arbitration systems, federal courts, state courts, and—increasingly—Congress. Each derives its authority from a different source. Each operates within a different jurisdiction. And, critically, they do not always agree.

That is why the current wave of athlete-eligibility litigation matters well beyond whether a fifth-year linebacker gets to play on Saturday.

Eligibility is the symptom.

Governance is the disease.

In my recent Practical Explainer on the new eligibility fight (Inside College Sports' New Eligibility Fight), I focused on the athletes caught between old eligibility rules, the NCAA's new age-based model, conference restrictions, and injunctions allowing some players—including athletes who crossed into professional sports—to pursue another college season. The central practical problem was already visible: an athlete might receive one answer from the NCAA, another from a conference, another from a university, and yet another from a judge.

Since then, the problem has become even harder to ignore.

The SEC is now suing one of its own members, LSU, in federal court over the conference's asserted right to prevent member schools from rostering former professional athletes. At virtually the same time, a Louisiana state judge granted preliminary relief that cleared a path for former NFL players to return to LSU. The SEC's federal complaint responds not merely with another eligibility argument, but with a constitutional one: the conference says LSU, a public university, cannot compel the SEC to associate itself with conduct that contradicts the league's rules and stated mission.

That is not a normal eligibility dispute.

It is a dispute about who governs the governor.

And it offers a useful window into the larger structural problem confronting college athletics.

The NCAA itself has changed the eligibility framework substantially.

In June, Division I adopted a new age-based system that generally permits up to five years of eligibility within a continuous five-year window, subject to transition rules for current athletes and students entering during the 2026–27 academic year. The new system eliminates many of the old season-of-competition rules, redshirt concepts, delayed-enrollment provisions, and waiver mechanisms that previously required schools to track an athlete's eligibility with something approaching forensic accounting.

That reform was designed, in part, to simplify things.

Instead, the transition has exposed how little authority now resides in any one place.

Federal courts have entertained antitrust challenges to the NCAA's treatment of fifth-year athletes. State courts have granted emergency relief to other athletes. Conferences have adopted independent restrictions on former professionals. Schools have had to decide whether to roster athletes protected by court orders while facing the possibility of conference sanctions. And the College Sports Commission now administers an entirely separate regulatory architecture governing revenue sharing, roster limits, and certain NIL activity.

There is still a rulebook.

There are just several of them.

And the hard legal question is increasingly not simply what does the rule say?

It is:

Whose rule controls?

That question requires understanding the different sources of authority operating inside modern college sports, because they are not interchangeable.

The NCAA remains the closest thing college athletics has to a national rulemaker.

Its member institutions collectively agree to common standards governing eligibility, recruiting, competition, academic requirements, transfers, conduct, and dozens of other matters necessary to stage intercollegiate competition across hundreds of schools.

Some degree of collective rulemaking is not merely permissible. It is unavoidable.

The Supreme Court recognized that reality more than forty years ago in NCAA v. Board of Regents. College sports sells competition between schools; that product cannot exist unless the schools agree on at least some rules governing how the competition works. A football league in which one school fields 11 players, another fields 19, and a third permits tackling with garden tools would have a marketability problem.

The legal system therefore does not treat every jointly adopted sports rule as inherently unlawful.

But neither does it treat the NCAA's declaration that a rule is necessary as the end of the analysis.

That is the lesson of NCAA v. Alston.

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the notion that the NCAA enjoys some freestanding immunity from ordinary antitrust scrutiny simply because it regulates college sports. The Court acknowledged the need for cooperation while insisting that challenged restraints still be justified under established antitrust principles.

Justice Gorsuch's opinion contained an especially useful description of the system: “this thicket of associations and rules.”

That thicket has only grown thicker.

And Alston altered the practical balance of power because NCAA rules now operate in an environment where athletes have learned that the rulebook can be challenged rather than merely appealed internally.

The NCAA can still make rules.

It just cannot assume that writing one makes it legally durable.

The next layer is becoming much more important.

Conferences have always possessed their own authority. The Supreme Court noted in Alston that Division I conferences “can and do enact their own rules.”

Historically, however, conference regulation often operated as a supplement to NCAA regulation.

Increasingly, conferences are behaving like independent governing bodies.

Consider the new professional-participation rules.

The Big 12 adopted a rule prohibiting member institutions from fielding athletes who, among other things, declared for a professional draft without timely withdrawing, appeared on a professional roster, or signed a professional contract. The conference made the critical point explicit:

its rule applies independently of NCAA eligibility determinations.

That sentence is more important than it looks.

Suppose an NCAA determination—or a court order restricting the NCAA—leaves an athlete eligible.

The conference's position is essentially:

Fine. But that does not answer whether one of our members may field him.

That converts what looks like one eligibility dispute into two different legal questions.

The first asks whether the athlete satisfies NCAA requirements.

The second asks whether a member institution can use that athlete without violating an independent conference obligation.

Those questions may involve different defendants, different contracts, different legal theories, different defenses, and potentially different courts.

That is precisely what is happening with LSU and the SEC.

The SEC's federal suit is particularly notable because it does not simply ask a court to declare the athletes ineligible. Instead, it asserts an institutional right to enforce the conference's own rules against LSU and frames the dispute partly through the First Amendment right of expressive association.

Whether that argument ultimately succeeds is another question.

But the theory itself tells us something significant about where governance has moved.

The SEC is not merely defending an NCAA rule.

It is asserting its own sovereignty within the college-sports system.

Then there is the College Sports Commission.

The CSC is easy to misunderstand because it does not simply replace the NCAA.

It has a more specific jurisdiction.

Created as part of the post-House regulatory structure, the CSC enforces rules connected to institutional revenue sharing, certain third-party NIL arrangements, and sport-specific roster limits. NCAA Bylaw 23 formally delegates enforcement authority over settlement-related rules to the designated enforcement entity, including investigative authority, penalty determinations, and participation in neutral arbitration when those decisions are challenged.

That creates a remarkably different enforcement structure from the traditional NCAA model.

A dispute over whether an athlete may receive a particular third-party NIL payment may begin with the CSC.

A challenge to a CSC athlete determination can proceed through neutral arbitration.

Questions about interpretation or enforcement of the House settlement can implicate a special master and ultimately the federal court supervising the settlement.

And that court is not merely theoretical background.

In June, the special master in the House litigation addressed a dispute over the CSC's authority to review NIL arrangements involving multimedia-rights companies and brand sponsors. The ruling rejected, at least at that stage, efforts to categorically remove those transactions from CSC review.

Just days ago, Judge Claudia Wilken also overruled objections to continuation of the injunctive-relief settlement for incoming athletes.

Think about what that means structurally.

College athletics now has a system in which a private enforcement entity administers settlement-based regulations, neutral arbitrators review certain enforcement decisions, and a federal court retains authority over interpretation and enforcement of the underlying settlement.

That is not the NCAA system your parents grew up with.

It is almost a separate regulatory state living inside college athletics.

And the CSC's limited jurisdiction creates another potential source of confusion: not every college-sports dispute belongs there.

A revenue-sharing dispute may.

An NIL enforcement dispute may.

A general NCAA eligibility dispute ordinarily does not simply become a CSC matter because it involves an athlete.

That jurisdictional distinction will matter increasingly as parties decide where—and against whom—to bring challenges.

Universities occupy an even stranger position.

They are regulated entities, but they are also decisionmakers.

Schools decide whom to recruit, admit, roster, compensate, discipline, and ultimately place on the field. They administer NCAA and conference rules. They enter NIL-related arrangements. They allocate revenue sharing. They sign contracts with conferences and other institutions.

And public universities bring an additional body of law with them because they are governmental actors.

That distinction can change everything.

The Supreme Court's older college-sports cases illustrate the point.

In NCAA v. Tarkanian, the Court held that the NCAA was not a state actor merely because UNLV, a public university, followed NCAA recommendations in disciplining Jerry Tarkanian. UNLV itself, however, unquestionably was a state actor.

Later, in Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, the Court found state action where a high-school athletic association was so pervasively entwined with public schools and public officials that its conduct could fairly be attributed to the state.

Those cases are not interchangeable with today's disputes. But they illustrate a recurring question that sophisticated college-sports litigation increasingly requires parties to ask at the outset:

What is this entity, legally speaking?

Private membership association?

Public university?

Private university?

Conference?

Settlement enforcement body?

State actor?

Contractual counterparty?

The answer determines which claims are available.

The current SEC-LSU case turns that traditional posture almost inside out.

Instead of a plaintiff arguing that a private athletic organization should be treated as governmental, the SEC—a private conference—is invoking § 1983 against officials of a public university and claiming the government institution is violating the conference's First Amendment rights.

Only college sports could turn an eligibility fight into a constitutional dispute between a private athletic conference and its own public-university member.

But that is precisely the point.

The identity of the regulator now matters almost as much as the regulation.

Courts are the final—and increasingly disruptive—piece of the governance puzzle.

Judges are not athletic directors.

They do not set roster limits, devise transfer windows, determine playoff formats, or decide how many years a linebacker ought to spend in college.

And courts regularly express reluctance to become day-to-day sports administrators.

But eligibility disputes have a feature that makes judicial intervention particularly powerful:

they come with an expiration date.

An ordinary commercial plaintiff who wins three years later may receive damages.

An athlete who wins an eligibility lawsuit three years later may receive congratulations.

The season is already gone.

That is why eligibility disputes so often arrive through temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions. The athlete argues that missing competition causes injuries that cannot be adequately repaired later: lost playing time, exposure, development, NIL compensation, institutional revenue-sharing opportunities, and potential professional opportunities. Your eligibility rules therefore become procedural litigation almost immediately.

And once a court issues emergency relief, the decision has consequences far beyond the caption.

In Wisne v. NCAA, a Colorado federal court granted preliminary relief to a class of athletes challenging the NCAA's treatment of fifth-year eligibility under Section 1 of the Sherman Act. The district court later denied the NCAA's request to stay the injunction, rejecting several arguments concerning market definition, anticompetitive effects, and the NCAA's asserted procompetitive justifications. The Tenth Circuit subsequently stayed the injunction pending appeal after concluding that the NCAA had made a substantial showing of likely success.

That procedural history matters.

The rule did not change three times.

The enforceability of the rule did.

That difference is everything to a coach building a roster.

Similar emergency orders have now appeared in multiple states. Texas litigation temporarily prevented the NCAA and SEC from using challenged restrictions against dozens of athletes. Louisiana litigation produced preliminary relief affecting former professionals. Indiana athletes recently obtained temporary relief against NCAA and Big Ten restrictions.

So two athletes with nearly identical histories can potentially occupy very different legal positions based on whether they obtained relief, which court heard the case, which entities were named, what legal theory they asserted, and how an appellate court treated the order.

That is not merely an eligibility issue.

It is a choice-of-regulator problem with a litigation clock attached.

This is the part that gets lost when every dispute is described simply as “Athlete v. NCAA.”

The source of the challenged authority matters.

An NCAA rule may arise from collective action among member institutions.

A conference rule may derive from conference bylaws and membership agreements.

A school's decision may arise from institutional discretion, employment relationships, scholarship terms, participation agreements, or public-law obligations.

A CSC determination arises from the House settlement framework and NCAA legislation implementing it.

An arbitrator's authority comes from the applicable dispute-resolution agreement.

A federal court supervising a settlement possesses judicial authority over settlement interpretation and enforcement.

A state or federal court issuing an injunction is exercising judicial power over the litigants before it—not assuming permanent management of college athletics.

Those sources cannot simply be collapsed into one concept called “college-sports rules.”

And that has enormous implications for litigation strategy.

If an athlete challenges only the NCAA but the conference independently prohibits the same conduct, winning may not solve the problem.

If a school is restrained from following one rule but remains contractually obligated to another association, the litigation may move rather than end.

If the claim concerns a CSC NIL determination but the applicable rules mandate arbitration, marching directly into ordinary litigation may collide with the agreed dispute-resolution structure.

If the defendant is a public university, constitutional theories unavailable against a private actor may come into play.

If the challenged rule is an agreement among competing schools or conferences, antitrust principles may apply differently than they would to a unilateral institutional decision.

Before arguing whether the rule is lawful, you have to identify whose rule it is.

That sounds elementary.

In modern college sports, it increasingly decides the case.

There is a temptation to think conference rulemaking solves the NCAA's litigation problem.

If nationwide NCAA rules keep getting challenged, perhaps conferences can simply regulate independently.

Legally, it is not that simple.

Section 1 of the Sherman Act applies to agreements that unreasonably restrain trade. The fundamental concern therefore does not disappear merely because a restriction is written in a conference handbook rather than the NCAA manual.

A conference consists of institutions that compete with one another—for athletes, coaches, wins, fans, media attention, donations, and in various economic markets. When those competitors agree collectively on the terms on which they will compete, there is at least a threshold antitrust question.

That does not mean the rule is unlawful.

Sports require joint rules. Board of Regents makes that clear. Some eligibility standards may be genuinely necessary to define the product, protect competitive balance, maintain a distinction between forms of competition, or achieve another cognizable procompetitive objective.

But after Alston, courts are unlikely to accept “because this is college sports” as the complete defense.

The question becomes more precise:

What market is affected?

What is the restraint?

What anticompetitive effect does it produce?

What legitimate competitive objective does the rule advance?

Is the restraint reasonably connected to that objective?

Could materially less restrictive alternatives achieve the same legitimate purpose?

That is why the current professional-return rules are legally interesting.

There is an intuitive sports rationale for preventing a veteran professional athlete from dropping back into a college roster indefinitely.

But intuitive fairness and antitrust legality are not synonyms.

The exact line matters.

An athlete who spent six NFL seasons is different from a player who declared for a draft, was never selected, attended a rookie camp, and never appeared in a professional regular-season game.

A rule can have a legitimate objective and still become vulnerable if it sweeps materially farther than necessary to achieve it.

That is where factual development matters.

Antitrust litigation is not won by adjectives like “fair” and “necessary.”

It is won or lost through evidence demonstrating why a particular restraint does what its proponents claim it does.

Antitrust law is only part of the picture.

Conference governance also rests heavily on contract.

Member institutions voluntarily join conferences, accept conference constitutions and bylaws, agree to competition rules, share revenues, surrender certain rights, and promise to comply with collective governance mechanisms.

That gives conferences substantial arguments that member institutions cannot selectively accept conference benefits while disregarding conference rules whenever one becomes inconvenient.

The SEC is leaning heavily on that conception in its dispute with LSU.

And the implications can spill beyond conference membership.

Before LSU's season opener, Clemson reportedly warned that LSU's use of certain former professionals could implicate contractual obligations between the schools themselves.

That illustrates how quickly one eligibility dispute can generate several overlapping relationships:

athlete and NCAA;

athlete and school;

school and conference;

school and opponent;

conference and member;

and potentially court orders binding some—but not necessarily all—of those actors.

The existence of a contract does not automatically validate every rule contained within it. Contracts remain subject to antitrust law, public policy, statutory restrictions, constitutional limitations where state actors are involved, and ordinary principles governing enforceability.

But it does mean that a judicial order directed at one defendant may not erase every other obligation surrounding the same athlete.

A win against one regulator can expose the next regulator waiting behind it.

The CSC structure is worth watching for another reason.

Whatever one thinks about the substance of the House settlement, its enforcement mechanism at least attempts to answer a question traditional college-sports governance increasingly struggles with:

Who decides the dispute, and what happens next?

The rules identify the CSC's enforcement authority.

They create neutral arbitration for certain contested determinations.

They provide for stays of penalties during arbitration.

They prescribe timelines.

And the settlement identifies a mechanism for judicial supervision over disputes concerning its interpretation or enforcement.

That does not eliminate controversy. It simply organizes it.

There is a difference.

By contrast, the current eligibility battles can resemble jurisdictional whack-a-mole.

The NCAA acts.

An athlete sues.

A court enjoins.

A conference adopts a separate rule.

A school threatens—or refuses—to follow it.

A second lawsuit appears in another state.

A conference goes to federal court.

Another opponent invokes contract rights.

Kickoff remains Saturday at 7:30.

That is not a durable governance architecture.

It is emergency litigation with a television schedule.

This is also why lawyers approaching college-sports disputes increasingly need to think beyond the underlying doctrine.

In many cases, the decisive questions may be procedural.

Who needs to be named?

Where can the case be filed?

Is the defendant subject to personal jurisdiction?

Does the dispute belong in state court, federal court, or arbitration?

Is there a contractual forum-selection clause?

Does a settlement prescribe an exclusive review mechanism?

What relief will actually solve the client's problem?

Will an injunction against the NCAA matter if the conference can independently impose sanctions?

Can a school comply with an athlete's injunction without breaching conference obligations?

Is the party seeking relief likely to suffer irreparable harm?

Can a court issue relief broad enough to matter without binding entities that are not before it?

What happens on appeal?

And how quickly can all of that occur before the season moves on?

These are not side issues.

In sports disputes, procedure often becomes the remedy.

The difference between winning a preliminary injunction on Friday and winning a declaratory judgment in December can be the difference between playing a season and missing one.

That makes litigation strategy unusually intertwined with the business reality of sport.

The clock is part of the case.

The athletes attract most of the headlines, but schools may eventually bear the greatest governance burden.

A university making a roster decision today may need to account for NCAA rules, conference rules, court orders, CSC requirements, revenue-sharing limits, roster caps, scholarship commitments, NIL arrangements, opponent agreements, and institutional policy.

Those obligations may point in different directions.

LSU's recent position illustrates the dilemma.

A state court may clear a path for athletes to participate. A conference may simultaneously threaten penalties for using them. The university may believe competitive considerations favor rostering them while institutional considerations favor avoiding a prolonged fight with the conference.

LSU ultimately did not use the former professionals in its opener despite obtaining favorable state-court relief, illustrating the difference between having a legal argument and having a complete risk solution.

That distinction is going to matter more frequently.

The question for institutional decisionmakers is no longer simply:

“Is the athlete eligible?”

It may be:

“Eligible according to whom, enforceable against whom, and at what institutional cost?”

That is a much more complicated question.

Eligibility makes the problem visible because the consequences are immediate.

But the same structural issue exists elsewhere.

Who controls third-party NIL activity: the school, NCAA, CSC, conference, arbitrator, or settlement court?

Who sets revenue-sharing restrictions?

Who decides whether an affiliated sponsor is genuinely independent?

Who establishes transfer rules?

Who disciplines athletes?

Who regulates agents?

Who defines permissible recruiting behavior?

Who decides what counts as impermissible pay-for-play?

Who determines roster limits?

Who resolves Title IX implications of institutional compensation?

And what happens when state law provides one answer while national athletic rules provide another?

Those questions increasingly span contract law, antitrust, constitutional law, labor and employment law, arbitration, civil procedure, state regulation, federal preemption, and class-action settlement administration.

That complexity is precisely why college sports cannot be understood anymore as a niche collection of NCAA bylaws.

The rules now sit inside a much larger legal system.

The push for federal legislation is fundamentally a response to this fragmentation.

The bipartisan Protect College Sports Act advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this year, and revised legislation has sought to create national standards addressing NIL, eligibility, transfers, athlete protections, revenue sharing, and related areas. The current proposal also includes provisions addressing the relationship between federal rules and potentially conflicting state requirements.

Whether that particular legislation ultimately becomes law—and what the final version would look like—remains uncertain.

But its premise is revealing.

Congress is not attempting merely to solve an NIL problem.

It is attempting to solve a governance problem.

State-by-state regulation cannot easily produce nationally uniform competition.

Ad hoc injunctions cannot create durable eligibility standards.

Conference-by-conference regulation risks replacing one national rulebook with several regional ones.

And no private association can simply declare itself immune from generally applicable federal law.

Eventually, a stable system requires some answer to the question:

Who has final authority over what?

It is tempting to conclude that college sports simply needs one organization with absolute authority.

I am not convinced that is either realistic or desirable.

College athletics is too varied.

The NCAA has interests that differ from the major conferences.

Power-conference football presents issues that Division III swimming does not.

Schools retain legitimate institutional autonomy.

Athletes possess legal rights independent of membership rules.

Courts must remain available to enforce external law.

Federal and state governments have legitimate regulatory interests.

The problem is therefore not necessarily that authority is distributed.

The problem is that the boundaries between those sources of authority are increasingly unclear.

A workable governance model needs something closer to a jurisdictional map.

The NCAA's lane should be identifiable.

Conference authority should be defined.

CSC jurisdiction should remain bounded by the settlement framework that created it.

Schools should know what discretion they retain.

Athletes should know where decisions can be challenged.

And the system needs an orderly mechanism for resolving conflicts between those layers before those conflicts become emergency hearings the week of kickoff.

The goal is not to eliminate disagreement.

It is to know where disagreement goes.

The eligibility cases of 2026 are easy to treat as quirky stories about fifth seasons and NFL players returning to campus.

They are much more useful than that.

They are stress tests.

They reveal what happens when the NCAA modifies a national rule, athletes challenge the transition, conferences respond with independent regulations, schools choose whether to comply, and courts enter orders affecting only some pieces of the structure.

The result is exposing the central legal problem of modern college athletics:

There is no longer a single source of governing authority, yet the sport still depends on nationally coherent rules.

That tension is unlikely to disappear.

If anything, athlete compensation, direct revenue sharing, NIL regulation, employment questions, conference consolidation, and federal legislation will create more overlapping authority—not less.

The lawyers, administrators, athletes, and institutions navigating those disputes therefore need to stop asking only:

What is the rule?

The better questions are:

Who made it?
What gives them authority to enforce it?
Who is actually bound by it?
What external law limits that authority?
Where is the decision reviewed?
And if two regulators disagree, who wins?

Those questions sound procedural.

They are becoming the substance of college sports.

For decades, the NCAA could plausibly function as the answer to “Who runs college athletics?”

Today, the honest answer is more complicated:

It depends on what you are asking, where you are standing, and—increasingly—which courthouse you walked into first.

College sports does not merely have an eligibility problem.

It has a governance problem.

And until the system decides who gets to decide, the courts will keep helping it answer the question one lawsuit at a time.