College sports keep running into a funny impediment. They are illegal.
1. What happens to college sports if they’re against the law?
“College sports are illegal” isn’t entirely true. That’s part of the problem. The relationship between college sports and employment law involves a lot of gray areas. Some things—should a kicker be allowed to play if he makes money off his own YouTube channel—seem pretty black and white legally. Others don’t. Is the NCAA legally allowed to restrict college athletes to four years of competition in a five-year window? That’s a question for a U.S. District Judge. To be specific, it’s a question for a U.S. District Judge in New Jersey. Rutgers safety Jett Elad is trying to get another year of college football. He’s going through the courts. We don’t know what the courts will say.
A lot of questions surround college sports right now. I don’t know if there are more than ever—college sports perpetually navigate perilous redesign; sometimes top-down, sometimes bottom-up—but there are a lot. At the root of it all are two questions: First, what can the NCAA legally do? Second, what will schools, states, and players all allow the NCAA to do illegally?
For a long time, the NCAA did what the NCAA did because no one took it to court. Laws are enforced through retroactive consequences. Laws are not blockades which directly prevent illegal activity. If the NCAA breaks laws and no one sues, the NCAA gets to keep breaking laws. Since the NCAA is built and maintained by its member universities, and since most of those universities are public, tied to attorneys general through state governments, nobody used to sue all that much. Then, college sports became a big enough business (and a demanding enough employer…err…not–exactly–an–employer) that in certain corners, players’ amateur status stopped making sense. Once that happened and the players started to sue, all hell broke loose. For schools (and therefore states), it became a competitive disadvantage not to sue. Now you have Rutgers’s head coach, Greg Schiano, testifying in court against the NCAA, an organization in which Rutgers willingly participates.
In some ways, what we’re seeing is the NCAA breaking under its own weight. Fifteen years ago, hundreds of universities and all fifty states were mostly on board: This was how we did college sports. Now, those universities and their states are turning against one another, using the courts to rip the NCAA apart plank by plank. Some of the errors were unforced: The NCAA should have allowed players to profit off their name, image, and likeness a long time ago. Others were destined to eventually blow up: The old transfer rules were both good for college sports and a legal disaster waiting to unfold.
This is a dramatic description of what’s happening. The NCAA and college sports are both very much intact. It’s unlikely, too, that any judge would ever make a ruling which immediately crushed the college football or college basketball industry. There’s a parallel here to “judicial restraint.” Judges sometimes err on the side of not rocking the boat, or in this case not decimating what might be, tallied up, a hundred-billion-dollar industry. That, though, is why we say “plank by plank.” College sports are getting looser, and while that’s usually good in the case of any one issue, it adds up to a pretty flimsy NCAA. More and more, that means it’s adding up to sports which don’t resemble even their recent historical selves.
There’s no easy way forward. There’s no perfect solution. Laws are laws. If you’re called on them, you can’t break them without penalty. In hindsight, universities probably should have sniffed this out before it got so far out of control, but that’s off the table now. Whatever happens is going to be imperfect. It’s important that people who care about this stuff realize that piece. Fixate on perfection, and you will always feel like college sports is missing something which could make them whole. They never were whole. You fell in love with something and then it changed.
Congress could pass a law codifying an NCAA-like administrator, and that might be the route this all takes. But college sports designed by lobbyists is going to be anything but perfect, and the firestorm which accompanies any serious entertainment of that legislation is poised to be obscene. Schools are already chipping away at a status quo they built themselves. Good luck getting them to agree to a framework decreed by unpopular, feckless officials elected by other states and other congressional districts.
More likely, and probably more productively, there’s going to be push and pull, games of cat and mouse. Athletes won a big victory with the legalization of NIL. Schools might be about to win a big victory with the passage of the House v. NCAA settlement, a Trojan Horse for capping athletes’ earnings. Former junior college athletes won a big victory when courts gave Diego Pavia more eligibility. Schools (and maybe fans) could always try to push back by making these leagues a U25 or U24 organization.
On the one hand, this sucks. The rules are always changing, and it was more fun to be a fan when more players stayed at one school long enough for their team to build an identity. On the other hand, what sport is perfect? I don’t mean that nihilistically. When best is impossible, better is better. It was more fun to be a fan when players stayed at one school for longer, but it required trampling the rights of those players to make that happen.* It might be bad for college sports when undergrad transfers don’t sit out a year, but it’s legally (and morally) above board.
The five-year rule is grayer. If it breaks the same way as transfer rules, college sports might be a little worse. We might get 30-year-olds playing quarterback. College sports won’t be ruined, though. Some of us will like them less, and some will like them more, and if there are real branding costs for schools when players stick around too long, they’ll stop letting them stay. If there aren’t? Welcome to majority rule.
*I agree with the sentiment that a lot of players—most notably Nico Iamaleava, seemingly recently conned by his own dad into doing something spectacularly stupid—would be better off with greater barriers around transferring. I also think a lot of people would be better off with greater barriers around alcohol, though, and I’m not about to suggest we go back to Prohibition. Personal responsibility is part of freedom.
2. The Canadiens distributed a lot of tickets.
Transitioning from tedious to downright boring: The Canadiens drew a lot of fans this year!
The NHL set a new attendance record again this season, with a total of 23,014,458 tickets distributed across 1,312 games. Leading the charge was, as usual, the Montreal Canadiens. They sold out every game. With 21,105 tickets distributed for every game, their total 2024–25 reported attendance was a mighty 865,305, almost five percent more than the NBA-leading Bulls’ 825,659. (Capacity is within 100 seats between those two franchises.)
Out of curiosity, I checked the NFL and MLB numbers, and:
The NFL-leading Cowboys distributed 836,749 tickets across nine home games last season at Jerry World.
The MLB last-place A’s distributed 922,286 tickets across 81 reported home games last season at the Oakland Coliseum.
So, if you’re ranking the Big Four franchises by attendance in their most recently completed season:
1–30. All the MLB franchises
31. Dallas Cowboys
32. Montreal Canadiens
33. Chicago Bulls
34. Philadelphia 76ers
35–124. Everybody else
I don’t know that this is meaningful, but it interests me.
3. Are the Rockies this year’s White Sox?
Woody Paige was going off about Dick Monfort again on Twitter this morning, which led to the discovery that with the White Sox’ scorching 4–14 start, FanGraphs is projecting them to finish with 1.1 more wins this year than the Colorado Rockies, who are 3–15.
Hopefully Monfort gets the Reinsdorf treatment in the national press. He’s more than earned it.
**
Excellent piece on the upheaval in college sports.