Chat with AGB Board BotTop Public Policy Issues Facing Governing Boards in 2025–2026:
The new reality of college sports: paychecks, transfers, and legal battles.
Published March 28, 2025
The topsy turvy world of intercollegiate athletics poses more challenges for governing boards and college presidents than ever before.
The ideal of the student athlete, from the fictional Frank Merriwell at Yale in dime novels a century ago to real-life Rhodes Scholars and basketball stars Bill Bradley and Tom McMillen in the 1960s and 1970s, is no more. Star athletes today can pull down million-dollar endorsement fees, drive Lamborghinis, switch schools to go to the highest bidder, and head off to the pros after two semesters.
Governing boards have always exercised oversight of and borne responsibility for their institutions’ athletic programs. At universities that compete for the NCAA Division I football and basketball championships, they may pay coaches millions more than presidents and approve budgets in the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.
Already, top college athletes are free agents who can switch schools without losing a year of eligibility. Loyalty to teams and institutions has evaporated. Marshall University’s football team pulled out of the 2024 Independence Bowl, where it was scheduled to play Army, after its coach quit in December 2024 for a more lucrative job, and 25 players abandoned the squad to enter the NCAA’s transfer portal.
The turbulence in intercollegiate athletics has serious implication for the business models of many institutions, which count on strong athletic programs to draw tuition-paying students eager to try out for a varsity team, as well as those who never put on a uniform and watch from the stands. Sports are essential to their identity, fundraising campaigns, and business models.
Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud told his faculty, “The athletic experience here is … part of our defining experience that recruits students and not just student-athletes. It’s part of our academic programming. It’s part of our brand nationally. It’s very important to why we’ve had fairly significant enrollment success.” The big changes coming to intercollegiate athletics are “going to have wide-range implications, including for academics, for budget, for operations, for students, for the student-athlete experience,” he said.1
Some colleges and universities field dozens of varsity teams. Ohio State University, the 2025 football national champion, spends a quarter-billion dollars on its 36 teams. Ohio State’s new president, Walter “Ted” Carter, listed athletics among his top strategic priorities at his investiture last fall. Carter, a former captain of the ice hockey team at the U.S. Naval Academy, said, “We need to be a leader … (and) make sure that our student-athletes remain students first.”2
Finally, two major antitrust lawsuits—House v. NCAA and Johnson v. NCAA—could have an impact on the athletic programs of almost every college and university, small or large.
House v. NCAA
A pending settlement of antitrust lawsuits against the NCAA would require the association and all 365 Division I schools to pay nearly $2.8 billion over ten years to compensate past players for what they could have made from marketing their name, image, and likeness (NIL). The NCAA forbade college athletes from cashing in until 2021 when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that restrictions on athlete compensation violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. And beginning with the 2025–2026 school year, colleges and universities would be able to directly pay athletes a total of $20.5 million a year per institution, if they so choose, subject to a federal judge’s approval of the settlement of House vs. NCAA and related lawsuits. Some $1.1 billion of the settlement will come from the NCAA’s own coffers, while $1.6 billion-plus will come from slicing every Division I conference’s share of March Madness basketball tournament revenues for the next ten years.3 (The NCAA does not share in the huge television revenues from the college football playoffs. ESPN paid $7.8 billion for those rights through 2031.)4
The complexities of the settlement are explained in a guide issued by the independent Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics,5 as well as in a Q&A on the NCAA’s website.6 While the 280-some NCAA Division I schools outside the biggest conferences will have to pay a share of the settlement, they will have to decide for themselves whether to start paying athletes and abiding by the NCAA’s new roster limits. The Ivy League has opted out, not surprisingly, because the Ivies have never awarded athletic scholarships.
Eighty-five percent of the $2.8 billion settlement will be paid to football and basketball players on teams going back to 2016, with female athletes picking up the crumbs. The new administration’s Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education withdrew guidance issued during the Biden Administration that interpreted Title IX as requiring equal allocation of funding between men’s and women’s teams.
But that might not be final. A 2021 lawsuit filed by women rowers and volleyball athletes at the University of Oregon against the institution, alleging discrimination over the manner in which NIL monies are distributed, has not yet been decided. Look for other lawsuits to follow.
In addition to concerns about compliance with the equal opportunity requirements of Title IX are concerns about the future of Olympic sports at Division I institutions, namely that financial support for them will be drained to pay football and basketball players. The NCAA reports that 75 percent of the 2024 U.S. Olympians competed for their college teams.7
Johnson v. NCAA
Regardless of the proposed House settlement, some athletes are pressing forward with antitrust lawsuits seeking to win recognition as employees of their colleges. The most consequential is Johnson v. NCAA, which was brought by a former Villanova football player and athletes from more than a dozen other Division I schools. (The employment status of college athletes was not part of the House case.) A federal appeals court in July 2024 rejected an attempt by the NCAA to quash the suit. The appeals court agreed with a district judge that athletes could be considered employees but sent the case back to the judge for further review. A victory for the players could lead to millions of dollars being owed by the NCAA and its member institutions for past and current wages and would hit hardest those institutions without the resources that are available to larger athletic programs.8 (A month before the president took office, Dartmouth College basketball players and University of Southern California athletes withdrew separate petitions to the National Labor Relations Board for the right to organize a union. The withdrawals came ahead of a change in leadership at the NLRB under the incoming administration.9)
Like the House case, the Johnson lawsuit directly involves NCAA Division I institutions and athletes, but it has implications for institutions and athletes in all divisions. The NCAA has long insisted that college athletes are amateurs and students, not employees, and it continues to lobby Congress vigorously for antitrust exemptions to override the patchwork of state laws on NIL. A final decision on whether athletes are employees could take years, but all colleges and universities should follow both the House and Johnson cases closely.
Name, Image, and Likeness
Since 2021, the NCAA has allowed student athletes in all three of its divisions to cash in on NIL and to transfer to other schools without sitting out a year. NIL “collectives”—mostly alumni boosters and local businesses—have been able to guarantee athletes thousands, and in some cases, millions of dollars to come play for their affiliated college. But the role and oversight of collectives could change as a result of the House settlement, which would allow colleges to make NIL payments directly themselves while also permitting athletes to continue to cut their own NIL deals.10 Even though this would leave a role for “outside” collectives to continue recruiting and funding athletes, the settlement calls for NIL agreements with these collectives to be “subject to review to ensure they are legitimate, fair market value agreements and not used for pay-for-play…” in an effort by the NCAA to ensure there is scrutiny surrounding any suspicious-looking, large money deals. The review is to be done by a yet-to-be identified independent third party.11
Other recent developments show how uncertain and unsettled NIL deals and compensation can become.
- In December, six former Florida State basketball players sued their former coach for $1.5 million in NIL compensation they claim he promised them. This is at least the second lawsuit brought by former players over NIL monies they say were promised but not received. In both cases, the athletes did not have signed contracts.12
- In January more than 300 former University of Michigan football players sued the NCAA, the Big Ten, and the Big Ten Network, alleging that the three made significant revenues off their “game-winning plays and electrifying performance.”13
- The University of Wisconsin alleged that Miami University acted improperly in encouraging a UW football player to transfer. Wisconsin said the player had a binding NIL deal at UW.14
- Over 30 states have NIL laws on the books. Policymakers in at least four states are not waiting for anything to go amiss regarding the final settlement in the House case. Virginia passed legislation in 2024 and the governors of Ohio, Oklahoma, and Georgia have issued executive orders allowing their state institutions to directly compensate their athletes.15
Transgender Athletes
The president signed an executive order on February 5, 2025, to prevent schools, colleges, and universities from allowing transgender athletes born male to play on women’s teams and use their locker rooms and bathrooms. The order states that federal funding could be withheld from schools that fail to “keep men out of women’s sports.” Letting transgender athletes play on these teams “results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy,” the executive order says.16 The president, in an earlier order signed on his first day back in the Oval Office, declared it was U.S. government policy to recognize only two sexes, male and female, that are fixed at birth. He ordered all government agencies, including the Passport Office in the Department of State, to remove all references in official documents to gender identity and to replace the word gender with “sex.”17
One day after the president’s order on transgender athletes, the NCAA changed its own guidance to comport with what it called “a clear, national standard.” From now on, it said, in all NCAA competitions with separate men’s and women’s teams:
- On men’s teams, a student athlete may practice and compete regardless of sex assigned at birth or gender identity.
- A student-athlete assigned male at birth may not compete on a women’s team.
- A student-athlete assigned male at birth may practice on the team consistent with the student’s gender identity.
- A student-athlete assigned female at birth who has begun hormone therapy (such as testosterone) may not compete on a women’s team.18
The prior NCAA policy on transgender athletes left participation up to each sport’s national governing body or international federation.
Even before the president took office, the Republican-led House of Representatives passed a bill in January 2025 that would bar transgender females from competing in women’s sports. Two Democrats voted with the Republican majority.
Participation by transgender athletes in intercollegiate athletics had already become a topic of ongoing debate. For example, all at San Jose State University, several women’s volleyball players filed a lawsuit against the NCAA, their coach, and the Mountain West Conference commissioner over the participation of a transgender teammate. At least five teams in the Mountain West Conference choose to forfeit rather than compete against San Jose State when the transgender athlete was scheduled to play.19
Twenty-seven states already have banned or restricted the participation of transgender athletes ages 13–17 on girls’ teams.20 The issue has loomed larger in scholastic sports than intercollegiate ones. NCAA President Charlie Baker told a Senate panel recently he was aware of fewer than ten transgender athletes among the half million on teams that play for NCAA championships. The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, comprised of 237 smaller institutions, revised its policy last year on transgender athletes to state: “Only NAIA student-athletes whose biological sex is female” are eligible to participate in women’s sports; however, “all eligible NAIA student-athletes may participate in NAIA-sponsored male sports.”21
President Biden had sought to protect under Title IX the rights of transgender athletes but could not get his rule changes finalized. On December 24, 2024, his Education Department withdrew those proposed rules. (Notably, the San Jose State women’s athletes who sued argued that their rights under Title IX had been violated.).22
Possible Congressional Action
In the last two Congresses, lawmakers introduced bills that attempted to clarify amateur athletic status and set national standards for NIL compensation. None advanced beyond committee.
The 119th Congress could be different. Bipartisan interest in the Senate is growing for legislation to provide the NCAA the tools seen as necessary to effectively regulate athletics without violating antitrust laws.23 One major motivating factor among Senators is that the market is becoming so unregulated that larger institutions will become too dominant and stifle competition at smaller institutions. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), now chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, is renewing his push for legislation to give the NCAA an antitrust exemption, set national rules for NIL, and bar athletes from being classified as employees. He is seeking Democratic cosponsors to, in Cruz’s words, “save college sports.” Not to be left behind, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a hearing on “Moving the Goalposts: How NIL is Reshaping College Athletics.” The biggest takeaway was the desire by most subcommittee members and witnesses to see federal legislation to bring consistent, uniform, and fair NIL rules to replace the patchwork of state NIL laws, many of which could undermine or work around the agreements in the House settlement by giving their in-state institutions unfair advantages. A second hearing by a House Judiciary Committee panel examined whether an antitrust exemption for the NCAA would benefit student athletes.
A New Ballgame for the Top College Athletic Talent
College athletics have already entered a brave new world at the highest levels of competition. There is an arms race to determine which colleges and universities will land the best players and coaches, with some spending millions of dollars from budgets fueled by a conference’s ten-figure television contracts. Track star Jesse Owens, before winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, had to pay his own way to Ohio State, where he set three world records. After the Olympics, this son of a sharecropper was stripped of his amateur status for accepting endorsement money. How different the intercollegiate athletics world is today.
And not to the better, to the mind of Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor and former president of Purdue University. He questioned in a Washington Post op-ed whether universities playing football in the power five conferences—which shared $3.55 billion in revenues in 2023—can legitimately claim fielding athletic programs awash in cash further their academic mission. “[T]his is plainly a business and not an amateur activity,” he argues. “How long will colleges be able to maintain the fiction that their sponsorship of professional football is for the purpose of advancing education?”24
The vast majority of colleges and universities and their athletic programs, and the majority of student-athletes, will never be part of teams in the power conferences that are on television all the time. But Amy Privett Perko, chief executive officer of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, warns that there is “an existential risk” to all college sports that this “full professionalization” potentially creates. And that could come by “propelling a collapse of educational purpose within the college sports model as a whole.”25
Questions for Boards
- What are the implications for our institution(s) and student-athletes of the pending settlement of House v. NCAA? Will our school directly pay athletes? On which teams?
- How would an antitrust settlement affect sports at our institution, in particular the non-revenue sports, including those that groom Olympic athletes?
- Are we competing in the athletic association, athletic conference, and division that best reflect our institutional mission and the welfare of our student-athletes?
- Will we offer more athletic scholarships?
- Will we cut back on some teams due to new NCAA roster limits?
- What further implications regarding NIL need to be discussed, particularly any state laws that might not be addressed by the House settlement?
- Likewise, what are the implications for our institution(s) and student-athletes of the pending settlement of Johnson v. NCAA?
- How will changes in athletics affect the institution’s and foundation’s relationships with alumni and donors?
1. “Chancellor Syverud Updates University Senate on Benefits and Intercollegiate Athletics,” Syracuse University News, October 24, 2024, https://news.syr.edu/blog/2024/10/24/chancellor-syverud-updates-university-senate-on-benefits-and-intercollegiate-athletics/.
2. Dan Hope, “Ohio State President Ted Carter Says OSU Will Continue to Provide Scholarships for All 36 Sports,” Eleven Warriors, November 8, 2024, https://www.elevenwarriors.com/ohio-state-athletics/2024/11/150482/ohio-state-president-ted-carter-says-osu-will-continue-to-provide-scholarships-for-all-36-sports.
3. Christopher Connell, “Disruption in College Athletics: Turmoil Over Intercollegiate Athletics Sets Presidents and Boards Scrambling,” Trusteeship 33, no. 2, March-April 2025, https://agb.org/trusteeship-article/disruption-in-college-athletics-turmoil-over-intercollegiate-athletics-sets-presidents-and-boards-scrambling.
4. Heather Dinich, “College Football Playoff, ESPN agree to deal through 2031–32,” ESPN, March 19, 2024, https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/39766079/college-football-playoff-espn-agree-deal-2031-32.
5. “Brief on House v. NCAA Settlement,” Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, February 12, 2025, https://www.knightcommission.org/wp-content/uploads/KnightCommissionBrief_HousevNCAA_182025.pdf.
6. “Updated Question and Answer: Impact of the Proposed Settlement on Division I Institutions,” NCAA, December 9, 2024, https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/governance/d1/legislation/2024-25/Dec2024D1Gov_PhaseTwoInstSetQuestionandAnswer.pdf.
7. Corbin McGuire, “Team USA by the numbers: NCAA athletes bolster Olympic squad,” NCAA, July 10, 2024, https://www.ncaa.org/news/2024/7/10/olympics-team-usa-by-the-numbers-ncaa-athletes-bolster-olympic-squad.aspx#.
8. “The College Student Athletics Policy Landscape in 2024,” American Council on Education, July 2024, https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Issue-Brief-College-Athletics-071624.pdf.
9. Associated Press, “Dartmouth men’s basketball players end attempt to unionize,” ESPN website, December 31, 2024, https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/43237303/dartmouth-men-basketball-players-end-attempt-unionize.
11. Remarks by Matt Banker, “Not the Game Day You Remember: Navigating the Changing Landscape of Collegiate Athletics,” Conference presentation at the AGB Foundation Leadership Forum, Washington, D.C., January 30, 2025.
12. Matt Norlander, “Court Report: Florida State players suing Leonard Hamilton reveals deeper NIL issues throughout college sports.” CBS Sports, January 1, 2025, https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/court-report-florida-state-players-suing-leonard-hamilton-reveals-deeper-nil-issues-throughout-college-sports/.
13. James Parks, “More than 300 ex-Michigan football players join lawsuit against NCAA, Big Ten: report,” SI.com, January 30, 2025, https://www.si.com/fannation/college/cfb-hq/news/michigan-football-ncaa-lawsuit.
14. “Wisconsin says Miami tampered with Lucas,” Washington Post, January 19, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/2025/01/18/wisconsin-badgers-miami-hurricanes/9d6f60c8-d602-11ef-9835-51843d9371d6_story.html.
15. Audrey Lee, “Oklahoma Governor Stitt Signs Executive Order Allowing Schools to Pay Student-Athletes for NIL,” Athletic Business, January 14, 2025, https://www.athleticbusiness.com/operations/governing-bodies/article/15712027/oklahoma-governor-stitt-signs-executive-order-allowing-schools-to-pay-studentathletes-for-nil.
16. Donald Trump, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” White House Executive Order, February 5, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/keeping-men-out-of-womens-sports/.
17. Donald Trump, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” White House Executive Order, January 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/.
18. “Participation Policy for Transgender Student-Athlete,” NCAA, February 6, 2025, https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2022/1/27/transgender-participation-policy.aspx.
19. Katie Barnes, “Inside San Jose State’s polarizing volleyball season,” ESPN.com, November 26, 2024, https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/42549609/inside-san-jose-state-university-2024-volleyball-season-gender-fairness-safety.
20. “More than 90 percent of transgender youth live in states that have proposed or passed laws restricting their rights,” UCLA School of Law, Williams Institute, April 23, 2024, https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/anti-trans-leg-youth-press-release.
21. “Transgender Participation Policy,” NAIA, Approved by NAIA Council of Presidents April 8, 2024, Effective August 1, 2024, https://www.naia.org/transgender/files/TG_Policy_for_webpage_v2.pdf.
22. “Athletes from five universities file Title IX suit in transgender volleyball controversy,” NBC News, November 15, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/athletes-five-universities-file-title-ix-suit-transgender-volleyball-c-rcna180335?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma&taid=67378c4c4b4cf300010a655f.
23. Dan Murphy, “Texas senator aims to help NCAA regulate athlete payments,” ESPN.com, January 9, 2025, https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/43348934/house-settlement-ncaa-sec-big-ten-nil.
24. Mitch Daniels, “College football has turned pro. Let’s talk about those tax breaks,” Washington Post, January 21, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/21/ncaa-college-football-name-image-likeness/.
25. Elena Loveland, “A Question for Amy Privette Perko: What Do Boards Need to Know About Changes in College Athletics?” Trusteeship 32, no. 5, September-October 2024, https://agb.org/trusteeship-article/a-question-for-amy-privette-perko/.
