College Sports Is Racing Toward a Cliff. Saving It Means More Than Protecting the Revenue Engine.

Congress can bring order to college sports, but it cannot protect the revenue engine by hollowing out the athlete-development pipeline that runs from youth play to Team USA.

Randy Levine’s recent opinion piece in the Sports Business Journal, “Trump council’s Randy Levine: Congress must act to fix college sports,” got me thinking and sent me back to two articles I wrote earlier this year:

“An Executive Order Won’t Save College Sports. Here’s What Might.” and “The Broken Pipeline: How the Collapse of College Sports Threatens U.S. Olympic Dominance.”

Levine is right: Congress needs to get involved.

The current system is a mess. NIL rules vary by state. The courts keep changing the operating environment. The transfer portal has become a full-time roster-management issue. Revenue sharing is here, but nobody has confidence that the current structure will hold. Meanwhile, the gap between the schools that can spend at the top of the market and everyone trying to keep up continues to widen.

Nobody is operating with real certainty. Athletes do not know what rules will apply from one year to the next. Schools are trying to make decisions about rosters, scholarships, staffing, and sports sponsorship without knowing what the rules will look like in six months. Conferences are caught in the middle, trying to create standards they may not have the legal authority to enforce.

The people most likely to feel the consequences are often the ones with the least leverage: women’s and Olympic sports, especially at schools where football and men’s basketball consume the resources and attention required to compete at the top of the market.

So yes, Congress should act.

But before it does, we need to be clear about what we are trying to save.

Are we trying to build a modern college-sports system that recognizes where the market, the law, and athlete expectations have already gone? Or are we trying to put the old system back together with a federal seal of approval?

Those are not the same thing.

An Executive Order Won’t Fix This

The White House can make college sports a priority. It can direct agencies, push for coordination, and elevate issues such as athlete safety, transfers, eligibility, women’s sports, and Olympic-sport opportunities. That matters, and the recent executive actions did exactly that.

But an executive order is not a durable solution.

It cannot resolve the antitrust questions now at the center of the college-sports business model. It cannot create a national NIL system that survives the next administration or the next court ruling. It cannot fully resolve the conflict between state laws. And it cannot answer the basic question that keeps coming back: what rights should athletes have in an enterprise that depends on their performance, their identities, and their ability to draw an audience?

That requires Congress.

The new revenue-sharing model only reinforces the point. Direct payments have begun, but the system is still provisional, with unresolved questions around compensation limits, NIL enforcement, Title IX, and long-term athlete protections. As Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione put it, the current arrangement is “not, in its current form, a long-term solution.” That is why Congress should not treat the settlement framework as an endpoint. It is a bridge to whatever comes next.

The danger is that Congress sees the chaos and tries to solve it by giving schools, conferences, and the NCAA a version of the authority they once had, without confronting why that authority stopped working in the first place.

That would create order. It would not necessarily create a better system.

We Have Been Here Before

The closest comparison may be the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act.

The original Amateur Sports Act of 1978 brought order to a fragmented Olympic system. It created the governance structure for the U.S. Olympic movement, empowered national governing bodies, and gave the U.S. Olympic Committee a central role. At the time, that was important and necessary.

But the Act was built around an amateur model just as the business of the Olympics was changing. Television rights were becoming more valuable. Sponsorship was becoming more sophisticated. Professional athletes were entering the Games. Athlete endorsements and commercial opportunities were growing. The Olympics were becoming a global media and commercial enterprise, while much of the governance language and institutional thinking still reflected an amateur-era model.

The law eventually had to catch up.

The 1998 amendments removed amateurism as a formal eligibility requirement and more fully integrated the Paralympic movement. Congress later passed the Empowering Olympic, Paralympic, and Amateur Athletes Act in 2020, strengthening oversight, safety, and athlete representation. Athletes now hold at least one-third of voting power on USOPC and NGB boards, including representation from recent competitors.

Those changes were meaningful. They also came after the world around the system had already changed.

That is the point college sports should take seriously.

The Ted Stevens Act was not a mistake because it created structure. The problem was that the structure was built for an economic reality that did not last. By the time the law adjusted, the market had already moved well ahead of it.

Congress should learn from that.

Do not write a law for the version of college sports people wish still existed.

The Business of College Sports Has Changed

There is still a tendency to talk about NIL, revenue sharing, the transfer portal, and athlete marketing as if they are temporary distortions of a stable amateur model.

They are not temporary.

They are the market catching up with the value athletes have been creating for decades.

Football and men’s basketball are not simply campus activities. They are major media and entertainment businesses. Their economics drive conference realignment, coaching salaries, facilities, donor behavior, recruiting, scheduling, and increasingly the entire strategic direction of athletic departments.

NIL has made athlete marketing a legitimate part of the landscape. Revenue sharing has made it even harder to maintain the fiction that athletes are not central economic participants. The transfer portal has exposed what many people were reluctant to call a labor market, even though athletes have been making labor-market decisions all along.

They look at playing time. They look at coaching stability. They look at the roster. They look at money, academic fit, location, brand opportunity, and what each decision means for their future.

That is not going away because coaches, administrators, or fans are tired of it.

The Olympic movement went through a similar shift. The IOC generated $7.6 billion in revenue during the 2017–2020/21 cycle, a reminder that the Olympics stopped being a pure amateur enterprise long ago.

College sports is now in their own version of that transition.

The Part Nobody Wants to Talk About

The biggest problem with the current debate is that it tends to start and end with football and men’s basketball.

That is understandable. They drive the money. They are the reason Congress is being pushed to act. They determine which conferences grow, which schools get left behind, and how the industry thinks about revenue sharing.

But they are not the entire system.

For swimming, track and field, gymnastics, wrestling, rowing, volleyball, water polo, fencing, skiing, and many other Olympic sports, college athletics is still the main pathway between youth competition and elite international sport.

There is no deep professional system waiting to take its place.

A handful of professional teams, prize purses, clubs, training centers, and sponsors cannot replace the number of roster spots, scholarships, coaches, facilities, competition opportunities, and academic support that colleges provide.

This is no longer a forecast. It is the operating model. Schools that opted into the House settlement can distribute up to $20.5 million per year directly to athletes, but that amount covers all sports in the department. Early allocation plans for a number of major programs have indicated that football will receive roughly 75 percent of available direct-payment pools, with much of the remainder flowing to men’s and women’s basketball. The exact allocations will vary by school, but the direction is clear: everyone else is competing for the margin.

We can call this revenue sharing, market correction, or modernization. But the math does not change. Unless a school finds new money, every new dollar committed to the revenue engine increases pressure on sports that lack their own media leverage.

When a school cuts a swim team, a wrestling program, a gymnastics team, or a track program, it is not just cleaning up a budget.

It is taking capacity out of the American athlete-development system.

That reduction moves through the entire pipeline. Fewer college opportunities affect recruiting. They affect club teams and coaches. They affect the choices families make when they are deciding whether to invest time and money in a sport. They affect whether a talented athlete can keep developing after high school.

Then, years later, they affect the national-team pool.

This is the hard truth: a school may be making a perfectly rational decision when it sends more money toward football, men’s basketball, facilities, coaches, and revenue-sharing obligations. But when every school makes the same rational decision, the result is a much weaker Olympic-development system.

The damage will not always show up in next year’s budget. It will show up years later, when fewer athletes enter the system, and the national-team depth that once looked automatic is no longer there.

That is what I meant by the broken pipeline.

What Congress Should Actually Do

The Protect College Sports Act has useful components. It attempts to establish national NIL standards, reduce conflict among state laws, and provide limited antitrust protection in defined areas.

That is a start. It is not the end of the conversation.

A law that gives institutions more control, limits athlete mobility, and protects schools from legal exposure may make athletic departments feel more stable. But it will not create a durable solution if athletes have no real say in the system, if Olympic-sport protections are just language on a page, and if schools receive legal protection without clear obligations in return.

If Congress gives college sports national preemption or limited antitrust protection, it should receive enforceable commitments in return, not aspirational language, advisory committees, or promises that disappear when the budget tightens.

That should include:

• Clear national NIL rules, including contract disclosure, agent standards, education, and protection from bad deals.

• A real athlete voice in governance, with voting power rather than another advisory group.

• Narrow antitrust protection tied to measurable obligations, not broad immunity.

• Scholarships, medical care, insurance, mental-health support, and degree-completion protections that do not disappear because an athlete transfers, gets hurt, loses a coach, or is caught in a roster cut.

• Sport-by-sport transparency on spending, roster opportunities, scholarships, and program cuts.

• Real enforcement around women’s and Olympic sport participation, not another promise that disappears when budgets tighten.

• A serious funding strategy for athlete development as more of the money concentrates at the top of college sports.

The U.S. cannot keep asking colleges, national governing bodies, and nonprofit sports organizations to carry out a national athlete-development mission without ensuring economic support for it. The Olympic system has lived with that tension for decades: a public-facing national responsibility carried largely by private organizations with uneven resources and uneven commercial leverage.

The new system is already testing the limits of institutional rulemaking. The College Sports Commission is intended to enforce the direct-payment framework, while the Deloitte-operated NIL Go clearinghouse is designed to review certain third-party NIL arrangements for valid business purpose and market comparability. Challenges to compensation restrictions, NIL enforcement, and Title IX allocation decisions are already part of the landscape. That is not a side issue. It is evidence that the current model is an interim structure, not a durable settlement.

The Question Congress Has to Answer

The most important question is not whether the biggest athletic departments feel more stable after a new federal law passes.

The question is whether the system still works for the athletes and sports that do not have the same media leverage.

Will a young swimmer still have a path to college? Will a wrestler have meaningful opportunities outside a shrinking number of programs? Will a gymnast, rower, skier, volleyball player, track athlete, or water polo player still have a bridge from youth sport to elite competition?

Will athletes have real influence over the rules that affect their health, compensation, eligibility, and careers?

And will schools that receive legal protection be required to uphold their side of the bargain?

Those are the questions Congress should answer.

Levine is right that Congress needs to act. But Congress should not pass a 1978-style answer for a 2026 sports economy, protecting the revenue engine while the athlete-development pipeline beneath it slowly disappears.

College sports needs a national framework. It needs rules, accountability, a sustainable funding model, and a governance structure built for the market we actually have, not the amateur model we keep pretending is still there.

This is about more than the future of intercollegiate athletics. It is about the broader infrastructure underneath it: the physical-education teacher introducing a child to movement, the school program that makes sport accessible, the unstructured play that builds confidence and curiosity, the community coach, the local club, and the young athlete who discovers a sport before anyone tells them there is a business model behind it.

College sports sits in the middle of that system. It gives young people something to pursue, creates a bridge from youth participation to high-level competition, and supplies a critical part of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic pipeline. If we hollow it out in the name of protecting the revenue engine, the damage will not be confined to the college campus. It will travel backward through the entire system and eventually show up in the athletes who give us a reason to cheer for Team USA every two years.