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Alexander: Can the chaos of college sports be solved?

April 11, 2026

Can we agree that college sports – at least the parts separate from what actually takes place on the field or the court – have become a mess?

There’s seldom an orderly transition any more for athletes, no certainty or even probability that a player who enters the system as a freshman will stay four, or at most five, years in the same place. Senior Nights have taken on a new meaning, when players are feted for making it to the end even though that “end” might involve four schools in four or five (or more?) years.

Consider: The day after Michigan defeated Connecticut to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship Monday, the Division I portal opened – and within hours, reportedly, more than 1,000 players had entered.

By 1 p.m. Saturday , according to the “Verbal Commits” transfer tracker, the number who had either entered the portal or publicly announced plans to transfer stood at 2,066. There are 365 Division I programs – from No. 1 Michigan to No. 365 Mississippi Valley State, which finished 3-30 and was dead last in the kenpom.com rankings – and the scholarship limits beginning this past season were increased from 13 to 15, meaning a total of 5,475 players under scholarship.

So, at that point, 37.7% of that total was made up of players looking for new homes. (Or, more likely, pay raises.)

And even those of us who have said for years that college athletes were entitled to at least some sort of compensation for all of the revenues coming into their billion-dollar industry are wondering when, or if, the pendulum will swing away from unrestricted free agency back toward the direction of sanity.

The NCAA has been effectively neutered as a rule-making institution by the courts, the agents who have flooded the zone require no certification, and more than one college basketball coach within my earshot has used the T-word – “tampering.”

Even President Trump has weighed in, though his proposed solution merely involves a form of the old rules – a maximum of five years, one transfer to a customer, the same rules that the courts have shredded – and his method of enforcement involves the same cuts of federal funds to universities that he’s threatened for other reasons.

Maybe we should listen more closely to Victoria Jackson, Arizona State professor and sports historian and a frequent and welcome contributor to this column, and particularly her response when asked what it would take to straighten all of this out.

For one thing, she said, given the historical and global contexts that apply, this is a transitional period. “This isn’t how this business will be operating 10 years from now,” she said, noting that unlike some other countries with their own unique systems of sport, there is no minister or czar or commissioner of sport in this country to oversee things.

“I think there’s two ways to tackle fixing this,” she said. “One is at the national level, thinking about policy, which becomes challenging … And then the second one is grassroots and bottom up and the local solutions to this thing that is a stupid business model.

“I think people who come to the realization that they have a lot more power and agency to start coming up with solutions to serve their sport, and their athletes, that’s where we’ll see change starting from.

“I do think it’s going to come from the ground up rather than from the top down.”

Will the NCAA somehow regain any sort of influence beyond administering March Madness? Will we continue to watch the commissioners of the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference jockey for influence while everyone else in Division I accepts lesser roles?

Or is there a more inventive solution, maybe one in which these athletic plants are affiliated with rather than tethered to universities, where players would attend classes but the teams and their administrators would operate as separate, quasi-professional entities? Maybe, say, as the American equivalent of a second division, a true developmental entity that the major professional leagues and this country’s Olympic movement would help fund?

That might be a huge ask. Remember, Division I already operates as a free farm system for the NFL, NBA and WNBA.

“Higher education has been running player development for the NFL forever,” Jackson said. “It’d be very hard to convince the NFL that now this is gonna be an additional cost for them, right?”

But would those leagues be willing to contribute to the cause in exchange for additional control over the process? Could there be a scenario, years from now, where big-time sports become independent of higher education?

If so, this might be the first shot fired: Jackson’s initial suggestion is to spin off football from the rest of a university athletic department’s sports, to operate as its own separate business.

“You still have that transfer of money from football to pay for the running of all the other sports, or most of the other sports,” Jackson said. “But it’s done in a way where that football business is run separately, but they’re paying for the rights to the (university) brand, they’re paying for the rights to the use of facilities and so on and so on.

“And then you can start structuring football differently from everything else. You can classify those athletes as employees. You can engage in collective bargaining with the body, a unit representing those workers, right? And then that way you’re not pretending that you have to do it with all athletes and all their sports too.”

Using that to provide a template for other sports would be quite the achievement. One of the issues that has prevented agreement toward any regulation of the industry has been whether college players should be considered employees, which would lead to collective bargaining and ultimately rules that are fair for both sides. Given the dollar amounts of current NIL and revenue sharing agreements, pretending college athletes are not employees is ludicrous.

Recognizing that reality could be that start from the ground up, the seeds of a revolution that transforms the enterprise.

Ideally under this model, football would continue to help subsidize the non-revenue sports. And, since we refer to those programs now as “Olympic sports,” the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee should contribute sufficiently to those programs to help support the system that produces Olympic athletes for not only our country but a good portion of the world.

Maybe the NCAA survives. Or maybe a new entity takes its place, one with a slimmer, updated rulebook that isn’t written with the fear that someone’s always trying to get away with something.

“I often remind students like college football has more in common with European and English club soccer than it does with the NFL,” Jackson said. “These teams were born in the same moment in the late 19th century. They have the same sorts of kind of connections to the community and elements of fandom – the generational attachments, the singing of songs that make European and English football so special. You don’t get that with the NFL.”

There is and likely always will be a place for college sports in this country. Isn’t it time to update the enterprise to recognize current realities?

jalexander@scng.com

Orange County Register

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Alexander: Can the chaos of college sports be solved?

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