The College Sports CEO Should Be an AI
Beep Boop
Developments in the increasingly inscrutable House case, a class-action antitrust lawsuit filed five years ago by an Arizona State swimmer and a college basketball player who allege that the NCAA unfairly infringed upon their God-given right as Americans to make as much money as humanly possible, indicate that the structure of college sports may be changing quite dramatically this summer.
Per a recent ESPN article, if a settlement between the NCAA and the plaintiff is approved, the NCAA will divest some authority into an entity called the “College Sports Commission.” Details are extremely murky about how responsibilities will be divided amongst these two organizations, but it is understood that the College Sports Commission will regulate NIL deals to ensure that they are fair market value and not pay-for-play deals wearing a funny hat. This is a problem because NIL deals are just pay-for-play deals wearing a funny hat.
The College Sports Commission will be led by a CEO who will report to a board that includes the commissioners of the power conferences: The Southeastern Conference, the Big Ten (which has 18 teams), the Big 12 (which has 16 teams), and the Atlantic Coast Conference (which has teams boarding the Pacific Ocean).
Per the aforementioned article:
The CEO of the commission will be one of the faces of this new era of college athletics. Sources have told ESPN to expect the person to come from outside college athletics and not to be a household name to college sports fans. The CEO is expected to make seven figures and, once the settlement is in place and the hiring process is complete, will have significant authority.
I am largely disinterested in learning how this will work or who the CEO will be because the College Sports Commission probably isn’t going to exist in 2026.
The legal theory behind most of the lawsuits against the NCAA is a less cynical iteration of my description of the House case in this piece’s lede: The NCAA’s rules restricting athlete compensation just to educational benefits is an illegal restraint of trade. Every single court that’s overseen these cases has agreed that this is, in fact, the case under the American legal system.
The creation of the Commission doesn’t solve for this. The consulting firm Deloitte, which will run the NIL-deal clearinghouse for the College Sports Commission, noted that “70% of past deals from booster collectives would have been denied,” as reported by Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger.
All it is going to take is one enterprising college athlete having an NIL deal rejected for a lawsuit to be filed.
The College Sports Commission membership agreement is also a problem. It would require universities agree to follow rules that violate state laws, such as a Tennessee state law that, as Dellenger’s article describes it, “gives schools and third parties in the state ‘cover’ not to follow rules that may be subject to antitrust scrutiny” which the College Sports Commission very much is. 13 other states have laws protecting school-to-athlete payment. Nine states have statutes outlawing the practice.
This is a long way of saying that the only question I have about the Commission is who will sue it first, an athlete or a state.
My suggestion to the search committee tasked with hiring the organization’s CEO is to phone it in. Don’t bother putting in any effort at all. Just program ChatGPT to be the CEO. Save yourself a million dollars. Tell it to emulate the best TV and movie CEOs: Montgomery Burns, Gordon Gekko, and Citizen Kane. Maybe throw in some coaches too. I hear good things about the Friday Night Lights coach. Kurt Russell’s performance as Herb Brooks in Miracle is criminally underappreciated. If you want some management acumen tell the computer to internalize, as much as software can, the lessons of Billy Beane as portrayed by Billy Beane in Moneyball. Just don’t give it conflicting programming or else it might pull a HAL 9000 and start ejecting college athletes out an airlock.