A Definition That Does Not Exist: The NCAA's Search for a New Identity

"The report of my death was an exaggeration."
Mark Twain, 1897

Those were the American author's famous words after a newspaper report falsely cited him as being on his deathbed. They appear just as relevant nearly 130 years later as discourse swirls over the NCAA’s future amidst a half-decade of chaos and structural change.

"I don't think the NCAA is dead," Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne said. "I think it's going through a major cultural and evolutionary change.

So this time, the exaggeration may not be about death, but instead definition.

A definition that, right now, does not exist.

"Anybody that tells you they know how it will land, man, they're a lot smarter than me," Byrne said. "Because I don't."

The internal questions consuming college sports have grown increasingly urgent as the landscape has been reshaped entirely.

"You have to acknowledge that in college sports right now, there are two different realities," Rowan University Head of Research and Social Impact Initiatives Lauren Smith said. "Football and men's basketball exist in one reality, and all of the other sports exist in a different one."

Football and men’s basketball are the only sports that generate revenue at nearly every school in the nation and serve as the financial apparatus that supports the non-revenue sports. That reality has existed since the mainstream commercialization of college sports began decades ago, but the introduction of NIL has pushed college athletics further toward a professional model and changed the way departments function.

"We're going from a purely amateur model to one that resembles something much more professional," NCAA Vice President of Hearing Operations Derrick Crawford said. "We look a lot more like the NFL than we did 10 years ago. We have terms like General Manager, salary cap and rev share being used in college athletics."

Three factors compounded at the start of the decade to create this shift: the legalization of NIL, the elimination of transfer sit-out rules, and the COVID eligibility waiver that extended athletic careers beyond five years. The fallout has reached courtrooms across the country.

"The environment has changed so much," Crawford said. "It's much more complicated. We've got a lot more issues around litigation and about our eligibility rules. So it's a much more dynamic and fast-paced and constantly moving environment today than what it was three or four years ago."

That shifting environment plays out regularly in big-picture policy discussions, often based on court rulings. But it is also seen at the operational level in budget meetings, roster decisions and day-to-day financial calculations from athletic departments trying to remain competitive across the country.

"People often will say, when it comes to college sports, 'Oh, you've got the money,'" Byrne said. "They treat it almost like Monopoly money, and it's just going to magically be plucked off the money tree. And sometimes football is criticized for spending, but we're not going to stop investing in football at Alabama. It helps pay for everything else that we do, and has an impact across the board."

Football generated a reported $64 million at Alabama in 2024. Men's basketball produced a fraction of that, at nine million, while every other sport lost money.

Football will always be the revenue engine that allows the rest of the athletic department to exist at its current scale. Everything from the Olympic athletes that come to Tuscaloosa, to the top-end facilities, to the coaching depth across sports is a downstream of a model that revolves around football as the financial driver.

The introduction of revenue sharing last July added a further wrinkle. Now, schools have to determine how to allocate the $20.5 million of available revenue-sharing money across sports. The model departments were projected to follow allocated 75% to football, 15% to men’s basketball, 5% to women’s basketball, and 5% to the remaining sports.

In practice, it has not been that simple.

"How do you fund that $20.5 million settlement?" Byrne asked, rhetorically. "I don't know if there's a school that's following that 75, 15 and five exactly. So we've created our own formula based on our revenue generation."

A framework for spending was a necessity, but it has also been the system's biggest point of criticism. What makes sense inside athletic departments rarely aligns with external perceptions, especially with the emergence of NIL collectives.

"Once collectives came in the mix, it changed the game," Smith said. "The collective started the arms race of the haves and the have-nots."

College sports exist along a fault line.

On one side is the intent to create a fair system where athletes receive compensation for their athletic talents. On the other is the reality of fully monetizing a multi-billion-dollar industry. When those two tectonic plates collided, the resulting magnitude-10 earthquake wiped out much of the existing infrastructure.

“I couldn’t think of a better term than messy,” Crawford said. “When you’re going through this transformative change, this is what it looks like. For 120 years, we had one model, and now we have a completely different one. We’re having to change rules, culture, a lot of things. It’s not easy to get everybody to buy in and understand the shift.”

A national sentiment has emerged that the NCAA will never reach a clean resolution. How can it? How can an organization that has, in the eyes of so many, struggled for years to adjust to change, possibly redeem itself?

The answer starts with stability.

Stability that may soon be on its way.

"I hope that we get to a point in the not-too-distant future where there is more consistency, there's uniformity, there's less chaos," Crawford said. "But I think we're still going to be in that space for another 12, 18, maybe 24 months. But I hope we get there sooner rather than later, because the one thing we all need is some stability."

An organization that has been living in the Wild West since the pandemic now faces pressure to establish order.

"I don't think just the horses are out of the barn. I think the cows and the chickens and the pigs are too," Smith said. "Everything is gone, and now we're trying to corral it back in."

Unfortunately for the NCAA, the acknowledgment of the need for order is the easy part. Building a system that actually enforces it is something else entirely.

College sports have been operating in an environment where enforcement has failed to keep pace with behavior. Inconsistent and seemingly selective regulation of rules, slap-on-the-wrist punishments, and courts consistently striking down the NCAA's ability to discipline its members have been hallmarks of a system that has left almost nobody satisfied.

"Nothing works long term without some type of regulation. Anarchy doesn't work," Byrne said. "With this new model, until somebody gets their teeth kicked in, it probably won't get everybody's attention."

The uncomfortable reality for programs is that enforcement is not only inconsistent but also widely perceived as uneven.

Programs operate with the understanding that similar conduct can produce dramatically different outcomes depending on timing, interpretation, or visibility. This has created a system where precedents and expectations exist, but predictability often does not.

Iowa's football program was punished earlier this week for contacting a player before the transfer portal window opened. Similar violations have surfaced across the sport in recent years, often with varying outcomes.

Has every guilty party been caught and punished? It's highly doubtful, creating an environment where administrations have to consciously decide on how lightly or heavily they want to tread.

Byrne has leaned on the side of caution.

"I've told our coaches and our staff that we will not be the school that gets their teeth kicked in," Byrne said. "If the speed limit is 75, we need to be going 75. There are certainly narratives out there where you've seen payrolls go well beyond what the House settlement has said, and we have worked hard to not have crazy NIL stories come out of our university or out of our athletic department."

No matter how 'by the book' a program chooses to operate, the pressure to win remains the same.

“We have to recruit and be competitive,” Byrne said. “We need some regulation. We need it to work. And the longer it goes on where we don’t have it, the more it becomes even more challenging.”

That pressure was publicly displayed on the hardwood in January, when Alabama added NBA G-League veteran Charles Bediako midseason. Byrne and head coach Nate Oats had done their due diligence. Thirteen EuroLeague players and five G-Leaguers were on active rosters, and the conclusion was drawn that the rules had no consistent answer for any of them.

The decision was deliberate in more ways than one.

"Anything we do at Alabama gets attention," Byrne said. "We were actually very hopeful that, because it's Alabama doing it, that it would create pearls being clutched. We were hoping that it would create an opportunity to get a discussion going at the national level."

It did. The NCAA was already processing 1,500 eligibility waivers, and Bediako's case thrust the broken framework onto the national stage. The broader eligibility questions that Crawford's office had been trying to address for months were suddenly the most talked-about issue in college basketball.

"If this helps get us national standards that are consistent, amen," Byrne said. "We'll be the first ones to sign up."

Bediako was ultimately ruled ineligible after playing five games, and Oats' program was not punished.

"We've tried to balance penalties versus cooperation," Crawford said. "You can only penalize people so much. We want to incentivize our institutions to cooperate. This is their process. They designed it. And so as an obligation and condition of membership, you have to cooperate.

"We want to do more of the carrots versus the sticks. We want to try to do more to encourage schools to cooperate in the process, to report violations."

With the NCAA and its members still trying to adjust to this new world, that approach is ideal for everybody involved, but there will be times when the stick is needed.

“We recognize sometimes they may not,” Crawford said. “And when they don’t, there has to be accountability for schools that don’t abide by the rules.”

Even if enforcement were stabilized, there are legal questions about the financial model.

Across college athletics, decisions that have traditionally been made internally are increasingly being brought into courtrooms. Judges have ruled on everything from NIL regulations to eligibility rulings to transfer-related disputes over the past years; a trend does not appear to be fading anytime soon.

And at the center of that legal uncertainty is a long-standing federal requirement that now collides directly with the sport’s new financial reality.

Title IX.

"Ninety-five percent of schools are out of compliance with Title IX, favoring men's teams over women's teams," Smith said. "That's a serious problem that nobody is really talking about."

The introduction of revenue sharing has added a new layer of complexity. Schools are now tasked with distributing institutional athletic funds to athletes in an environment where the majority of revenue is still generated by football and men’s basketball. It's still unkown exactly how that aligns with federal gender equity requirements

"So far, there hasn't been a ruling on Title IX," Smith said. "But under the settlement, if it is a benefit, if it is a payment coming from the school, legally, it should be held to the standards of Title IX."

With legal questions still working their way through the court system, athletic departments remain in a state of limbo, building financial plans around a framework that has not yet been fully defined.

"The NCAA is very challenging. They don't have subpoena power. They don't have a lot of things that would make enforcement a lot easier," Byrne said. "So nobody knows the answer, because it wasn't defined by the settlement."

In a media cycle dominated by transfer portal grades, NIL valuations and revenue-sharing spreadsheets, the human dimension of the college athlete's experience, especially in the classroom, is often overlooked.

"By and large, the student part is missing," Smith said. "It is focused on their athleticism."

Byrne pushed back on that sentiment.

"I still truly believe, as a person that's on the inside, there are a lot of young men and women in our athletic departments who genuinely care about the academic mission," Byrne said.

That tension between what the system has become and what the people inside it still believe it can be remains at the heart of college athletics, in the space between the ideal world and the reality.

"You can't have national championships without national rules," Crawford said. "You can't have national championships without regulation. Everybody has to be held to the same standard."

Everybody knows that. And everybody wants that standard to be implemented.

But nobody seems to know where it is.

"We want to see a landing spot where young men and young women can go chase their dreams and continue to develop as young people," Byrne said. "Perfection does not exist anywhere, but we want a really good environment."

The landing spot exists. Whether the system gets there, or whether the belief that it will is itself an exaggeration, remains to be seen.

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