The Accidental Free Market: Why College Sports are the Most Honest Leagues in America
We’ve spent years calling NIL “chaos.” What we’re actually seeing is what athletic labor looks like without a cartel.
My feed is filled with podcasters and fans struggling to cope with the change in college sports that has given us Indiana football making a case to be considered one of the greatest college football teams of all time.
We are told, repeatedly, that college sports are “broken.” I’m not so sure.
The logic goes like this:
→ The transfer portal is out of control,
→ NIL collectives are “buying” players, and the lack of a salary cap has turned the locker room into a mercenary camp.
→ Followed by cries of “greed” “college sports is for kids not 25 yr olds!” “these aren’t student athletes anymore”
and therefore “something must be done,” namely we need some sort collective bargaining to “stabilize” the sport.
Hogwash.
I’ve thought a lot about this over the years and I am actually convinced of the opposite:
Free markets are making college sports the best American pro league, if they don’t screw it up.
College sports are now operating closer to a free market than any ‘professional league’ in America. What we are seeing is what athletic labor looks like without coordinated wage suppression. I’ve got a new perspective now:
College sports now look like a real free labor market providing the most opportunity and best form of civic pride.
Professional sports look like a managed cartel.
You’ve Been Duped by Pro Leagues
We have been conditioned to view pro leagues like the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB as the gold standard of sports and “fair” labor models that produce the best product. They do everything they can to drive this narrative into our subconscious. But collective bargaining does not “solve” economic issues; it institutionalizes a distortion.
Why would they do that?
Salary caps, draft rights, franchise tags, and rookie scales are not “natural” features of a sport. They are cartel mechanisms jointly enforced by leagues and labor unions to benefit a small group of owners and a limited number of players at the top of the food chain.
Athletes quickly learn that the real minimum wage is zero.
These legacy professional sports leagues maximize earnings for a limited class of athletes by excluding a much larger population who could compete at the margin.
Consider what I’ll call the “Tom Brady Problem”: a sixth-round pick, buried on the depth chart, one injury away (or one vision-less coach or GM) from potentially never being seen. Or perhaps one made-up tuck rule. How many good-great athletes never get an opportunity to compete or earn? In a capped, roster-restricted system, we see the media co-opted into protecting cartel assets to create an illusion and treat scarcity as excellence. The NFL has 32 teams by rule, not by demand. They conspire to murder any competent leagues in the cradle.
Can’t so that with college though.
In any other profession - medicine, law, accounting - if we regulate, we regulate quality, not quantity. We don’t say, “Only 450 lawyers may earn a living this year” to protect the salaries of a few incumbents. At least we are not supposed to under the law. Yet that is exactly how pro sports operate.
College Sports: The Accidental Free Market Pro League
The funny thing is, college sports didn’t intend to become market-based. The powers that be would have never let it. They fell into it because the NCAA lost the ability to coordinate price controls, and the courts punched holes in the “amateurism” bucket faster than governance could plug them.
The result is a labor market that is chaotic, but real. Look at the structural differences today:
A top college QB today has more labor freedom than a mid-tier NFL veteran. He can solicit competing offers, move immediately, and re-price his value annually. Pro sports spent decades securing legal exceptions and controlling labor and suddenly college sports blew that all up.
The irony: pros are less free than top college players.
Note: The one aspect of college sports that is still restrictive is eligibility. The NCAA loved to make sure you know they are still there by making that a mess. But really the NCAA wants to keep the pro leagues off their backs and push talent to those leagues. Get rid of this and you have a full on competitor to legacy pro leagues.
What Kind of Teams Do You Want to Support?
There is a second, deeper layer to this: College teams are actually more embedded in their communities - they are the kinds of institutions we fans want.
That’s a problem for pro sports. And they know it.
Pro teams are franchises cosplaying as civic institutions.
Modern pro teams are privately owned monopoly assets. They are mobile at the owner’s discretion and often extractive toward cities and taxpayers (stadium subsidies, tax breaks). Owners “license” civic identity to fans, but the fans have no agency.
The jersey says “New York,” but the governance says “Private Equity.”
College teams are different. They are permanently tied to place. A university doesn’t relocate. Its fan base isn’t imported; it is grown through alumni, students, and families. This new system is great for bandwagon fans too like me and Mark Cuban. No commitments demanded or expected either way.
NIL has actually deepened this civic bond. While it’s framed as “buying players,” it is actually participatory capital. NIL collectives channel supporter money to athletes directly. It turns fans and alumni into active participants in the ecosystem rather than just passive consumers of a “product.”
Money in college sports flows down and outward into the community. In the pros, it flows up and inward to the league office.
Fans have decided they want to see Indiana win. Deal with it SEC.
A Choice of Systems
What unsettles people about the current state of college sports isn’t “greed” → it’s price discovery. For decades, we relied on the mask of amateurism to hide the true value of athletic labor. Now that the mask is off, the “chaos” we see is simply the sound of the market trying to find its level.
We have a choice between two value systems:
Legacy Professional Sports: ‘Stability’ and ‘parity’ achieved through artificial scarcity and cartel-managed labor. Or;
College Sports: Opportunity and participation expanded through an open, albeit theoretically uneven, market. But that ‘unevenness’ might give us an Indiana National Champion.
Don’t confuse cartel stability with moral clarity. College sports still has its soul in the fanbases and institutions (as corrupt as they can be too). I hope the uneasiness people are feeling helps to reveal the legacy pro league system we’d grown used to defending. College athletics has become the most honest expression of athletic competition we have left - open, imperfect, and dramatic.
So for me, I take more issue with legacy professional sports leagues than I do with college sports. I love seeing more players get paid. I love seeing the Indiana story unfold. If anything, my biggest issue with college sports is the NCAA eligibility circus. I do have some other concerns but they are concerns mostly for the athletes.
So where does this leave us?
The Realistic Three Endgames
I don’t see a world where today’s NIL “situation” persists forever. I also don’t think we end up with something pure by any measure. It just feels like we are not at equilibrium that makes the power brokers happy. The vacuum created by the NCAA’s practical ability to oversee college athletics will be filled. So, the only question is what the new container looks like.
Based on what I read, we are heading toward one of three inevitable conclusions:
1. The European Model (yes, European)
In this scenario, we stop pretending college sports are an American “pro” derivative and realize they are more like the English Premier League. There are no caps. Small schools become “selling clubs.” Power programs become global brands. Competitive balance isn’t enforced by a rulebook, but by the size of your community’s wallet. It’s unequal, but it is the most honest market in the world and there really is nothing more American than something like relegation.
2. The Institutionalized Cartel (captured, again)
This is what most traditionalists are praying for, sadly. Schools eventually admit athletes are employees. They form a massive Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). They trade salaries and health insurance for caps and restrictions. The market gets “tamed,” the “chaos” ends, and we go back to the comfortable, supply-restricted stability of a managed labor cartel. Money gets funneled and siphoned. Fewer athletes get paid.
3. The Great Decoupling (for the PE guys)
The “University” brand becomes a licensing play. The teams operate as private professional entities that happen to wear the school colors and rent the stadium on Saturdays. This ends the “student-athlete” charade entirely. It protects the university’s tax status but likely severs the last remaining threads of the “civic commons” that make college sports special. Non-revenue sports all but die. This is PE’s dream. And PE ruins everything, right?
Final Thought: The Protectionism Trap
College sports have quite the conundrum here. They’ve revealed that the “stability” we craved was actually built on the backs of suppressed labor. As legacy professional sports become more centralized, capped, and financially engineered, college sports are becoming the most authentic expression of competition we have left. I hope they can make some minor tweaks to improve the system without restricting opportunities for athletes. If they do it right, it ends up being a bigger threat to legacy pro leagues than people think.
What do you think? What did I miss? Let me know in the comments.