🎙️ My good friend Dominyck Bullard put out a great video outlining how ritual, collective participation, and the irreplaceable value of IRL human connection are the underlying patterns shaping sports, culture, and capital.

Sound familiar?

I wrote on ritual in 🧭 ATC_006, you can read about it here.

Dom has built a successful sports content agency and his short-form sports business Instagram coverage is growing like a weed. He’s quickly becoming one of the best in the game; thoughtful, authentic, and straight to the point.

I must confess . . . I have been withholding something from you on purpose.

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🧭 ATC_007 and 🧭 ATC_008 compressed as much of my domain expertise into as surgical a masterclass as I could possibly offer. Those essays demonstrated how the NCAA commercially “stumbled upwards” over the course of 150 years and mapped what is the most structurally constrained system I’ve ever investigated. 

By tracking the inputs, we could clearly follow the outputs that have been produced: the “Wild West” and its broken economics, the window that closes in 2032, and the real time collapse of the amateur model.

Those outputs, which are intuitive to any of us who follow collegiate athletics, explains to us what is happening. But what it does not do, what it cannot do, is demonstrate why the patterns shaping this institution are what they are. 

Like everything else in the human experience, the patterns shaping our world are a function of meaning, and this meaning is where the deeper understanding lives.

So, ATC_009 has been deputized to take up this deferred work of interpretation.

I want to make a claim that will sound like an overreach until I have proved it to be true: the present-day NCAA is the simultaneous fulfillment and expression of every pattern this publication has named thus far. 

This is not one case study among many which happens to rhyme with the contents of what I write about here, but rather the NCAA is the place where all of what I talk about here converges all at once: 

I’ve told you that the human experience is patterned, that those patterns reveal themselves in sports, culture, and capital, and that we are only as effective as the patterns we can recognize, remember, and apply. 

You should understand by now that the NCAA and the current state of collegiate athletics has not only been the reality I’ve lived as a former player, but has since become the system I’ve studied most and the problem I’ve genuinely tried to solve for.

It was this day-to-day problem solving that revealed to me, in time, that the NCAA is the proof of concept for the 🧭 At the Center phronema (Greek word for ‘worldview’ or ‘mindset’) and is the reason this publication exists at all. 

From the beginning, I have been writing my pattern essays with the NCAA in mind because I view it as the single domain in which the whole of the 🧭 At the Center vocabulary and corpus shines most brightly.

The five patterns listed above have served as the foundation upon which this publication is built, but as I will demonstrate, there sits one last pattern, one which dates back to the dawn of humanity, around which our understanding of this most brilliant institution will find its end.

This pattern is the first one I ever recognized, long before I had the language for any of the others, and whether you have picked up on it yet or not, I have been working toward this essay the entire time, holding it in reserve, because it could not be introduced until the groundwork was laid.

Let us quickly walk through each of the five patterns and how they map onto the NCAA before we meet the pattern that started it all.

Class is in session, let’s begin.

In ATC_002, I argued that the most fundamental pattern in human experience is the binary of a governing principle (heaven) and its material expression (earth). 

Heaven is the rule, order, and spirit; it is “that which animates,” while Earth is the expression and body of that spirit, the embodiment in which that order becomes visible. 

Everything has a heaven and earth, and it is only in the proper union of the two that anything exists at all. Heaven without earth is spirit without body, and earth without heaven is formless and void of meaning. This unification is called a symbol, and when we recognize a symbol, we grow in knowledge. 

I started here because sport is the clearest application of this pattern I know: the rules of a game are its heaven, the players and the field are its earth, and the game is the act that unites them. 

The rulebook does not move a single yard on its own, and 22 bodies running around a field without a rulebook doesn’t actually mean anything. Holding heaven and earth in agreement (symbol) is necessary for sport to function in the first place. 

And this concept equally applies to institutions. The heaven of the NCAA is its original charter, something like the protection of the student-athlete experience and preservation of the academic-athletic mission. 

But as ATC_007 and ATC_008 have demonstrated, the expression of that governing principle is clearly out of alignment, and this misalignment is precisely the reason why we feel so viscerally that the NCAA is in deep trouble. The institution is in telos drift, and as Genesis would put it:

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Underneath all of the gunslinging headlines, this is what the “Wild West” actually is: heaven and earth out of agreement. The names "amateur" and "student-athlete" no longer match the reality of the modern NCAA enterprise. 

In ATC_003, I argued that the pattern of time and space governs the pattern of heaven-and-earth by either separating or unifying the two.

Time separates and is the transformative, disintegrative force, the water, the flood that dissolves boundaries and sweeps the old form away, while space unifies and is the formative, integrative force, the dry land, the axis that holds a thing in its shape.

Institutions need both in order to remain grounded, steadfast, aligned, and true. Pure space with no time calcifies into rigidity which cannot adapt (dry land), while pure time with no space is complete dissolution which cannot hold anything together (water). 

Think of space as being that which is at the center, while time is always that which is at the margins. The two are always being held in tension:

In the first, boundaries dissolve, categories collapse, and everything is swept into undifferentiated water. In the second, the structure refuses to integrate the margins, believes it is total, and the tower rigidifies as it reaches for a heaven it is no longer in agreement with, leading to fracture. 

The health of an institution is dependent on the balance between these forces, and today’s pattern is the fruit of this seed I planted three months ago.

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I also introduced the archetype of Nephilim, the boundary-crossing hybrid figures whose appearance is not the cause of collapse but the visible sign that the order has already failed from within. 

I named Martin Luther as the Nephilim figure of the Reformation just as the synthetic CDO was a Nephilim of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. 

Nephilim are signs, signals, and foreshadowings of the margins overcoming the center, and the NCAA has its own: 

These are embodiments of the pattern of Nephilim. They are shiny versions of that which is at the margins, the same margins which constantly creep and threaten to overcome that which is at the center, and their clear boundary-crossings are causing category confusion.

This confusion (flooded land) can be juxtaposed with its counterpart, clarity (dry land). The NCAA is clearly experiencing one and not the other as it struggles to determine who even qualifies to participate in its own system.

In ATC_004, I argued that the pattern of hierarchy is necessary and that it is how the heaven-and-earth pattern manifests whenever a collective forms.

I also argued that by participating in whatever hierarchy you find yourself in, you will find yourself embodying the pattern of space (mentioned above) and its structural consequence – that is, formation.

I then walked the cascading organizational structure of the NCAA from top to bottom – beginning with the governing principle that guides the association (heaven) down to President Charlie Baker, down to the conferences, down to the schools, down to the athletic departments, down to the teams, the coaches, and finally the players. 

But while we can clearly map this onto the NCAA’s institutional structure, there are even clearer places in which this pattern becomes visible, like CFP payouts by conference, for example.  

I argued that hierarchy is universal, is not a dirty word and is not, in its healthy form, a structure of domination. Hierarchies recur across every domain, history, and culture, and the lived experience of hierarchy is through the relation between a ‘head’ and a ‘body’. 

And this relationship is (supposed to be) built on mutual sacrifice. 

When a head stops sacrificing for the body and uses its position of power to extract from the body rather than elevate it, the structure is no longer cohesive, and institutional collapse is imminent. 

For the NCAA, this looks like imposing the “student-athlete” classification upon which an exploitation of labor and suppression of athlete earning potential was built for decades, penalizing programs and athletes arbitrarily as they clung to a dying “amateurism” mandate.

We have witnessed the complete collapse of the head/body dynamic between the NCAA and its members in real time, as mutual sacrifice has been replaced by jockeying for power, the gratification of self-interest, and the body is now rejecting the authority of the head.

But when this happens, the answer is not to decide that bodies should have no head at all. 

While the above actions by the NCAA were clearly wrong, I will argue that the Adam-system pattern demonstrates to us that the virtuous thing to do is to reform the system, not “cut the King’s head off” (I’m looking at you, Super League proposals).

In ATC_005, I argued that reality is fractal: that the same structures repeat at every level.

The NCAA is not just a hierarchy, it is a hierarchy of hierarchies, with the same structure repeating at each level, and with each level simultaneously being a head to one thing while being a body to another.

The conference governs the schools (head), but answers to the association (body), just as the coach leads a team but answers to the athletic department.

Meaning itself and all of the other patterns mentioned above, I argued, are fractal: heaven & earth, time & space, hierarchy, they all recur at the level of the individual, collective, and civilization. This scale-invariance is the key to interpreting the patterns we see.

The patterns shaping the NCAA are the same patterns shaping the broader sports, culture, and capital ecosystem, which are the same patterns shaping the rise and fall of nations, the strength of a marriage, and your work-life balance.

This idea is what legitimizes the cross-domain pattern matching (pattern resonance) skill I champion here, so when I compare the NCAA to the Catholic Church in ATC_010, I am trying to teach you how to sharpen your pattern recognition lens by thinking fractally.

In ATC_006, I argued that sport functions as a civic religion because sport is ritual and collective participation, which is a pattern that binds us to one another and to our team. 

There are leagues that are consumed as content (X Games, Baller League), and there are leagues that are participated in as weekly ceremonies (NFL, College football). The second kind has a binding power with its fans that the first could not manufacture if it tried.

NCAA fandom has near-zero churn precisely because of its tradition and pageantry. The rites and dogmas of Notre Dame fandom serve as an intergenerational act of institutional belonging which binds an 18-year-old undergrad to an alumnus who stood in the same place forty years earlier. 

The 501(c)(3) status that NCAA institutions still carry is an ode to an earlier era's recognition that amateur athletics functioned as a civic-religious good rather than as a business, and was therefore owed the tax exemption a society extends to its sacred institutions.

The very act of fully professionalizing the NCAA product threatens to dissolve the thing that made it worth professionalizing.

The ceremonies of the Iron Bowl, Duke v. UNC, and Army v. Navy are the value. 

Strip the ceremony to monetize the spectacle, and you have monetized a corpse. This is what is at stake, and this is what we stand to lose.

And now to name the pattern I have been working toward since I launched 🧭 At the Center five months ago, the one which I recognized fresh off the FCS Playoffs proposal last year, before I had named any of the other patterns I have described. 

The reason this publication exists is the pattern of the Adam-system.

This pattern tracks the symbolic relationship between the main characters of the Genesis creation narrative: Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and soon thereafter, he created Adam.

Adam is formed with the breath of life in him, that is, the imago dei, and as such, receives dominion over the earth. His mission is to align his will to God’s, steward that which is under his dominion, and name the animals.

Symbolically speaking, you can think of the action of naming the animals as Adam assigning identity to things and establishing an order amongst them.

The earth presents itself to Adam as a puzzle, an amalgam of physical matter and fact, and Adam must gather that earth and unify it with meaning (heaven) from above so that reality can be intelligible (a symbol) in order to grow in knowledge of that reality.

In his role of naming things, Adam is creating an ordered system, i.e. “This is this, and this is that.”

When God creates His ordered system (creation), He places Adam at the center of it, who serves as the unification of heaven and earth on the macro-level. Adam then turns around and creates his own ordered system (civilization) on the micro-level. This is a fractal.

This is what the process of science is today – not the output, the actual process of the scientific method. We impose theories onto the world, create and move about an ordered system trying to organize variables so that they match the facts of testing, and when we successfully do so, we expand our domain expertise and grow in our knowledge of reality.

I ran this same ordering and imposition of meaning process when I “mapped the structural constraints of the NCAA in order to architect a capital solution that accounted for all of the variables.” Do you see?

Adam is a scientist and he imposes meaning onto raw reality, but just as the scientist does, Adam has a specific and precise limitation, which is the drama of creation in a nutshell.

Adam can name every creature in the world, but he cannot name himself.

Adam sees everything through his own perspective, and there is no position inside his own perspective from which he can view his own perspective.

He is within the very system that he is ordering, and as such “has a blind spot” and is in need of a foreign perspective from outside himself to say to him, “You are in the system yourself Adam, and that is a fact that you haven’t accounted for, but you should.”

The point of this foreign perspective is to point out the ways in which Adam’s system is improperly ordered, to “constructively critique” what Adam has put at the center, and what he has put at the margins.

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This mirror reflecting back at Adam serves as a feedback mechanism, one which he could not possibly generate from inside himself. But in order for this foreign perspective to work properly, it must come from something that is from him, by him, and for him. 

In the original Hebrew, the phrase translated as "helper fit for him" carries underneath it a stranger and more interesting sense, something closer to beneficial adversary, or more literally, a help against him.

Eve is the counterpart who works in opposition to Adam, and by that opposition does him good. 

She is the mirror and feedback mechanism that constructively criticized the system that Adam has architected by identifying the ways in which his impositions of meaning are incomplete or unfair. 

Eve is the only one who can name Adam and embody the foreign perspective that Adam needs in order to understand where he himself sits and what he is blind to. By doing this, Eve does Adam good and improves the overall system.

Whereas Adam names the animals, and thereby puts something at the center and something else at the margins, Eve listens to the animals.

Her ability to listen and understand the animals is representative of her ability to identify the ways in which Adam’s system has marginalized certain things and then mediate between those things and Adam in order to rectify that marginalization.

Eve loves Adam, and in that love her understanding of and empathy with the marginalized translates to a constructive criticism that is meant to be integrated into Adam’s system, reform it, and create a better, more well-ordered system.

Many people wonder why the serpent in the Genesis account is able to talk, but no one asks why Eve is able to listen and understand the serpent. This is why.

The serpent is representative of that which is at the margins. 

He embodies the animals who, when they received their imposition of meaning by Adam and thus their role within the Adam-system, were dissatisfied by their marginalization.

The serpent is a thing that is not satisfied with the name it was given, and is the voice at the margins that says the naming was either insufficient or unfair. 

When the serpent converses with Eve, he speaks in the register that Eve listens to, which is the register of the feedback mechanism: a marginalized being pressing its claim on how they have been unaccounted for.

It is actually a good thing that the serpent voices their marginalization and that Eve is able to listen, understand, and converse with it.

The problem, however, is that “the serpent was more cunning than the rest,” and Eve gets tricked.

The serpent is always a given. As we’ve discussed at length, any ordered system immediately puts something at the center and something else at the margins.

Therefore the actions to the serpent can only be the following:

→ When Eve listens to the serpent, she can either trust the serpent or not.

→ When Eve brings her feedback from the serpent to Adam, he can either integrate it into his system or not.

These are the choices around which an Adam-system either thrives or breaks, and when it breaks, the Fall of Man ensues. 

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So what happens in the creation account?

The capacity that makes Eve indispensable, her openness to what the order has not yet accounted for, is the very capacity that the cunning serpent exploits. 

Eve gets tricked, and in this way “makes the enemy her friend.”

Eve is unable to discern that the serpent is actually an enemy, and that the integration of his feedback is not in her best interest. But she listens to the serpent anyway and brings that criticism back to Adam for it to be integrated.

Adam is unable to discern that the feedback Eve is bringing him comes from a nefarious source and integrates the false feedback into his system anyway.

This is the fall, and while it is a case study on pride, it is also a failure of discernment.

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But notice how the serpent’s crafty half-truth presses upon Eve a false sense of urgency, as she immediately feels the need to take the feedback to Adam to integrate it (to grab of the fruit and eat).

There is a core problem with this false sense of urgency, and in keeping with our symbolic interpretation, you can imagine it as something like “trying to integrate too much too quickly.”

This is a variation of the pattern of time and space from ATC_003, wherein the water at the margins is constantly threatening to erode the stability of the center. 

Too much water = Flood.
Too much too quickly = Flood.

The point: everything the margins asks for can eventually be integrated.

A well-ordered system can metabolize almost any critique if it takes it on incrementally and tests each correction against the whole before reaching for the next. 

The problem is when you try to integrate everything all at once.

This is why we use words like “over-indexed,” or “over-levered,” or phrases like “I bit off more than I could chew,” or “my eyes were too big for my stomach,” or “I got over my skis.”

When you try to integrate everything all at once on the conviction that the marginalization is too much to wait another day, you do not reform the system but rather join yourself to the very thing that would dissolve it.

In this way you “make the enemy your friend” and bring about the collapse a stepwise integration reform would have prevented.

Eve's failure was that she could not tell the difference between legitimate feedback from the marginalized and a demand for everything to be swallowed all at once. She reaches for the whole fruit rather than the measured portion and she carries that totalizing demand back to Adam.

Adam's failures are two-fold and complement Eve’s in the worst way. 

This double failure, the refusal to integrate true feedback followed by the complete swallowing of too much feedback too quickly, is what leads to the Fall of Man.

And yes, I’m still talking about the NCAA.

My goal with 🧭 At the Center is to help you see the world through the lens of meaning rather than mechanics (recognize), thereby restoring the ancient cosmological view of the world (remember), and then map those patterns onto sports, culture, and capital (apply).

A key component of achieving this is through understanding narrative, of which the Adam-system is one of many.

The Adam-Eve-Serpent archetypes are pervasive in our society and surface in ways you wouldn’t expect. A few of these are listed below, at various scales (fractals):

Relationships:

Me and my fiancée, Bailey, are Adam and Eve.

I arrive into most situations carrying with me a system that I do not always know that I am carrying. I have a set of presuppositions about how a thing should go, a subconsciously imposed order informed by my upbringing, beliefs, traumas, and principles that I sometimes mistake for the order of reality itself.

Bailey sees my system from outside my perspective and she offers constructive criticisms of it. I usually do not enjoy hearing those criticisms when they happen, but the reason I don’t is because her critiques typically pinpoint exactly the part of my order I could not see and therefore could not defend.

When presented with this true feedback, I integrate it, and the system is better than it was before, every. single. time. 

Example: I had a habit of “front-loading the week,” meaning I would wake up way too early Monday-Wednesday, cram in way too much, and consistently overwork myself without realizing it until Friday came around and I had successfully run myself into the ground. My weekends were toast and it wasn’t until Bailey so lovingly told me to get a grip and stop this pattern of behavior that the rhythm of my life became much more enjoyable.

I am the one with the blind spot, she is the one who can see it, and if that is not living proof that the namer cannot name himself then I don’t know what is. Bailey is not my opponent. She loves me and is the necessary and indispensable condition of my improvement. 

The Adam-system pattern is in my kitchen before it is anywhere else.

Science:

Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are Adam and Eve. 

Newton plays the role of Adam and names the system. His 3 laws of classical mechanics are a genuine naming of the world, and they work.

But Einstein plays the role of Eve, he does not arrive and declare Newton to be a fool and throw classical mechanics out the window. 

He does something far more interesting: he puts the mirror inside the theory and asks Newton where the observer is standing within Newton's picture, a question Newton's own perspective could not account for.

For a second it seemed as though Newtonian physics would completely collapse, but the successful integration of Einstein’s theory of relativity simultaneously warps the categories of space and time while preserving Newton’s system. 

This is generally how the process of scientific discovery is done, and this is Eve expressed correctly. Successive theories often account for everything the prior ones do, but add to them what the prior one missed. An integration that contains the old order rather than destroying it transcends without dismantling. 

Politics:

The right and left wings are Adam and Eve.

The conservative wing is Adam: the keeper of tradition and the inherited order, the namer who defends the categories a society already has. 

The liberal wing is Eve: the one who listens to those at the margins, attends to what the established order has excluded, and presses that order to account for what it has left out. 

A healthy polity is the contained competition between the two, with the inherited order and the renewing feedback being held in tension. We need the right wing to fight for the 2nd amendment just as we need the left wing to fight for proper gun reform. 

The Fall comes in two forms here:

True progress across civil rights, immigration, and personal freedoms are all successful integrations of the Adam and Eve dynamic played out on a national scale.

Now to bring it home, and let the convergence of these ideas explain the current state of the NCAA.

Amateurism, eligibility, institutional control, and above all the category of "student-athlete." From this name extends an agreement with the world, an imposed order upon which a system was built around these principles. 

But as ATC_007 and ATC_008 laid out, since its founding, the commercial expression of the association has done nothing but drift from its original charter. The serpents have been marginalized, their labor has been exploited, and their earnings have been suppressed as the NCAA ruled through arbitrary penalization and all the while told the margins to “go to hell.”

Adam named the enterprise once and stuck to it long after the ground had shifted underneath the legitimacy of its name.

ATC_007 and ATC_008 named these directly and expounded on them at length, so please refer to those essays.

This feedback is the help against the institution, the true criticism the order could not see about itself. But it is also not the enemy. Many of these reforms are inherently good things that should be implemented.

What began as "Pay the athletes their real value" has devolved into “Sever the enterprise from the institution, professionalize it completely, break away into a super league, let the prediction markets in, bring the professional players back, and seize every piece of it now, because it is all long overdue.”

And while it may be true that it is long overdue, the total and immediate integration of all of these things has completely gorged and collapsed the ordered system. 

I understand that when the severity of the injustice is perceived as high, the sense of urgency in correcting that injustice seems immediate because taking things slow can feel like siding with the injustice.

But as we’ve seen, integrating everything immediately is not reform. 

The NCAA could integrate almost all of these corrections on its own if it takes them incrementally, but it hasn’t. It’s reached for everything all at once, driven by those whose convictions pushed the message that the wait was no longer tolerable. 

And now the institution is in collapse as it tries to swallow something whole. 

The unfortunate reality of this institutional collapse is that the NCAA is one of the most central ritual enterprises in the U.S. and is something that binds families, friends, and communities together across generations. 

But just like Adam, the NCAA is failing in both directions at once.

It was Babel for decades, too rigid to integrate Eve and the serpent’s feedback, clutching to an old name long after the need for reform. But it is also the Flood, reaching for the whole correction all at once and thereby dissolving the very institution it spent a century over-protecting. 

Ossified against the true feedback it needed and on the verge of swallowing that feedback faster than it can survive, the “Wild West” is more than a governance crisis, capital story, and zero-sum behavioral environment.

The cure exists in a stepwise integration process, one which honors the tradition, history, and 150-year-old inherited Adam-system while simultaneously reforming the order to account for the marginalized without integrating everything all at once and overthrowing the system.

Like Einstein and Newton, build the new model such that it contains the old one, preserving everything the inherited system got right while adding what it refused to see. This is the integration that transcends without dismantling.

Refuse the serpent's insistence that all of it must be seized now and slowly bring the inherited heavenly name back into agreement with an earth that has moved.

Let’s not forget that we are the beneficiaries of 150+ years of the intercollegiate higher education system and the NCAA’s “stumbling upwards.” 

Our inheritance of that Adam-system should not be taken for granted. 

To this point, allow me to get prescriptive for a moment. 

Do we really think that revolution and completely dismantling the inherited order is the right thing to do here?

Super League proposals that want to “cut the King’s head off” and fully professionalize via private equity are not going to succeed if their only plan is to execute an “out with the old, and in with the new” model. 

You cannot throw the proverbial “baby out with the bathwater.” 

And it is worth asking directly, what gives you the certainty that your new Adam-system will sufficiently integrate all of Eve’s feedback without a misstep?

Are these proposals born out of a genuine desire to create a head that self-sacrifices for the body and institute an order that sincerely integrates the feedback of the margins, or are they born out of pride, avarice, and a hunger for power?

Do not cut the King’s head off. 

The reformer who loves the institution does not answer a head that has stopped sacrificing for its body by killing it and leaving the body to bleed out. 

Integrate the true feedback, and refuse to take it all at once.

History has played out the Adam-system pattern before, and we have already met its most telling signal, the Nephilim. 

In ATC_010, we will flash back to Wittenberg, Germany in 1517, when a single act of legitimate critique nailed to a church door turned into a fracture that split a civilization and defined Western history for the next 500 years.

The last movement of my four-part essay arc on the NCAA and the current state of collegiate athletics will demonstrate how the NCAA’s Adam-system pattern finds its fullest analog in the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation.

Let us be attentive, and in doing so, recognize, remember, and apply the deeper patterns that are really shaping sports, culture, and capital.

If you are still reading this, thank you.

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