🎙️ My co-host Brent Peus and I sat down with Ethan Rosenbaum of Source Golf to talk through why he’s creating “cable 2.0 for the sports creator economy.” 

If you care about the future of sports digital media at all, give it a listen.

This is the grand finale of my four-part essay series on the NCAA and the current state of collegiate athletics.

Inputs, outputs, interpretation and now 🧭 ATC_010 is analogy + prescription. Today I land the plane 🛬.

I have been building toward a parallel with the Catholic Church since 🧭 ATC_003, and it begins at the top, with the NCAA's Pope: President Charlie Baker.

The thing you must understand about President Baker is this: the man hired to reform the NCAA is structurally prevented from doing so by the architecture of his own authority.

His power is paradoxical because he simultaneously holds real authority over those he governs (arbitration and penalization) while remaining beholden to those very same constituents (who elect him and he representation). 

After all, the NCAA is the collective of schools that make up the NCAA.

And the reality is that 12% of this 1,100 member association (DI FBS) is the source of every structural problem, and that 12% is holding the other 88% hostage.

Any time Baker attempts a reform that is, by most reasonable standards, objectively good for the entire association (see: the 5-for-5 eligibility rule), he is sued into oblivion by those at the margins who profit from the chaos. 

It must be exhausting to constantly be painted as the villain of America's most beloved institution when you are the very one trying to prevent it from devolving into the Wild West, leveraging whatever paradoxical authority you can muster while you still have it, before your own constituents come looking to cut the King's head off.

I do not envy his position.

I have met President Baker twice. I quite appreciate his mild-mannered and thoughtful disposition, and his background speaks for itself: a Harvard A.B., Northwestern M.B.A., and a tenure as a Republican governor of Massachusetts, which tells me Baker knows how to get things done inside a system structurally opposed to him. 

I am by no means a Baker apologist. I simply find it difficult to believe that the executives and investors currently jockeying for position and power during this dislocation have the right motives, disposition, or wherewithal for this particular job.

What the NCAA requires at this moment is stewardship, not extraction. This is a particular type of institution, singular in its nature. It is one that is over a hundred years old, inherited rather than built, and as such the modus operandi of whoever leads it must be ordered accordingly. 

But those in positions of authority today are structurally constrained from doing so by the very architecture of the association they govern.

In this way, the NCAA suffers from a principal-agent trap, which is the exact position the papacy found itself in on the eve of the Reformation.

📝 Class is in session, let’s begin.

Earlier this week, the U.S.A. beat Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Round of 32 of the FIFA World Cup, a tournament which, since 1930, has embodied the beautiful game.

Twenty-two minutes into the first 45-minute half, and then again at the 65th minute, play was interrupted for a hydration break. The game was being played in Santa Clara, CA at Levi's Stadium, and the weather was 75-and-sunny.

These hydration breaks have stirred up fans worldwide, and for good reason.

The stated reason for their existence is player safety, but we all know that the actual reason is that the same pause manufactures net-new ad inventory, which will net FOX $450M.

A money grab, yes, but a specific type of money grab: one that took the structure, flow, and ceremony of the game itself and stripped it to monetize the spectacle, and while FOX will take home the money, FIFA is complicit.

What this moment is, at its core, is a revelation: the rare instance when an institution's stated mission and its commercial interest point in opposite directions at once, and the institution, forced to choose, quietly shows which one it actually serves. 

The game's form was sacrificed on the altar of the game's monetization, and the governing body that was supposed to protect the form signed off on it.

Instances like these demonstrate what happens to institutions that are asked to juggle two conflicting mandates simultaneously: governance and commerce.

When this conflict becomes irreconcilable, which master the institution serves is revealed.

↓↓↓

Before I bring the Catholic Church parallel in its fullness, I want to survey three other governing bodies that have faced the identical structural tension the NCAA faces today.

Each one has handled it differently, sits at a different point on the governance-to-commerce spectrum, and the pattern of how they resolved it, or failed to, tells you exactly what the NCAA is actually up against.

Motorsport has (for the most part) built a structural innovation the NCAA never has: a clean separation of church and state.

For Formula One, this separation is executed via the Concorde Agreements. The nonprofit FIA is the sanctioning body that governs the sport, while the Formula One Group, owned by Liberty Media since 2017, is the licensed for-profit commercial entity that sells the show. 

Liberty acquired the Formula One Group in January 2017 for $8.0B ($4.4B equity value), and over the decade that followed has executed an unprecedented value creation run that has delivered a 5.20x MOIC on that equity, with $FWONK now sitting at a $22.9B market cap.

On paper, this arrangement is elegant, and it is everything the NCAA never achieved. 

If you were designing this organizational structure from first principles, you would be tempted to draw this exact diagram. And while this separation is necessary, the terms of the separation are everything. 

The Acquired podcast episode on Formula One walks through the full history, but the punchline is this: the commercial rights were locked up for many years at a time, and the FIA, in executing that arrangement, relinquished almost all of its operational control. 

That looked like a reasonable trade when the commercial value was modest (yay, no operating costs!), but now that Formula One's value has exploded under Liberty Media, the FIA finds itself on the outside of a much larger pie than the one it bargained against, and the structural subordination that accompanied the original deal has become increasingly difficult to sit with.

Although the FIA is the global governing body of hundreds of motorsport leagues, circuits, and races, it absolutely needs Formula One, which means that the governing body's leverage over the commercial entity is, in practice, far more constrained than the clean org chart would suggest. 

The FIA and Liberty's relationship has been defined by acrimony in recent years precisely because this dynamic has surfaced, and even the success case, the cleanest governance-commerce separation in global sport shows signs of institutional drift and tension.

The lesson for the NCAA is not to “just copy the FIA.” The insight is that while this separation of governance and commerce is critical, the governing body that sells its upside on too long of a horizon will eventually find itself in a future state of subordination to the very entity it was supposed to license.

The terms matter as much as the structure.

On the governance-commerce spectrum, the FIA sits at one pole: the cleanest institutional separation between the two functions that global sport has produced.

If the FIA is the case where governance and commerce were held apart and the terms of that separation are the go-forward crux of the matter, FIFA is the case where they were never separated in the first place.

The same organization that governs and promotes global football across 211 member nations also owns and operates the single most valuable property the game produces: the World Cup.

This is the complete opposite end of the structural spectrum from the FIA, and it produces a fundamentally different set of institutional incentives.

When your principal mandate is the proliferation and development of football globally, and the primary mechanism for achieving that mandate is through maximizing the commercial value of your most prized asset, governance and commerce cannot simply coexist inside the same institution, the must fuse.

Over time, this fusion produces a predictable set of consequences.

When rule-making authority and commercial self-interest are concentrated inside a single monopoly with no external counterparty to hold either function accountable, the incentives compound in one direction.

The DOJ's 2015 investigation confirmed what this architecture would suggest: the "FIFAGate" scandal exposed a 24-year, $150M scheme of systemic bribery, kickbacks, and self-enrichment linked to media rights and tournament hosting.

This enables the commercial mandate to quietly supplant the original governing charter.

FIFA projects $13B in total revenue for the 2023-2026 financial cycle, with approximately $9B generated directly from the 2026 World Cup, a ~70% increase over the 2022 Qatar tournament, driven in large part by an expanded 48-team format that increased total matches from 64 to 104.

That format decision, just like an expanded CFP or NCAA March Madness, was a revenue decision, and the governance body ratified it because the governance and the commercial body are one in the same.

The hydration breaks, which FOX will convert into $450M of net-new ad inventory, are a product of this same logic.

But here is a wrinkle that should worry President Baker:

FIFA, for all its misalignment and corruption, at least built a real commercial competency. 

What makes FIFA an instructive case is that they are genuinely an extraordinarily competent commercial operator.

The organization employs hundreds of paid professionals and commercial executives to maximize value extraction from the World Cup, while simultaneously running a network of 70,000+ volunteers to keep costs low.

The revenue ceiling keeps rising because the people running the commercial operation know exactly what they are doing.

On the governance-commerce spectrum, FIFA sits at the opposite pole from the FIA: governance and commerce are not separated, not licensed, and not held in tension by any external counterparty.

They are fused inside a single institution, and the commercial competency FIFA has built is a product of that fusion.

In 🧭 ATC_007 I brought up the English Premier League as a historical parallel to provide context around the amateur-to-professional transition in sport. But equally, and perhaps more appropriately, I could have used the International Olympic Committee.

Although it has done so imperfectly, the IOC has made that transition while successfully retaining and exercising its governance muscle, and the way it did so tells us something important about the governance-commerce problem.

The IOC spent most of the 20th century defending an amateurism ideal every bit as rigid and increasingly hollow as the NCAA's. In the early 1970s, Phil Knight had to employ Steve Prefontaine as Nike's "National Director of Public Affairs" in order to keep him in the Nike fold without rendering him ineligible. If that is not a precursor to the NIL workarounds of the 2010s, I don’t know what is. 

In 1986, the IOC voted to remove the ban on professional athletes, and in 1992 the USA's Dream Team marked the formal end of that era. Although from then on amateurism was officially dead, what the IOC built in its place is the more instructive part of the story.

The IOC's governance-commerce model rests on a structure that neither the FIA nor FIFA occupy: sell the symbol.

The TOP Programme, created in 1985, was designed to have a limited number of partners, with usually only one corporate sponsor per category, giving them exclusive rights to the Olympic symbol (the literal Olympic rings logo) and to use it in advertising for the period of the sponsorship. 

Coca-Cola does not pay to sponsor the 100m dash, they pay for the right to associate with the five rings, and the revenue this model generates is substantial. Commercial revenue from the TOP Programme and media rights grew from $5.2B (2016) to $6.9B (2020) and $7.7B in the (2024), with $7.5B already secured for LA 2028, $6.9B for Brisbane 2032, and $4.0B for 2036. 

The IOC locks in revenues for years before most of those Games have a host city finalized. Broadcast rights account for approximately 60% of IOC revenues, with a large proportion coming from the United States, where NBC paid $7.65B for the period 2020-2032. 

Of all that revenue, the IOC retains only roughly 10% to cover operational and administrative costs, and distributes the remainder to organizing committees, International Federations (IFs), and National Olympic Committees (NOCs) through the Olympic Solidarity program.

These IFs and NOCs are non-governmental organizations (NGO) that are responsible for the administration of that sport at the international level. They are the ones who pay the athletes, not the IOC.

Basically, the IOC sets the constitutional framework, owns the commercial trademark, and distributes the revenue, while pay and sport-specific rule-making sit with the IFs rather than being centralized at the top.

On the governance-commerce spectrum, the IOC sits between the FIA and FIFA, leaning toward the FIA: not a clean structural separation, but a commercial model built around the symbol rather than the sport, and a governance architecture distributed enough that the two functions have retained their independence from each other even as the commercial operation has scaled to billions.

Now place the NCAA against all three.

Using historical models as a playbook, at every available fork in the road, the NCAA chose the option that compounded the problem, and the through-line that captures the full weight of that failure is found in two words.

“Student-athlete.”

The term was coined as a legal defense manufactured in the 1950s for the specific purpose of defeating a workers-compensation liability suit after the death of a player produced a benefits claim. 

Walter Byers, the NCAA's own executive director, later admitted that the term was crafted deliberately and embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations as a mandated substitute for words like "players" and "athletes." 

A shield against a lawsuit became the mechanism for enforcing seven decades of labor suppression while the commercial value of that labor compounded into billions.

There is only one place inside the NCAA ecosystem where something resembling a logical governance-commerce model is approximated: the structure of the CFP.

Here, CFP Administration, LLC (governance) sits separately and alongside a vehicle in BCS Properties, LLC (commerce).

But outside of this, the NCAA is somehow the live embodiment of multiple tensions across multiple examples of other governance-commerce models.

And the reason all four rhyme, the reason this is a pattern and not a coincidence, is that beneath all four sits a structure far older than any of them.

For those of you who actually know me, you know that I am a church history nut.

My favorite content creators have nothing to do with sports business and everything to do with mapping how the Christian church grew to become what it is today.

I am enthralled by the theological differences between the Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants, and most importantly, what patterns, narratives, and lens of the world are downstream of having a firm grasp on the way the East and West have developed over two millennia.

If this sounds boring to you, then that is totally okay, but understand that whether you believe it or not, this “Universal History” has at least some element of truth in it, and that by this level of approximation to the human experience, those same truths become the patterns that actively shape sports, culture, and capital.

I have written of heaven and earth, time and space, ritual, Nephilim, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, but I have yet to articulate the historical parallel that started it all for me.

Sit back and watch as the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation map 1-to-1 onto the NCAA and the current state of collegiate athletics.

For its first millennium the Church was undivided. As Christianity grew there was one demarcated body of followers in communion, holding the same orthodox theology and practicing the same rituals.

Across the first 800 years after Christ, over 7 Ecumenical Councils, the Church fought off heresy tooth and nail and built what still serves as the basis of the faith. These patriarchs decided which books counted as scripture, how the sacraments were administered, and where the boundary of the tradition ran.

During this period we could say heaven and earth were in agreement. The governing principle of the Church and its material expression were aligned, and although sin remained, at the corporate level the original telos held.

Church history is murky, and how you read it depends on which side of the aisle you sit, if you sit on one at all. But the event most attributable to the first crack in that unity is the Great Schism of 1054, when the Church split West from East over papal supremacy and a single disputed clause in the Nicene Creed, the filioque.

Mutual excommunications that have not fully healed nearly a thousand years later, and the attempts to heal that divide teach their own lesson.

Over the next few centuries, in the face of the Crusades and the Islamic expansion of the 11th and 12th centuries, representatives of both sides sought reunion. At the Council of Florence in 1439 Rome and Constantinople signed a direct attempt at it, and then both sides repudiated the signature, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 sealed the failure.

Catholics say the Orthodox split from them, the Orthodox say the reverse, and either way this stretch of history lays the ground for what formally began in 1517.

↓↓↓

Read the arc of the Catholic Church from 1054 to 1517 as the peak of the institution and then its long decline.

During this period:

By all accounts, the High Middle Ages is the moment the Catholic Church stands at its most coherent and most integrated, its heaven and its earth in their tightest agreement.

Then time did its work.

As the Church moved through the late 1400s and into the turn of the 16th century, it let the vicissitudes of time erode its adherence to its telos, and heaven and earth fell out of agreement. 

And while the institution did not look like it was declining – this was the age of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, St. Joan of Arc, and Johannes Gutenberg – unfortunately magnificence and corruption went hand in hand. 

Their fall from grace was embodied in the sale of indulgences, the commodification of grace itself, a practice in which the remission of sin was rendered into a transaction and sold to fund the construction of St. Peter's Basilica (1506-1626). 

When I say indulgences, hear “amateurism as labor suppression,” and when I say St. Peter’s Basilica, hear “ever-increasing media rights deals.”

All of the muck that I mapped across Parts I, II, and III: the 1906 charter and its amateur mandate, the fiction of “student-athlete,” 1% of athletes capturing 99% of the NIL money, and a governing body that can no longer name who qualifies to play in its own system are the NCAA's version of that same fall from grace, an institutional telos drift.

And as with any institutional corruption, a day of reckoning came.

Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517.

The buildup to Luther was substantial. John Wycliffe, the proto-reformer and “Morning Star of the Reformation,” was on the scene as early as 1374, the first indication that told you the structure was already failing. 

But it was Luther who drove the stake into the ground (or into the door, rather) and named the institutional collapse for what it was.

In ATC_003 I called Luther the Nephilim, the bell cow whose appearance means the Flood has already arrived, the boundary-violator who makes the erosion visible. But in the grammar of ATC_009 he is also Eve, the one who listens to those at the margins and carries the legitimate critique back to Adam, the Church. 

He is both at once, the signal that the collapse is here and the voice that names its cause. He was not the cause of the Reformation. If Luther had not begun reforming, someone else would have. The cause was the Church's own drift, and Luther was only the man who made it impossible to ignore.

And thanks to the printing press, Luther's ideas ripped through Europe at unprecedented speed, reaching across Germany within two weeks and the rest of Europe within two months, turning an obscure academic dispute into the spark of the Reformation.

A technology the institution could neither control nor contain spread the critique faster than any authority could answer it.

Is this not exactly what social media has been to the NCAA?

It has been five years since NIL took effect on July 1, 2021. As the NCAA drifted, athletes and commentators alike aired their grievances online at a speed the institution could not match, and the critique outran every answer the old authority tried to give. 

In 1521 Luther stood at the Diet of Worms and refused to recant. His words, "Here I stand," cemented the critique and reform became irreconcilable with the old order. The House settlement is that same moment in the NCAA's story, the legal hour at which the institution could no longer bury its head in the sand.

Now flash back to the Adam-system of ATC_009, and the map is exact.

Adam is the Catholic Church, the namer of the animals, imposing an ordered system of meaning onto reality. That system, like every system, pushed some things to the margin, and it was there, at the margin, that the Serpent pressed its claim that the naming had become unfair. Eve, who is Luther, was the one who could listen to that claim and carry it back to Adam as feedback meant to reform the system rather than destroy it.

The feedback was legitimate, but the integration of that feedback all at once, symbolized by the over-reaching for the Apple, is what overwhelms the Adam-system, and what followed was the Fall of Man and the Flood.

The Reformation did not break once and settle. It broke, and then it kept breaking, and it has not stopped breaking for 500 years, and the reason is structural, contained in the founding move itself.

Sola Scriptura removed the Church as the only authority able to bind interpretation of scripture, and as such interpretation fell to the level of the individual. Once every Christian was free to interpret scripture, doctrine, and dogma according to their own conscious, every serious theological disagreement between Christians became a new denomination waiting to splinter away.

Just 12 years after the Theses, at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, Luther and another Reformer, Huldrych (Ulrich) Zwingli met to unify the movement. There they agreed on many things, but the two were unable to reach agreement on the most important one, the real presence in the Eucharist.

Disagreements in interpretation over Christ’s phrase "This is my body" led to Luther famously saying he would, “Rather drink pure blood with the Pope than mere wine with the fanatics [Zwingli].” 

ATC_003 already named where this goes: protest, split, fragment, repeat.

Zwingli drowned the Anabaptists in Zurich for taking his Eucharist logic one-step further than him, and everyone began pointing fingers at each other, claiming their theology was the correct one.

Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals, and on and on the splintering continued. 

This same pattern played out in both the French and Russian revolutions: a legitimate grievance against a genuinely corrupt old order becoming a rupture followed by a long inability to build anything stable in its place.

Which is the NCAA now. 

Conference realignment, Super League proposals, pushes for autonomous conferences, expanded CFP and March Madness tournaments, G6 playoffs, and Cody Campbell’s Saving College Sports. Where is the stability? 

All I see are denominations splintering into even more denominations, no one in full communion with anyone else. 

Every school its own pope; every reform integrated all at once.

↓↓↓

The truth is that critique was legitimate and the Flood over-corrected.

Luther was right about the indulgences, substantively right, and the Reformation still shattered Christendom and set loose a fragmentation that has not healed five centuries later. 

Both are true at once, and I am not making a moral claim on who was right.

But this is why the Catholic response matters just as much as the Protestant break, because it can help us predict what lies ahead for the future of the NCAA. 

The Council of Trent (1545-1563) was the counter-Reformation, the Church’s reestablishment of dry land. Their pushback to reclaim their authority which had been challenged by the Reformation. A reassertion of sorts. 

Although it was late, imperfect, and too slow to stop the Flood from flooding, the instinct to reassert oneself after having been challenged and caught on their back foot is human nature.

But the two paths forward for the counter-reformation were to either integrate the critique in a manageable manner, or to anathematize and attack those who brought the Reformation about.

Which lands the point of the entire arc.

The question in front of college athletics is directed solely at the NCAA. The break is already here, and the Flood has already risen. As the governing body, the Adam who has received Eve’s critique, how are you going to respond?

Your paths forward are to either integrate feedback in a manageable manner, or to be total and absolute, shutting out those who go against you. 

Regardless, I would not be surprised to see the NCAA attempt a counter-reformation of its own within the next decade in response to the battering it has received as of late.

Everything will hinge on which path it pursues.

Enough diagnosis. It has taken me 25,000 words to get here, but if you put me in the hot seat, here is exactly what I would do.

The instinct is to start at the top, with the crown jewels, because that is where the money is and where the headlines are. But I am going to do the opposite and start at the bottom, because that is where the rebuild actually happens.

The cure is to build from the margins up.

Start with the part I know all too well, the part everyone else forgets.

Below the CFP and March Madness sit 88 other championships. Below the P4 sit close to 900 institutions across the G6, FCS, DII, and DIII. None of them own anything significant; they have no commercial crown jewel of their own.

Every top-down fix I’ve seen effectively leaves them for dead. So don’t leave them for dead.

Partner with the NCAA and become their full-suite, preferred operating partner. They take the governance, I take the commercial enterprise. 

Begin this partnership by grabbing the 88 championships that are not the CFP or March Madness, pulling them out of NCAA owner-operatorship, and restructuring them as conference-owned commercial entities, modeled after the CFP but purpose-built for the schools that actually play in them.

This “communist capitalism” is the greatest economic mechanism of sports properties (and companies like Costco) worldwide.

Then band together and build the commercial enterprise of those properties from the ground up. This is the unglamorous work, but it is the only part that rebuilds order instead of consolidating it to the few.

Now the mechanics, because you can build the right structure and still kill it with the wrong money.

If you are going to take private capital, do not, under any circumstances, take anything other than permanent capital.

The instrument must be compatible with the mission, or the mission dies.

Stewardship capital is evergreen rather than closed-end, earns on cash flows along the way rather than terminal exits, and does not salivate over the unlimited upside-participation that standard private equity desires. This type of capital does right by who it is in business with and makes no claim over the civic institution because it understands it has no right to.

Princeton, Stanford, Alabama, and Ohio State were all here 100 years ago, and they will be here 100 years from now. It is the responsibility of those in charge to steward those institutions for the next generation and the generation thereafter.

At the principle level, this is the formal opposite of the indulgence. Stewardship capital is the parable of the talents, which returns more than it was given.

At the mechanics level, at the school and conference tier, it looks like an investment arm paired with an operating group, funded by evergreen capital that participates in incremental value created rather than claiming ownership of institutional assets themselves. 

Reject the demands from ATC_008 of permanent ownership and unlimited upside and replace them with a licensed operating partnership that underwrites long-term cash yield from performance rather than from sale. 

Innovate on the MMR model by aligning structured capital to fund and operate the commercial enterprises of these institutions. License the rights from these school’s outside LLCs. Grow their commercial revenues across the 6 categories I outlined in ATC_008. Drive incremental revenue. Take 10-12% out of the cash flow of the business each year to return capital to your investors. Shoot for a 7 year payback period, and then operate into the long-term future with renewal windows every 3-5 years. 

Voilà. 👨🏼‍🍳🤌🏼

Only now do we get to the crown jewels, and here is where discernment matters most, because the tempting answer is a catastrophe when it is executed improperly.

Wave a magic wand and the cleanest move would be a full separation at the top: make the NCAA a pure governance nonprofit, carve-out their commercial assets into a separate commercial entity, raise something on the order of $5B+ to pour into the commercial build, and have that entity professionally managed and backed by private capital. 

The rising tide would certainly lift all boats, and it’s a big, big swing, but the key here is to apply the FIA model. 

For goodness sake please do not get rid of nor “sell” off a piece of the NCAA.

Instead, grant a conditional, renewable license to the commercial entity so you don’t lose your 100-year birthright. We’ve seen how time erodes all bargains, and a governing body that sells its upside on too long a horizon recreates the subordination it separated to escape. 

This will most likely never happen, and even if it did, you would need someone incredibly special in that seat who genuinely understands stewardship and has the heart posture and institutional knowledge to execute a long, slow rebuild with too many stakeholders to count.

And even then, if it is executed well, you would still be abandoning the G6 and FCS, along with the hundreds of DII and DIII institutions that do not own anything.

A full top-level professionalization is the tempting answer that, done without discernment, becomes the end of everything.

As I wrote in my recent LinkedIn post:

If a full FIA split isn’t possible, borrow from the IOC's symbol + diffusion of governance strategy, monetize the trademarks and IP of the NCAA as symbols, and push what governance you can down to the conferences.

License your five rings and let the conferences figure out how to handle employment.

↓↓↓

So here is the verdict: the cure is not the reactionary re-entrenchment that refuses the feedback all over again, and it is certainly not the totalizing professionalization that is sweeping collegiate athletics currently, threatening to dissolve the institution. 

The cure is a stepwise integration that rebuilds order from the margins up. 

The critique was legitimate, and the Flood we are experiencing now is certainly an over-correction, so integrate the true feedback and refuse to take it all at once.

To reform the NCAA, we must recognize that it is a 100-year old inherited institution, remember that we are stewards of this enterprise for the next 100 years, and apply those principles to the mechanics of how we actually “save college sports.”

Consider this plane landed. 🛬

If you are still reading, thank you. If you read all four-parts of this essay series, thank you even more.

I’ve done everything I can to synthesize as much information as possible and distill it down the best way possible to help you understand this space.

The NCAA and collegiate athletics is like nothing else in this world. This institution that requires our attention, care, and constant best foot forward.

The barbarians are at the gate, but my prayer is that we can find a way to genuinely steward it into the future.

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