The NCAA watched its model crumble. Is it ready to build something better?

That college sports aren’t what they once were — students going out for teams, pulling on the school colors and playing for their classmates and alumni — has been obvious for generations. A multibillion-dollar industry built on the backs of unpaid labor was neither fair nor sustainable, and it probably shouldn’t have taken three more lawsuits against the NCAA — settled this week to the tune of almost $2.8 billion — for that organization to make sure the people who create the product actually share in its financial success.

Still, it can seem jarring.

“I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that this is the biggest change in the history of college sports,” said Gabe Feldman, the director of Tulane University’s sports law program and an expert on the NCAA, antitrust law and the relationship between the two.

An entity that argued for decades that its very essence — its base-level attraction — was that the players were amateurs will now be paying the players, in some cases handsomely. With the advent of name, image and likeness rights for athletes three years ago, it was clear this sea change was coming. But the sea change can still feel sudden.

“This is going to make NIL seem relatively quaint,” Feldman said. “And it’s not clear what the stopping point will be.”

Yes, clarity is lacking, and implementation of such a system will take time. Still, in the midst of all this tumult, it would behoove the people who resisted this shift — only to have it foisted upon them because the legal writing was spray-painted in giant letters on the wall — to get together now and say, “OK, what do college sports look like in 10 years? In 20? And how can we shape them? Because if we don’t, we’ll be shaped by the courts.”

More movement is already afoot. Be wary.

There are at least two private investor groups that have reportedly been in talks with schools about the possibility of injecting cash into athletic departments in exchange for a cut of future revenue. That’s potentially appealing to the people in charge of those athletic departments, in no small part because it’s easy. Why take stock of your entire operation, make hard decisions on cutting programs and staff, and completely overhaul how your budget is distributed — with a massive new entry for athlete pay — when a guy in a trench coat is leaning against a lamp post saying, “Psst. Over here. I got some cash”?

The alternative would be sitting down with, say, Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney and saying: “Now, Dabo. I know your contract says you make nearly $10.9 million annually. That’s not going to work going forward because we have to pay your quarterback and your linebackers and your linemen. Would $2 million a year be enough to get by in the greater Greenville, S.C. area?”

Those would be hard talks across every major college athletic department and coaching staff. So if someone’s offering new funding — given that, under terms of the settlement, each college would be allowed to spend roughly $20 million on what would amount to player “salaries” in the future — it’s going to be awfully tempting for schools to take it. And in taking money, they cede authority.

“If the free market is permitted to operate,” Feldman said, “then the schools are going to say, ‘The way that we’re going to win is by, yes, getting the best players, but also the best coach and the best facility.’ They’ll compete every way they can.

“And this competition now includes a much bigger line item for compensation to athletes. But that doesn’t mean they still don’t want to get the best coach.”

So why not recalibrate?

The reality is that the NCAA has been willfully behind in evaluating the merits of its model for four decades. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled it couldn’t set its own market for television broadcasts. In 1988, it lost the right to cap earnings for certain assistant basketball coaches. In 2014, it lost the ability to prevent former athletes from profiting off NIL. In 2021, it lost the ability to prevent athletes from earning perks beyond a regular scholarship. In 2024, it was faced with losing four more cases — the three that were settled this week, and another that’s ongoing — so it came up with billions of dollars.

So now, how to control the costs? Not to suppress payments to athletes, but to make sure the new system is sustainable and stable. Take the projected $20 million each school would be allowed to pay its athletes. That’s way more than athletes made, say, a decade ago, because by my math, $20 million > $0.

But that cap could be agreed to one year and questioned the next by a new athlete who — correctly — assesses that it’s not proportionate to what the athletes contribute.

“That [$20] million — or whatever the cap ends up being,” Feldman said, “absent federal legislation or absent a union, that cap can be challenged.”

Here’s how on-its-head the world of college sports is at the moment: Some school officials are starting to like the idea of athletes unionizing. Sound crazy? Maybe it’s not. Athletes unionizing would allow schools to collectively bargain with them. And collective bargaining takes antitrust law out of the equation.

Maybe that happens. Maybe it doesn’t. These settled lawsuits and the new landscape they will yield represents a beginning, not an end. What happens from here is still to be determined.

It’s important for the NCAA, for college presidents and athletic directors, to understand that. Don’t exhale and act like it’s settled, because it’s not. They all need to be predictive and productive — they need to lead — because if they aren’t and they don’t, they’re more likely to end up back in a courtroom or around a negotiating table, having decisions made for them, continuing a college sports tradition that should have ended long ago.