Post 2 — How to Win a Lawsuit and Lose a Sport
He fought for three years to change the rules. The rules changed. So did everything else.
Jonathan Skrmetti fought for three years to give college athletes economic freedom. He won. A year later, he called the result a “train wreck” and said it was “sucking the life out of college sports.”
He wasn’t wrong. Neither was the reform.
This is a story about the difference between what a reward is designed to produce and what it actually produces.
The NCAA is the governing body for American college athletics — the organization that sets rules for roughly 500,000 student-athletes at more than 1,000 universities. For decades, it operated what courts would eventually classify as an anti-competition arrangement dressed as tradition. Athletes could not earn commercially on their name, image, or likeness. Players who transferred between schools were required to sit out a year before competing for their new program. The money generated by college athletics — television contracts, ticket revenue, licensing, bowl payouts — went to coaches, conferences, administrators, and facilities. The athletes who generated it went to class.
The legal challenge arrived in two movements. In June 2021, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the NCAA’s compensation rules violated antitrust law.1 Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence went further: “The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.” The NCAA understood that sentence as a warning. In July 2021, it opened name, image, and likeness rights — NIL — to all college athletes.
Transfer freedom followed a separate path. In December 2023, Skrmetti — then the Tennessee attorney general — led a coalition of state attorneys general in a federal antitrust suit targeting the NCAA’s transfer restrictions. The Department of Justice joined. By early 2025, the NCAA settled: unlimited annual transfers, no sit-out period, an open free-agent market at every position, at every program, every December.
Consider that a reward. It incentivized behavior accordingly.
In the 15-day transfer window that opened January 2, 2026, more than 10,500 college football players across all divisions entered the portal.
The behavior followed the reward exactly.
Chris Klieman had coached college football for 35 years. At Kansas State University, he went 54–34 in seven seasons, won a conference championship in 2022, and had years remaining on his contract. He retired on December 3, 2025, at 58. His formal statement cited family and personal health.
A few weeks later, in a candid interview with the Manhattan Mercury, he described what December had become:
“You get done playing Colorado, and come Monday, there’s 20 [players’ agents] that want to know a number, or they’re ready to go into the portal.”4
“That’s all I’m going to do the whole month of December and January, is work with whatever 80 of our kids to see if we can keep them, and if not, go work with 580 kids to fill the 30 spots we’re going to need. That’s not recruiting. That’s just finding ways to make deals.”
“We don’t have any guardrails and rules. Anybody can do whatever the heck they want. And that for all of us coaches, not just myself at Kansas State, I’ve talked to coaches across the country, we’re all kind of like, We need some guardrails so that somebody can’t spend $45 million, while somebody else is spending 15.”
Klieman had an estimated $22 to $30 million remaining on his contract. He did not blame the athletes. He walked away rather than manage the environment that replaced the one he had spent his career in.
The gap between his formal statement and his candid interview is worth a sentence. The public announcement cited family and health. The candid conversation named the portal. Formal language preserves relationships, protects a settlement, and leaves doors open. Candor surfaces when there is nothing left to protect.
Skrmetti — the man who won the lawsuit — called the portal a “train wreck” roughly a year later, and said it was “sucking the life out of college sports.”5 He also argued that the chaos was not the responsibility of the attorneys general who created it.
The architects of a new reward structure rarely own what the new reward produces.
The market the reform created behaved exactly as unconstrained markets do. NIL collectives — booster-funded entities structured as commercial sponsorship deals — now function as open talent markets. Programs with wealthy donor bases assemble rosters that programs without that depth cannot match. The reform targeted a system in which large programs had better facilities. It produced a system in which large programs have larger collective budgets. The form of the competitive imbalance changed. The imbalance did not.
The system has already begun redesigning the reward. The House v. NCAA settlement, approved June 6, 2025, established direct revenue sharing between schools and athletes — up to $20.5 million per school annually in the 2025–26 academic year, increasing over the ten-year term of the agreement.6 A new enforcement body, the College Sports Commission, announced its first CEO on the same day.
This is the second-order story, already in motion. The original reform produced behaviors that destabilized the system. That new reward structure will produce new behaviors. This story is not over.
What the reformers sought was a fairer system. What they built was a more efficient market. Those are not the same thing, and the distinction is not a criticism of the legal argument — the old system was legally and economically indefensible. The distinction is a caution for anyone designing rewards: the behavior you get is the behavior you reward.
They got what they asked for. Whether that is what they wanted is another matter.
In your organization, when you changed the rules to fix a problem, what new behavior did the new rules actually reward?
If you’re working through an incentive design challenge in your organization — or trying to understand why a strategy that looked right on paper isn’t producing the results you expected — I work with leadership teams on exactly these problems. You can reach me at wayne@waynerepich.com.
Behavior Follows Rewards. The pattern shows up wherever people are measured and rewarded.
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—Wayne
P.S. As we noted, this story is not over. Almost on cue: on June 3rd — three days before publication — former Alabama head coach Nick Saban sat before the Senate Commerce Committee and testified in support of the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan bill that would give the NCAA an antitrust exemption to enforce transfer limits, eligibility caps, and revenue-sharing guardrails. His verdict on what NIL and the transfer portal produced: “When the system becomes whoever raises the most money gets the best players, then we are no longer talking about college athletics as millions of fans and I have known it.” The behavior followed the reward exactly. Congress is now being asked to redesign the architecture.
Last time: Bonus post, June 3 — Egypt has produced the dominant players in squash for three generations. The system that built them was designed on purpose, built around one question.
Next: Wednesday, June 10 — Bonus post: Connecticut doubled its bottle deposit to incentivize recycling. What it incentivized was a four-state arbitrage market.
In development — Olympic athletes disqualified for losing; a corporation whose internal ranking system made employees compete against each other instead of the competition; a pro sports league that rewarded losing for four decades. More on the way.
Sources
National Collegiate Athletic Assn. v. Alston, 594 U.S. 69 (2021). Kavanaugh, J., concurring. Decided June 21, 2021. supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-512_gfbh.pdf
Tennessee Office of the Attorney General. “Tennessee Joins Antitrust Lawsuit Against NCAA.” December 7, 2023. tn.gov/attorneygeneral/news/2023/12/7/pr23-55.html
NCAA.com. “10 Numbers Breaking Down the 2026 College Football Transfer Portal.” January 16, 2026. ncaa.com/news/football/article/2026-01-16/10-numbers-breaking-down-2026-college-football-transfer-portal
Seaton, Ned. “I’d Die If I Kept Doing This Job | Former K-State FB Coach Talks About Why He Left, What’s Next.” The Manhattan Mercury, January 10, 2026. themercury.com/k_state_sports/id-die-if-i-kept-doing-this-job-former-k-state-fb-coach-talks-about/article_213a7517-5d35-4d71-9658-4f97136a52ce.html
Schrotenboer, Brent. “College Football Transfer Portal Is ‘Train Wreck.’ Ask Man Who Ignited It.” USA Today, January 29, 2026.
In re College Athlete NIL Litigation, No. 4:20-cv-03919 (N.D. Cal.). Final approval order, Judge Claudia Wilken, June 6, 2025. $2.8B over 10 years; $20.5M annual school cap for 2025–26. espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/45467505
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