Flock Talk: The Illusion of Order

 

There is something almost poetic about watching the NCAA rediscover enforcement.

For a decade, the organization drifted somewhere between fecklessness, ignorance and apathy. It clung to a shelled version of anti-trust exemption without ever doing the hard work necessary to sustain it. Amateurism was treated as a sacred shield rather than a legal theory in need of maintenance. The 1992 Olympics should have been the flashing warning light. The line between amateur and professional was already blurring. Instead of adapting, the NCAA closed its eyes and kept repeating the same script.

Coaches and athletic directors were not innocent bystanders in that era. They sold the illusion that college athletics were still “pure” while quietly acknowledging that pay-for-play dynamics had long since entered the bloodstream. The system was only “clean” if you chose not to look too closely.

Now, after years of rampant tampering and a transfer portal that functions more like open season than regulated free agency, the NCAA says it is ready to crack down again. “Significant penalties.” Modernized infractions process. Renewed commitment to enforcement.

It sounds decisive.

It is also likely to fail.

The Core Tension

Here is the part that cannot be disguised with memos and task forces.

Tampering rules, at their core, restrict player movement.

Yes, the NCAA will say it is punishing schools. Yes, they will frame this as cleaning up bad actors. But the functional effect of aggressive tampering enforcement is to inhibit conversations that might lead a player to better opportunities.

Meanwhile, a head coach at Ole Miss can be recruited away by LSU in the middle of a season. Coordinators move. Position coaches move. Administrators move. Agents negotiate. Buyouts are triggered. Contracts are rewritten.

No one calls that tampering.

Why should players operate under a more restrictive regime than the adults who recruit them?

That asymmetry is not just optics. It is legal vulnerability.

The Monopoly Problem

The NCAA’s fallback position is always contractual. The National Letter of Intent. Financial aid agreements. “You signed up for the rules.”

But that argument runs headfirst into the same problem that has haunted the association for years. When a single governing body with near-total market control restricts mobility and economic opportunity, courts tend to ask hard questions.

The Supreme Court already signaled in Alston that the NCAA does not get a free pass simply because it invokes amateurism. If enforcement efforts functionally limit a player’s ability to explore options while coaches and administrators face no comparable restraint, that looks less like competitive balance and more like coordinated market limitation.

The NCAA can punish schools all it wants. If the underlying structure restricts the labor market for athletes in a way that would be impermissible in almost any other industry, it will struggle to survive judicial scrutiny.

“Just Create a Players Union”

The most common response to all of this is simple in theory and wildly complex in practice: unionize the players and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement.

That sounds clean. It is not.

An employment relationship would have to be defined in a way that encompasses public and private universities across nearly every state. Labor law differs between public and private institutions. State laws vary. Conferences have different bylaws. Schools have different governance structures. Some are state actors. Some are not.

Who is the employer? The school? The conference? A national football association? The NCAA? A newly formed entity?

You cannot just wave at “a CBA” without solving the foundational question of who sits on the other side of the table.

The irony is that the NCAA’s historical refusal to clearly define athletes as employees is part of what makes a uniform solution so difficult now. The structure was built to avoid that classification. Reversing it requires untangling decades of legal positioning.

Strengths and Weaknesses in the Argument

There are strengths in the NCAA’s renewed posture.

Chaos benefits no one long term. The current tampering environment erodes trust between programs. It undermines roster stability. It incentivizes back-channel bidding wars that leave even compliant schools feeling disadvantaged. A transparent system with enforceable guardrails is not inherently unreasonable.

But here is the weakness in the enforcement push: it treats tampering as a morality problem instead of a market problem.

Tampering is rampant because the incentives demand it. When players can transfer freely, when NIL money is real, and when roster construction determines millions in revenue, schools will test the boundaries. Policing conversations does not eliminate the underlying demand for movement.

You can threaten suspensions and recruiting restrictions. You can modernize the infractions process. But unless the structure itself is reconciled with modern labor principles, enforcement will look selective, inconsistent and legally fragile.

And once again, the NCAA risks fighting yesterday’s battle.

The Bigger Picture

This is not about defending tampering.

It is about acknowledging that the market has already evolved beyond the rules designed to contain it.

If a coach can leverage opportunity midseason and leave for a better job, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that an athlete should be walled off from similar opportunity in the name of order.

The NCAA’s renewed crackdown may generate headlines. It may even produce a few high-profile penalties. But unless the organization addresses the fundamental imbalance between how it treats coaching labor and athlete labor, enforcement will continue to collide with the same anti-trust headwinds that have defined the last decade.

The 1992 Olympics showed us the line was already fading. We pretended otherwise. Now the curtain is fully pulled back.

You cannot restore amateurism with a memo.

You cannot regulate away a professional market with nostalgia.

And you probably cannot save a system built on selective mobility by pretending that punishing the schools does not ultimately restrict the players.

The winds of change that the NCAA once ignored are no longer blowing at the door.

They are already inside the house.