In a recent Mises article, Tho Bishop declared that the institution of college sports is currently under the grip of anarcho-tyranny, which he defined as “the state-driven phenomenon of criminalizing the enforcement of basic civic norms while increasingly restricting the liberties of law-abiding citizens.” The latest outrage comes from Louisiana State University in which its enfant terrible football coach, Lane Kiffin, has done what he always has done: push the boundaries of the rules of college athletics well beyond where they should be.
Presidents of the Southeastern Conference are meeting today to discuss the future of LSU in the SEC, with expelling the university from the league being one of the options on the table (although that happening is highly unlikely). What has led to this unprecedented situation? The decision by Kiffin to sign two players who already had signed NFL contracts but didn’t make those teams.
It has been a long-time NCAA policy that once an athlete signs a professional contract, his or her eligibility as a collegiate athlete is permanently ended. But Kiffin and LSU, however, decided instead to take the matter to court in front of a friendly judge in Baton Rouge who enjoined (as one might have expected) the NCAA and the SEC from legally forbidding LSU from putting the players on their rosters. (The SEC also has sued LSU over this issue, with the suit heard yesterday in federal court in Birmingham. In response, LSU did not place the two NFL players on its final football roster.)
That there are flexible to non-existent boundaries in college sports is due to one policy that both state and federal courts, beginning with the Supreme Court’s Alston decision in 2021: the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is to be held under strict anti-trust laws. Specifically, the high court ruled that the NCAA could no longer prevent collegiate athletes from financially benefitting from what the court called “Name, Image, and Likeness,” given that to prohibit NIL would be considered illegal “restraint of trade.” In other words, athletes could do product endorsements, monetize their social media accounts, or strike financial deals with business or booster organizations. (The infamous $50 handshakes, however, still violate NCAA rules).
Just that decision alone would have been highly significant, as financial compensation for student-athletes beyond their athletic scholarships was something the NCAA had always wanted to avoid, and for good reason: extra money directed to athletes meant less booster money for the colleges and universities themselves. However, Alston only set the table for more litigation.
RaeQuan Battle—who had transferred to West Virginia University after previously transferring to the University of Montana—was told by the NCAA that he had to sit out a year before playing for WVU. In fact, sitting out a year, except in special (and rare) circumstances, was the general rule in college sports. We had transfers on my track team at Tennessee in the early 1970s, and all of them dutifully waited a year to be eligible. Battle, however, didn’t want to wait and neither did athletes in other states.
In 2023, a federal judge in Charleston, West Virginia ruled that the NCAA’s transfer regulation was a “restraint of trade” and enjoined the organization from enforcing it. The NCAA gave in, thus creating the spectacle of the Transfer Portal in which every athlete is a free agent and during certain times of the year can transfer to another university and be immediately eligible at his or her new landing spot.
The combination of both NIL payments and perpetual free agency has created a situation in which athletes transfer to places that offer them more money. Unlike professional sports, athletes are not under contract and are free to pursue new programs—and those new programs are free to pursue the athletes, ostensibly only after they have entered the Transfer Portal—although it is obvious that the no-contact rule is regularly violated.
This is the situation of which Bishop wrote:
True absurdity came from the bench this Monday, with a Texas judge granting an injunction against the NCAA’s attempts to ban Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby from the sport after admitting to a laundry list of gambling-related offenses, including numerous bets on his own team and using third parties to place bets to avoid sportsbook restrictions. Regardless of one’s opinion about the normalization of sports gambling, the interests of both sports and gambling have in creating a firewall between active gambling by in-game participants is obvious. Despite this, the judicial system has prevented the most basic rule enforcement, and no longer meaningfully exists.
The NCAA is a private organization, yet, under the present judicial regime, it no longer is free to write and enforce the rules its member colleges and universities have agreed to obey. In the case of Texas Tech, a friendly local judge in Lubbock ruled that the NCAA could not enforce its own rules against a football player who had gambled on games in which he played.
People familiar with Division-I college sports and major professional sports know that one of the greatest fears leaders of these organizations have is point-shaving or athletes outright being paid by gamblers to throw games, especially with online sports gambling having gone mainstream and legal in 30 states. Any hint of gambling by athletes is taken very seriously, yet here is a judge claiming that prohibitions by the NCAA and the Big 12 (the conference in which Texas Tech plays) against players gambling on sports (and especially their own teams) are somehow illegal.
All this chaos has led to members of Congress introducing legislation, the Protect College Sports Act of 2026, with retired Alabama football coach Nick Saban openly endorsing it. Among other things, the bill “establishes requirements for name, image, or likeness (NIL) agreements for college student athletes and provides a limited antitrust exemption for schools and conferences to pool and sell certain college sports media rights.”
As Ludwig von Mises noted, when government intervenes in the economy, it creates new sets of problems that invite even more intervention. In the case of college sports, the original intervention of antitrust law has created results that now are said to require congressional intervention to stop the damage. Do not be surprised if the Protect College Sports Act of 2026 creates whole new problems that invite further intervention. Once again, Mises was right.
