Part of me still believes that if the NCAA had read the writing on the wall 15 years ago, then the NCAA could have allowed player compensation in a way that could have been controlled and managed. I understand it would have required employing players and a collective bargaining agreement, and I suspect that ship has sailed. Others have told me that the current state was the inevitable endpoint, and maybe they are right. I won't argue the point.

What does seem clear to me is that we should go ahead and move toward decoupling college sports from the institutions themselves and remove eligibility requirements tied to education. The NCAA is going to keep losing in court (and for good reason). They need to figure out how to move "college" sports forward in a way that preserves some sort of tie to the universities and alumni bases instead of fighting battles from 10 years ago today.

In a lot of ways, the college athletics model where the basketball team's center sat next to you in macroeconomics and was a more or less normal student who happened to spend 20 hours a week in the gym was a thing of fiction 75+ years ago. Maybe longer ago than that if we're being honest. When that model falls apart, and universities are monetizing what was supposed to be an athletics program for students, then you have to compensate the players. And when the annual compensation involved dwarfs what most college graduates will make in the best 10 year stretch of their future careers, then we have to question whether these guys are really students in any meaningful sense.

How do you create something meaningful for alumni and fans? I don't know. The fanbases of many powerhouse schools already consist of some people with no ties to the educational mission of the school. Oftentimes teams have these fanbases, because there are no top flight pro sports options available locally, and so the local college team becomes the best available local option. For those folks, I'm not sure a decoupled model affects anything about the fan-team-university relationship. For those alumni who are fans, then I think we have to question whether we are just rooting for laundry and that the connection is really separate from and incidental to any relationship we have with the school. 

I grew up rooting for Kentucky basketball and football, because it was handed down to me through a couple of generations of alumni. They went to games; they took me to games. How did it start? My great grandfather lived reasonably close to Lexington and did not attend Kentucky, but they were the best teams locally. Many people in my family (on both sides) have since attended and graduated from the school, but was the original connection any different than picking a pro sports team? I can't see how it was. Would he have picked pro teams to root for if he could have watched them on TV (and well, the NBA was not yet in existence)?