Abstract
Big Ten Conference (Big Ten) and Southeastern Conference (SEC) and name, image, and likeness (NIL) form contracts replicate the mobility-suppressing features of the National League’s uniform player contract from 1880 to 1917 and the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA’s) early rules against pay for play. Professional baseball clubs and NCAA schools drew from athletes who played in both arenas during the 1880s through 1910s. These agreements prohibited the most marketable players from contracting with another club. Likewise, NCAA rules prohibited athletes from being paid to enroll or play and required them to complete one year of study before playing. Like their baseball ancestors, college athletes today are so heavily constrained by adhesive NIL contracts that they cannot capitalize on their true labor market value. Comparing the Big Ten and SEC NIL contracts to early baseball examples, the similarities in overreach are apparent, when courts found that baseball form contracts lacked mutuality or consideration. These adhesive and unconscionable contracts recontextualize baseball contracts from a century ago. This article serves as a legal guide to remediating or challenging these NIL agreements.
INTRODUCTION
A. Background: Unenforceable Player Contracts and Unenforced College
Amateurism Rules
College and professional athletics are separate enterprises. But their early histories tell a different story, one of intertwined athletic labor markets. By 1909, university leaders were concerned about the overlapping demand from professional baseball clubs (as they were called) and collegiate teams for good players. This phenomenon coincided with the emergence of rival professional baseball leagues from the 1880s through the 1910s. Baseball clubs in new leagues poached good players, primarily from the National League. This opened a labor market that was tightly gripped by the National League’s reserve clause, a one-sided contract option that clubs continuously renewed to retain their best players. Labor market competition boosted salaries during the “baseball wars” between rival leagues.
While elite players benefited from occasional windows of expanded employment opportunities, less talented baseball players found a different labor market—a “summer baseball” labor market that hired some college players who were amateurs while playing for their schools in the spring. In other words, the labor market for professional baseball players included college students who sought summer employment, likely in semiprofessional leagues. A second labor market opened for college students: an underground economy where players were paid surreptitiously in different sports. The emergence of two hybrid professional–collegiate labor markets—summer baseball, and secretly paid athletes in the academic year in a variety of sports— led to conflict in the newly formed Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS), later renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
Courts played a large role in the professional baseball wars. When a club from a rival league signed a valuable player, the former club often sued the player for breach of contract. The club sought an injunction to compel the player to return and perform on the contract. Universities and colleges faced a different dilemma—(1) keeping outside, professional athletes from their contests and (2) ensuring that college players were not paid to play for their schools. Overall, these efforts failed. And since that time, an underground labor market for college athletes has coexisted with rigorous amateurism rules.
This history is relevant. To begin with, schools and NCAA power conferences incorporate some of baseball’s classic adhesion terms, highlighted by the reserve clause, in name, image, and likeness (NIL) form contracts. This article enumerates legal defects in these baseball contracts, and suggests that court decisions from the 1880s through 1910s offer useful legal blueprints for college athletes to challenge their NIL contracts.
This article raises a broader institutional concern. The new NIL model is an ingeniously reformulated version of the NCAA’s original treatment of athletes in 1906. Then, and now, students cannot be employed as athletes nor paid to play. Then, and now, some students were paid to play in various subterfuges, known to leaders in higher education. This article shows that some leaders sought to address the “professionalism” problem in their midst and the undercurrent of athletic money that threatened to erode the core mission of their schools. Their reform efforts failed. More than a century later, the problems they identified have
grown. Power conference schools today are turbocharging a highly successful business model for athletics. At the same time, their core academic enterprise struggles with severe funding cuts.
B. New Legal Problems: NIL Form Contracts in the House Settlement Era
In this introduction, I highlight recent changes that have culminated in a new NIL and revenue-sharing model for college athletic programs, including new terminology that is associated with these changes. In the collegiate sphere, athletes did not
mount a successful challenge to college amateurism rules until O’Bannon v. National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n in 2014. Ed O’Bannon, a former college basketball star, claimed that the NCAA violated the Sherman Act by requiring athletes to forgo compensation while the NCAA sold their NIL rights to a video game producer. The case highlighted the NCAA’s exploitation of the NCAA’s strict amateurism rules. By 2019, California enacted the nation’s first college NIL law, prohibiting a school or athletic association from penalizing an athlete for making money from an NIL deal. By 2021, at least twenty-five states enacted NIL laws. The same year, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the NCAA was a monopoly that unreasonably restrained competition in providing college athletes with educational benefits.
None of these disruptions to the amateurism model forced the NCAA to enact major reforms. However, In re College Athletic NIL Litigation (commonly referred to as House v. NCAA) caused the NCAA and power conferences to adopt a new model where schools provide direct payments to athletes.House was a consolidated class action antitrust lawsuit over the NCAA’s restrictions on paying athletes from broadcast revenues that generate billions of dollars annually for the association and
power conferences. In July 2025, Judge Claudia Wilken approved a settlement to pay $2.78 billion over the next ten years to eligible athletes from 2016 to 2024. The settlement also allowed schools to share revenue and directly pay for their NIL.
This article exposes legal problems in the emerging NIL/revenue-sharing model. The power conferences adopted NIL form contracts that impose unreasonable restraints on their players. In consideration for pay from a school, athletes grant broad NIL rights to their school and conference, and to their business partners. In particular, NIL form contracts for the Big Ten Conference (Big Ten) and Southeastern Conference (SEC) have unconscionable, adhesive, and indefinite terms that replicate baseball contracts that courts refused to enforce.
For example, the SEC contract prohibits an athlete from entertaining a competitive offer while under contract. The Big Ten contract allows a school a continuous right to adjust NIL pay. Neither contract guarantees pay for athletes, but athletes can be required to reimburse schools for leaving the institution. Schools have a right to terminate an NIL contract at their discretion. Athletes have no correlative right to terminate their contract. A school can extend the term of an NIL contract past the deadline for a player to enter the transfer portal. The player receives no independent consideration for portal forbearance. If the player enters the portal while under contract, the player owes damages to the school. As form contracts, these agreements leave little or no room for negotiation. The
amount of compensation is negotiable—but seemingly, nothing else. And even that amount is subject to a school’s unilateral rights for reducing pay or clawing back expended money.
Lawsuits arising from these take-it-or-leave-it contracts appear to be inevitable. They pose issues related to adhesion, illusory terms, good faith and fair dealing, unjust enrichment, restrictive covenants, unfair business and trade practices, unauthorized exploitation of publicity rights, and more. These problems will likely emerge and fester over the coming years until court rulings establish clear legal boundaries of permissible and illicit contract terms.
This article explains how courts adjudicated contract disputes arising from the reserve clause. The Big Ten and SEC NIL form contracts appear to embed similar miscalculations about their enforceability. This analysis analyzes past contract disputes and court rulings to suggest outcomes in future NIL contract lawsuits. Courts frown on club-imposed contracts because they violate common law doctrines that protect a person’s right to sell his labor in a free market.
I. THE UNIFORM PLAYER CONTRACT IN PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL AND NCAA AMATEURISM RULES
A. The Failed Ideal of College Amateurism
The seeds of the NCAA’s current NIL and athlete transfer problems were sown at roughly the same time—from about 1885 to 1890. Intercollegiate athletics started in 1852. By the 1880s, critics were concerned about “professionalism” in college athletics. Today, this term refers to pay-to-play. Following eighteen deaths of college football players in one season, President Theodore Roosevelt insisted that schools manage this situation. College leaders formed the Intercollegiate Athletic
Association of the United States (hereafter, National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA).
The NCAA took up the professionalism problem early in its history. Addressing the association’s convention in 1907, Professor Luther Gulick warned, “The professional in competition with the amateur throws out the amateur.” Professor W. L. Dudley observed that a school’s “professional spirit” conflicted with its academic identity: “Alumni and students exhibit the professional spirit by attempting to secure players for their college teams by methods which are in violation of the principles of amateur sport.”
Most schools believed that rules could ensure an amateur competition model. At its first convention, they passed amateurism rules: full-time enrollment of an athlete, loss of eligibility for accepting payment, no possibility to play for another school, and a limit of four years of eligibility.
These rules were not drawn up in a vacuum. College leaders debated the problem of “professionalism” in their baseball games. Good college players played in summer leagues for pay. Professors debated whether they could still be eligible for college teams. The debate, assigned to a committee, was never resolved. But the association’s newly instituted amateurism rules bore a striking resemblance to the reserve clause in professional baseball.
The following discussion explores the instability surrounding the uniform player contract and its reserve clause in baseball from the 1880s through the adoption of collective bargaining in the 1970s. At its core, the reserve clause was a
club option in a uniform player contract. It prevented good players from offering their services in a competitive labor market. Players could not bargain over the restrictive clause.
Similarly, the NCAA’s amateurism rules tied a player to his institution. The rules made this relationship last through the player’s four years of eligibility.And if he played for pay—apart from the unresolved summer baseball question—he would lose eligibility. Reports swirled that professional players were added to some college teams. While the college baseball players were not paid during their school season, some were paid in a summer league.
The historical trendlines for major league baseball and NCAA athletes are remarkably similar. This history shows that the evolution of free agency for certain baseball players—and later for football and basketball players—charts a path for college athletics today. To make these historical lessons clear, the following analysis intersperses recent and current developments in college athletics in the discussion of baseball’s early experience with the reserve clause.
B. Labor Market Competition Frayed the Reserve Clause in Professional
Baseball, and the NCAA’s Amateurism Rules
1. Emergence of the Reserve Clause in Professional Baseball
This section lays a foundation to explain how the new NIL and revenue-sharing system is evolving. As in past disputes involving club contracts that prevent players from marketing their talents, courts will likely free college athletes from the most restrictive and unconscionable terms of their NIL contracts. The section shows that major league baseball and college athletics evolved from purely amateur to professionalized sports. Competitive labor markets affected both enterprises. In
response, the National League and NCAA, respectively, imposed contract terms and rules for baseball clubs and schools to control player movement. In court cases involving professional players who signed contracts with new clubs, rulings often allowed them to move.
Baseball started as an amateur sport. As the sport professionalized, clubs used a uniform player contract to reserve a player indefinitely. This idea mimicked exclusive performance contract clauses for theater and opera stars with unique and extraordinary talent. Johanna Wagner, an opera star, had an exclusive contract to perform for a theater in London but agreed to perform for a rival theater for more pay. In Lumley v. Wagner, an English court enjoined her from performing for the second theater while she was under contract.
American courts adopted the Lumley injunction. In Daly v. Smith, a case more visible to baseball owners than the English Lumley case, a state court in 1874 enjoined Fanny Morant Smith, a star actress, from performing for another company.Daly v. Smith may have influenced the creation of the reserve clause, a powerful tool
that helped baseball clubs monopolize and control their best players. This much is certain: The reserve clause responded to “revolvers” in the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players—players who moved from one club to another for better contracts, like Johanna Wagner and Fanny Morant Smith.
By 1876, the National League replaced the National Association. The latter suffered from too much player movement from one club to another. The experience suggested some artificial restraints on player mobility were necessary for a league to maintain a competitive balance. Thus, the groundwork was laid for baseball’s adoption of a buyer’s monopoly.
The National League began to control labor market competition between their clubs. Rules protected rosters from player defections by requiring clubs to boycott players who tried to move to another club during the season and by prohibiting clubs from tampering with player contracts. After the 1879 season, each club could reserve five players. Relatedly, league rules prohibited them from hiring another club’s reserved player. The reserve clause, an exclusive option to renew a player’s contract for the next season, monopolized the labor market for the best players. Within its first year, the reserve clause caused player compensation to fall sharply.
A legal commentator in 1916, looking back on three decades of legal disputes in baseball, incisively remarked that the “so-called ‘reserve’ and ‘release’ clauses of the
player’s contract … were inserted with a view of securing a maximum control over the player’s services, and of according him the minimum of enforceable rights.” These were classic form contracts, twenty paragraphs, with highly advantageous terms to the club. Paragraph 14 of the standard contract was onerous to players. The contract established the authority of the club over every aspect of the player’s conduct and life during a season. Paragraph 18 was highly restrictive, containing a “reserve clause” that allowed clubs to employ their best players indefinitely— and that, notably, had grown to fourteen players on each club.
While the National League imposed a strict reserve clause on its players, clubs from competing leagues signed National League players. Courts favored labor market competition in this period. Allegheny Baseball Club v. Bennett may have offered the first glimpse into this phenomenon. Charles Bennett was under contract to play for the Pittsburgh club in 1883 in the American Association. After he joined Detroit’s
National League club, the Allegheny club lost its lawsuit to compel him to play in Pittsburgh. The court said that a contract such as this “will not be enforced when it is doubtful whether an agreement has been concluded (citation omitted).”
John Montgomery Ward’s contract dispute offered another early example of litigation over the reserve clause. After the club exercised its reserve clause option to retain him for the 1890 season, Ward implied that he was negotiating with another employer. The club sued Ward to prevent him from moving. Distinguishing this case from Wagner and Smith, the court found that the reserve clause failed to make a new contract for the ensuing season.
The Ward case was typical for the period when clubs in the upstart leagues poached the best National League players. Today, Ward is a blueprint for players to successfully challenge NIL form contracts in the new post-House settlement. This conclusion is not based, however, on one landmark case. A consistent line of cases ruled in a similar vein, when a club in a rival league poached a player.
Interleague competition eroded the National League’s price-fixing powers under the reserve clause, causing player salaries to double from 1883 through 1917. This period also marked the emergence of the first player’s union, the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, in November 1889. Players owned the league. Their new league lasted one year. It had a disruptive impact, spurring lawsuits in 1890 and 1891. But its collapse ended labor market competition. The National League clawed back salary gains from good players.
Most courts refused to go along with this organized suppression of labor market competition. In cases from 1902 through 1914 involving players who jumped their contracts for other clubs, courts determined that the uniform player contract either lacked mutuality or the dispute was not suitable for equity.Brooklyn Baseball Club v. McGuire reasoned that a contract terminable on ten days’ notice by one party against a party who was bound for one year could not be enforced in equity.American Base Ball & Athletic Exhibition Co. v. Harper denied injunctive relief to prevent three players from the St. Louis Cardinals players from jumping to the St. Louis Browns. Baltimore Baseball Co. v. Hayden dissolved a temporary injunction where two players who were under contract for the 1905 season to the Baltimore club accepted offers in June to play for the York club. Finding no mutuality in a contract that gave a club a right to terminate the agreement with ten day’s notice while holding a player to perform for a year, Cincinnati Exhibition Co. v. Johnson refused to issue a Lumley injunction where a player jumped from a National League club to a Federal League club one week into the 1914 season. Similarly, in American League Club of Chicago
v. Chase, a player under contract to an American League club jumped to the Federal League in June. The court refused to continue a temporary injunction because the dominant baseball leagues maintained an oppressive contract system.
Only two cases over this twelve-year period protected a club from poaching— and in both cases, the court cited the unique and extraordinary talent of the player. Philadelphia Ball Club, Ltd. v. Lajoie was an exceptional case. Twelve years later, Cincinnati Exhibition Co. v. Marsans, rendered a similar ruling. Considering how much Marsans was paid in the 1916 contract depicted below in Figure 1 ($6000), and comparing this pay to top-end salaries of that time, Marsans was not paid as a unique and extraordinary talent.
2. Rise of Professionalism in College Athletics
Professionalism in college athletics resembled baseball’s emergence from amateurism in 1869 to a maturing professional model in the 1880s. During this time, college athletics evolved into a hybrid form of amateurism–professionalism. The explosive growth of intercollegiate games and zealous school spirit drove this transformation.
The NCAA’s recent NIL experience has re-created the experience of early National League players with the reserve clause. At least twenty-five states enacted NIL laws from 2019 through 2021 that prohibited the NCAA from penalizing an athlete for earning endorsement pay. Also, the Supreme Court questioned college amateurism in National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n v. Alston,.
The floodgates for NIL deals soon opened. NIL deals began to mirror free agency deals in de facto pay-for-play agreements, akin to player poaching of National League clubs by rivals in the American Association, Players League, and Federal League. NIL deals grew in value. As a result, the NCAA issued an interim
rule that allowed athletes to sign NIL deals, but the rule failed to achieve its stated purpose to restrict pay-for-play transactions. The futility of the NCAA’s interim rule matched the ineffectiveness of the no-poaching truce between the National League and the American Association.
Current NIL developments mirror the labor market churn during the rise of the National League, when clubs tried unsuccessfully to use the reserve clause to stifle player contract jumping. Just as the National League’s rules could not contain an exploding labor market, the NCAA’s de facto labor market is on a similar path. In 2024, the NIL market for college athletes was estimated at $1.7 billion. A pay- to-play market flourished, disguised as NIL deals and funded by corporations.
Like the National League in 1876, the NCAA reacted to the rapid expansion of its labor market for college athletes by implementing stricter rules to limit athletes from transferring to another school for a better NIL deal.
An important, second historical lens improves our understanding of the parallels between early professional baseball and current NIL developments. Just as rival baseball leagues and clubs expanded the labor market for professional athletes (see Part I.B.1), intercollegiate athletics operated with a shadow labor market from its inception in the 1870s. Professional and college labor markets for baseball players openly overlapped, evidenced by college athletes who played as amateurs during a school year and as professionals during the summer.
Intercollegiate games started in the early 1870s. Even then, critics noticed that college athletes were being subsidized by “extravagant expenditure.” The National Association of Amateur Athletes of America published principles of amateurism in 1879. Edward Mussey Hartwell’s Physical Training in American Colleges and
Universities added another voice to reform college athletics, declaring in 1885, “Professionalism has done much within the last five years to bring discredit upon college sports.” Pointing to the overlapping labor markets in major league and college baseball, Hartwell advocated for amateurism rules: “When college men are willing to travel with professional ball players, and especially under assumed names, it is time for college authorities to recognize and regulate college athletics.”
Thus, when the NCAA convened for the first time, the group embraced academics over athletics and amateurism above professionalism. The group declared that it “discourages commercialism and encourages true amateurism.” Its first convention set seven rules for player eligibility, emphasizing a player’s standing as an amateur and student. But many academic leaders were skeptics of the new athletic association.
Sports would undermine their education mission. Some college leaders worried that professionalism among college athletes would corrupt students.
A debate held on January 2, 1909, at the annual proceedings foreshadowed the current tensions between pay-for-play and college amateurism. Summer baseball presented a problem. By then, college baseball had been played for decades. Some college students played for pay in summer leagues. This alarmed some college leaders. They wondered if this should be allowed.
One side of this debate was pragmatic. Proponents of a rule to allow pay for summer baseball argued that schools tolerated the situation for years with no harm. They thought that summer baseball did not pose a threat to amateurism
for other sports. But some faculty foresaw the current state of NIL collegians who move from school to school for more money. College athletics would become commercialized, spreading to other sports.
Collegiate amateurism never escaped the undertow of professionalism. By 1914, The Atlantic exposed sham methods to evade amateurism rules. Soon, reports surfaced of coaches arranging recruiting inducements for prized athletes. Schools rationalized that “all the others are doing it” and “we are doing very little
of it compared to our competitors.” In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation issued a lengthy analysis of college athletics, noting that many athletic departments “subsidized” the employment of good athletes. Football, in particular, was commercialized in ways that are familiar a century later. Recruitment practices from the 1920s resemble NIL deals today. Publicity for college athletics in the 1920s hinted at the explosion of publicity rights for athletes a century later.
3. Linking the Reserve Clause in Professional Baseball and College Amateurism Rules to
College NIL Form Contracts
Professional baseball and college athletics developed at roughly the same time, from about 1880 through the 1920s. They drew from a supply of athletic talent in labor markets that overlapped to some degree with each other. Uniform player contracts controlled the most marketable players by forbidding them from contracting with another club. Likewise, NCAA rules forbade athletes from
being paid to enroll or to play and required them to be enrolled for one year before becoming eligible to play.
The uniform player contract for Armando Marsans in 1916 (Fig. 1), and the rules and regulations for University of Pennsylvania athletes in 1893 (Fig. 2), depict the one-sided nature of these relationships. When selected passages from the Big Ten and SEC NIL contracts are compared to these examples, the similarities in institutional overreach are apparent.
These examples bear on recent and current developments in NIL for college athletes. As this article demonstrates in Part II.B, NIL contracts in the Big Ten and SEC contain adhesive and unconscionable terms, like early baseball contracts. Earlier courts found that the player contracts lacked mutuality or consideration, or were beyond their equitable powers to prevent the player from moving. The drafters of the Big Ten and SEC form contracts have recontextualized versions of contracts from a century ago by severely limiting an athlete’s negotiation rights. These NIL contracts are vulnerable to the same types of lawsuits and outcomes.
As for college athletics, the rules in the 1893 University of Pennsylvania regulations echo today in the Big Ten and SEC contracts. Rule I prohibited pay for play. Like Rule I, NIL contracts bar employment. While the restrictions on professional baseball players and current college athletes differ to a degree, they suppress the operation of a free labor market. Rule II, Section 3, barred an athlete from participating for one year if the individual transferred to another school. While that rule is not repeated verbatim in the SEC contract, the agreement prohibits the athlete and agent from entertaining a competitive offer. The individual would need to transfer to another school outside any NIL deal framework—and only after arriving, be free to negotiate, probably with a weaker hand.
The Big Ten NIL contract (Fig. 3), with a provision for an exclusive and irrevocable grant of collegiate NIL rights, raises a serious question about whether an athlete has anything else to grant to a school outside the conference. This re-creates the significant obstacle for any athlete who wanted to transfer to a University of Pennsylvania team—loss of a year to compete. The SEC NIL contract (Fig 4), with severe restrictions placed in athletes for pursuing and receiving interest from other schools, is also similar to the transfer obstacles imposed in 1893 by the University of Pennsylvania. In sum, the Big Ten and SEC have used form contracts—reminiscent of baseball form contracts with a strict, club-friendly reserve clause—to diminish pay for players in the new NIL era. Like their baseball ancestors, college athletes are so heavily constrained by adhesive contract conditions that they have little hope of capitalizing on their true athletic labor market value.
II. THE NEW RESERVE CLAUSE: BIG TEN AND SEC NIL FORM CONTRACTS
This part presents original research on NIL contracts. The discussion centers on the NIL form contracts for the Big Ten and SEC conferences. Part II.A describes the research methods and sources for acquiring these contracts. This explanation is important because it reveals what is not known about these form contracts. Who drafted them? Are schools required to adopt them? Can athletes bargain for different terms? Do the conferences review and approve each school’s NIL form contract? Have these contracts—which were self-described as memorandums of understanding—changed with the implementation of the longer contracts referenced in these documents?
While there are many unanswered questions about NIL form contracts, the following discussion could be the first legal analysis of these agreements. Part II.B begins with a chart that extracts key terms from the contracts. Terms are similar but not identical. There are important differences, too. Athletes grant exclusive NIL rights in the Big Ten contract, while SEC athletes grant partial, nonexclusive rights. This difference seems to be advantageous for SEC athletes because they retain some ownership of NIL rights. But the SEC contract, unlike the Big Ten contract, strictly prohibits athletes and their agents from entertaining competitive offers while the NIL contract is in effect. If an NIL contract terminates after a transfer portal period opens and closes for athletes, how do they acquire information about their market value? This appears to be a functional equivalent of the reserve clause in baseball contracts, depriving the athlete of any ability to negotiate a better agreement.
Part II.B identifies seven legal vulnerabilities in these NIL contracts.
A. Methods and Sources for Acquiring NIL Form Contracts
I acquired form contracts in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made to over ninety schools in the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC, Pac-12 Conference, Conference USA, Mid-American Conference, Ohio Valley Conference, Mountain West Conference, Atlantic 10 Conference, America East Conference, and Big Sky Conference. My request sought NIL and revenue-sharing form contracts, and
agreements for NIL collectives and athlete agents. Most of my requests were unanswered or denied. Some states have enacted NIL shield laws, another factor that may have led to nonresponses.
I received NIL contracts from the University of Minnesota, and another Big Ten school that later limited my ability to publicize its disclosure, and Boise State University; an NIL athlete disclosure form from UNLV; NIL collective contracts from Southern Illinois University (Carbondale), and University of California- Davis; and an agent registration form from the University of Toledo. In short, most of my FOIA requests did not yield requested documents.
During my research, an ESPN reporter who was writing on NIL contracts asked for my views on whether these agreements constituted an employment relationship. He shared a form contract from the SEC, and a clause from a Big Ten school’s NIL contract that referred to adjustable NIL compensation. Also, during that time, Athletes.org filed NIL contracts to the docket in the House case. These contracts came from the University of Minnesota, University of Kansas, and University of Arizona. Due to the emerging dominance of Big Ten and SEC conferences in college athletics, I focused my analysis on their form agreements.
B. Key Terms of the Big Ten and SEC NIL Form Contracts
The complete Big Ten and SEC NIL form contracts have been submitted to this journal to verify their contents. Table 1 summarizes key provisions.
Table 1 shows that an individual athlete grants NIL publicity rights to the school in exchange for payment. The athlete and school can use a blank grid in the contract to specify the amount and schedule of payments. In the Big Ten, the athlete’s grant of rights is “irrevocable” (Row 1) and “exclusive … without limitation” (Row 7). This grant lasts for the athlete’s eligibility under NCAA rules, typically five years (Footnote 1 of the Big Ten form contract, and Footnote 8 in the SEC contract). Athletes in the SEC grant more limited NIL rights. The grant is “nonexclusive,” except for rights related to the school’s “products, services, or brands” (Row 7).
Both contracts prohibit the athlete’s revocation. The Big Ten agreement states that the athlete’s grant of rights is “irrevocable without limitation” (Row 8), while the SEC athlete grants the conference an irrevocable right to “title, and interest in ‘work product,’ including ‘tweets, texts, photographs, videos, music, audio/ sound recordings, artwork, hashtags and other material, information or works of authorship” (Row 8).
Athletes agree to broad sublicensing and assignment of their NIL rights. The Big Ten athlete grants sublicensing rights to the conference, NCAA, and third parties (Row 2), while the grant in the SEC contract is to third parties, including multimedia entities (Row 2). Relatedly, the assignee of athlete rights in the Big Ten is the school, Big Ten Conference, licensee, and sublicensee in multiple tiers (Row 3). The SEC provides a more limited definition of assignee, restricted to the athlete’s collegiate activities—the school, SEC, NCAA, or promotor or organizer of collegiate games or competitive events in which the school participates (Row 3).
The scope of NIL rights in both conference agreements is expansive (Row 5). The Big Ten’s NIL contract broadly applies to the athlete’s “rights of publicity,” “personality rights,” trademarks, other intellectual property rights. While the SEC definition is similar, it contains personal attributes such as visible tattoo artwork, and computer-generated extensions, including virtual, computer generated, hologram, avatar, and caricature representations of the individual.
Consistent with the breadth of these assigned publicity rights, the contracts broadly define their commercial scope. The Big Ten contract has “no limitation on the type of commercial use by the institution, conference, or licensees” (Row 4). The SEC contract is narrower, limited to “advertising, marketing, publicity and other activities that promote, or identify student–athlete with the institution, the SEC, the association, or any promotion … of college athletic games or competitive events in which the Institution may participate” (Row 4). But this scope broadens to include “Esports, video games, virtual competitions, and nonfungible tokens [NFTs], and similar digital items” (Row 4).
The NIL agreements impose significant costs and barriers when the athlete transfers to another school. A Big Ten school’s payment obligations terminate when athlete enters the portal or transfers. Also, the athlete must reimburse school in pr-rated amounts for consideration paid forward (Row 9). The SEC agreement imposes more restrictions on the athlete, stating that neither the athlete nor agent shall initiate, solicit, entertain, negotiate, accept, or discuss any inquiry, proposal, or offer from any other college or university concerning transferring or enrolling or granting a publicity right or license, or consider a competitive proposal. In addition, the athlete or agent must immediately notify the school when they receive a communication of interest or an offer (Row 9).
Both conferences own the athlete’s NIL rights after the individual’s eligibility ends. The Big Ten contract says that the school and sublicensees are not required to discontinue use of the athlete’s NIL content (Row 11). The SEC is more limited, stating that the school shall not obtain ownership rights, other than the license granted in this agreement (Row 11).
The Big Ten agreement explicitly states that the athlete is not an “employee or servant,” nor does the Agreement create a joint venture or partnership (Row 12). The
SEC contract has a similar limitation, stating that the athlete’s relationship with the school is that of an independent contractor. The contract also states that nothing in this agreement is intended, or should be construed, to create a partnership, joint venture or employment relationship (Row 12).
Under the Big Ten agreement, the athlete must use the school’s dispute resolution process (Row 14). The SEC agreement similarly states that schools are free to incorporate their own dispute resolution procedures (Row 14). Both NIL agreements contain universal waivers of school liability. The Big Ten’s “limitation of liability” provides complete immunity from liability for all parties affiliated with the school, conference, and business partners. The SEC’s release is more limited, stating that the athlete grants a complete and absolute liability release, and promises not to sue the school. While this is limited to the school, the athlete more broadly waives any right to enjoin, restrain or interfere with use of their NIL or the exploitation of the school’s rights as provided in the agreement.
In sum, the Big Ten and SEC contracts transfer ownership and distribution of athlete publicity rights in exchange for compensation. To the extent they define a postcontract negotiation process, their terms favor schools, not athletes. This lopsided arrangement extends to every other part of the agreements—a dispute resolution process determined by the school, liability waivers that apply to schools and downstream users of athlete NIL, and waiver of an athlete’s potential right to be an employee or business partner with the school. Payment is the only clear benefit to the athlete. However, the contracts entail such extensive stripping of athlete rights related to future negotiation and resolution of disputes that these procedural inequities appear likely to affect the amount of pay that an athlete receives by the end of the contract.
III. LEGAL VULNERABILITIES TO ENFORCING THE
BIG TEN AND SEC FORM CONTRACTS
This article demonstrates that NIL form contracts replicate the mobility suppressing features of both the uniform player contract from 1880 to 1917, and the NCAA’s long-standing rules against pay for play. A recent court opinion, MLB Players Inc. v. DraftKings, Inc., helps to reveal the adhesive and unconscionable vulnerabilities in the Big Ten and SEC contracts.
MLB Players, Inc. (MLBPI) is a subsidiary of the Major League Baseball Players Association, the union that negotiates and administers a collective bargaining agreement with Major League Baseball (MLB). Players assign their NIL group rights to the Players Association. MLBPI is the exclusive group licensing agent for active players. This entity “possesses the exclusive right to use, license, and sublicense those players’ [NILs] for any commercial marketing, promotional activity,
or product in which MLB players’ group licensing rights are implicated.”
In 2024, MLBPI sued two gambling companies, DraftKings, Inc. and bet365, alleging unauthorized use of players’ NIL in images on their online and mobile sportsbook platforms. MLBPI alleged violations of Pennsylvania’s name or likeness statute, common law rights relating to misappropriation of publicity, and misappropriation of identity. Its lawsuit also asserted a claim for unjust enrichment. MLBPI defeated the companies’ motions to dismiss on its claims for enforcing players’ rights of publicity. The court also found that MLBPI sufficiently alleged the commercial value element of its statutory claim, common law right-of-publicity, third-party use player NILs for a commercial purpose, and unjust enrichment.
MLB Players, Inc. offers a litigation backdrop for conceptualizing how athlete NIL rights in the Big Ten and SEC suffer by comparison. This contrast shows that college athletes have little or no legal protection once they sign an NIL agreement.
1. Athletes are denied the right to bargain collectively to convey group
NIL rights.
2. Athletes sign one-sided dispute resolution clauses in their NIL contracts.
3. Athletes experience impairment of NIL rights when they transfer.
4. Athletes experience significant NIL devaluation by NIL agreements that
allow a school to adjust pay without negotiation.
5. Athletes are subjected to adhesion contracts.
6. Athletes agree to contracts that lack mutuality.
7. Athletes waive remedies for NIL violations.
1. Athletes Are Denied the Right to Bargain Collectively to Convey Group NIL Rights. MLB Players Inc. reveals the inequality of negotiating power between professional and college athletes in the context of owning and conveying NIL rights. To begin with, the Big Ten and SEC NIL contracts, respectively below, deny employment rights for athletes.
Big Ten NIL Form Contract
SEC NIL Form Contract
This status designation impedes players from forming a player’s union for the purpose of collective bargaining. Because the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) applies to private-sector employers, private schools in the Big Ten and SEC are covered by this law (e.g., University of Southern California, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt). Some Big Ten schools are in states that allow public employees to unionize outside the NLRA.
Professional player unions negotiate with leagues over the ownership of group licensing rights for players (called group licensing agreements, or GLAs). In this representative capacity, a player’s union enters into a separate publicity rights agreement with the marketing arm of the league to generate income for players.
Some professional players earn millions of dollars a year from GLAs.
A player’s union can sue for infringement of the players’ group publicity rights. Big Ten and SEC athletes have no rights to sue to protect their publicity rights from infringement and other unlawful uses. In contrast to athletes in the Big Ten and SEC NIL agreements, a player’s union retains group licensing rights for active players, and “owns all federal and common law rights in certain trademarks, including a federal trademark registration for the corporate mark” of the union. By assigning to their union an exclusive right use of “their names, signatures, images and/or likenesses, on a group basis, in connection with licensing programs,” MLB players generate revenue and royalties that inure to their benefit. Unions also enter into agreements with emerging technology platforms to generate new sources of income.
2. Athletes Sign One-Sided Dispute Resolution Clauses in Their NIL Contracts. Mandatory
dispute resolution clauses in NIL agreements magnify the disadvantage to college athletes in lacking collective bargaining power. The Big Ten contract requires the athlete to use the school’s dispute resolution process.
Big Ten NIL Form Contract
Similarly, SEC schools may incorporate language for the laws of their state (see footnote 15 in the form contract) and insert their own dispute resolution procedures (see footnote 16 in the form contract), avoiding negotiation with the athlete or athlete’s agent over this process.
SEC NIL Form Contract (Including Footnote)
Compared to professional players, who can use a negotiated arbitration process instead of one imposed by MLB, or file a lawsuit to protect their NIL rights, college athletes must use the dispute resolution process of the party with whom they have a dispute. Athletes at public schools at both conferences have due process property rights.
Shannon v. Board of Trustees the University of Illinois demonstrates why the Big Ten and SEC dispute resolution provisions are unconstitutional. Terrence Shannon Jr., then a likely first-round draft pick in the NBA, faced criminal charges during the season. Once he was indicted, his university suspended him from participating in games. He exercised his right, granted by the school, to challenge the suspension before a three-person panel created by the university. After the panel denied his challenge, he claimed in a lawsuit that the school violated his due process property rights. A federal judge ruled that the school’s dispute resolution process was unconstitutional.
This internal dispute resolution process raises additional legal concerns. Shannon was initially deprived of access to his university’s regular disciplinary procedures. But the case of an athlete with a dispute under the Big Ten NIL contract has no disciplinary component. At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, students have access to a “Student Complaint Process.” This general description refers to the Code of Federal Regulations, Academic Concerns, Campus Conduct Concerns, Sex-Based Misconduct Support, Response, and Prevention Procedures, and related conduct matters. There is no apparent process for grieving, much less adjudicating, a financial contract dispute over the Big Ten NIL contract. To this point, the Shannon court said, “Plaintiff’s suspension can and will impact his career opportunities, current income from his NIL contract, and anticipated future income. In the collegiate athletic context, a suspension can significantly inhibit a student-athlete’s career prospects and earning potential that cannot be recovered through any adequate remedies at law.”
In sum, a school’s specialized dispute resolution processes are not currently designed to adjudicate NIL publicity rights contract dispute between students and their schools. For state schools, all of which are subject to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, property that inheres in an athlete’s NIL agreement cannot be taken without procedural and substantive protections that likely require a specialized forum.
Even if public schools develop such processes, they seem to lack the neutrality features provided by judges who can adjudicate due process property rights claims without a stake in the matter. Private schools, while not subject to the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause, are vulnerable to other challenges relating to the possibility of bias in their NIL dispute resolution processes. And for public and private schools are unlikely to have robust discovery processes and expertise to make informed decisions about impairment of NIL rights.
3. Athletes Experience Impairment of NIL Rights When They Transfer. When an athlete transfers, their original NIL contract impairs their ability to enter into a second agreement with a new school.
Big Ten athletes who sign the NIL form contract appear to be limited, if not completely prevented, from transferring to another conference. These excerpts from Points 1(a) and 1(c) in the Big Ten contract support this conclusion.
Big Ten NIL Form Contract
In Point 1(a) of the contract, the athlete grants the school “irrevocable” and “exclusive” NIL rights. Footnote 1 (in “Eligibility Period”) explains that the grant of rights is for the athlete’s NCAA eligibility—the individual’s college career— not eligibility at the school. The first sentence in “Rights after Eligibility” (Point 1(c), above) reinforces this concern: “After the Athlete’s Eligibility Period, the Institution and its sub-licensees are not required to discontinue use of the Athlete’s NIL (e.g., content).”
This functions like the reserve clause that most courts refused to enforce during the baseball wars, when contract jumping occurred. This contracting arrangement also puts athletes in a similar position as the baseball players in Haelan Laboratories v. Topps Chewing Gum Co. Professional baseball players signed a publicity rights agreement with a chewing gum company, Haelan Laboratories, authorizing commercial use of their photograph. Topps Chewing Gum, a rival company, signed the same players to contracts authorizing this company to use the players’ photograph for its commercial purposes. The players were caught in the middle of this lawsuit by the first company, which alleged that the players were fraudulently induced by the second company to interfere with its contract. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Haelan Laboratories, as the first grantee of an exclusive limited duration right to use the players’ photographs, could maintain a fraudulent inducement action if Topps Chewing Company used its photographs while the first contract was in effect. In reaching this ruling, the court rejected Topps Chewing Company’s argument that the players’ first contract was not an assignment of publicity rights, but a release against a claim for a violation of privacy.
If Big Ten athletes grant their NIL rights irrevocably and exclusively—a grant that lasts for the duration of athletes’ NCAA eligibility—how do they sell those rights again to another school, especially outside the Big Ten conference? Complicating matters, this grant of rights reaches multiple subtiers of rights holders to the athlete’s NIL. The Big Ten contract appears to grant downstream users the same irrevocable and exclusive right to the athlete’s NIL.
SEC NIL Form Contract
In Section 14 of the SEC contract, titled “miscellaneous,” an athlete faces a prospect of being trapped like a transferring Big Ten athlete from signing a new NIL agreement because of a term that states, “Student–Athlete may not assign or otherwise transfer any of Student–Athlete’s rights, or delegate, subcontract, or otherwise transfer any of Student-Athlete’s obligations or performance, under this Agreement, and any such attempt to assign, delegate, or transfer is void ab initio.” However, the SEC and its third-party beneficiaries retain full rights to transfer rights under the NIL agreement.
Transferring Big Ten and SEC athletes could be enmeshed in a dispute between two competing owners of their NIL rights, like the situation in Haelan Laboratories, Inc. This, in turn, suggests litigation could occur between schools or conferences that assert competing rights to the athlete’s NIL—or two businesses that own sublicenses to this NIL. Litigation could require judicial fact findings that parallel Haelan Laboratories.
4. Athletes Experience Significant NIL Devaluation by NIL Agreements that Allow a School to Adjust Pay Without Negotiation. An audacious provision in the Big Ten NIL contract states: “The Consideration may be subject to regular review and assessment at Institution’s discretion.”
Big Ten NIL Form Contract
This provision suffers from similar legal infirmities as the Hallman court found in 1890, when it concluded that a player could not be prohibited from signing with another club simply because he had agreed a year earlier to be bound by a reserve clause.
Metropolitan Exhibition Co. v. Ward also suggests that the Big Ten NIL contract is unenforceable due to its adjustable consideration clause. The Ward court refused
to enforce the reserve clause for lack of definiteness, or lack of mutuality and fairness, noting,
The failure in the existing contract to expressly provide the terms and conditions of the contract to be made for 1890, either renders the latter indefinite and uncertain, or we must infer that the same terms and conditions are to be incorporated in the one to be now enforced, which necessarily includes the reserve clause, for no good reason can be suggested, if all the others are to be included, why this should be omitted. Upon the latter assumption the want of fairness and of mutuality, which are fatal to its enforcement in equity, are apparent… .
5. Athletes Are Subjected to Adhesion Contracts. The Big Ten and SEC NIL contracts incorporate the House settlement agreement, as shown respectively.
Big Ten NIL Form Contract
SEC NIL Form Contract
As a result of the House settlement agreement, the NCAA has implemented rules that require all college athletes to submit NIL deals of $600 or more for approval by a third-party clearinghouse. This ensures that NIL payments conform to the House settlement strictures against pay to play. Twelve factors, mostly opaque,
determine the propriety of an NIL deal.
The College Sports Commission (or CSC) has implemented arbitration procedures that conform to terms of the House settlement. The procedures are detailed and comprehensive. However, they appear to raise unconscionability issues.
An arbitration system was found to be procedurally and substantively unconscionable in Bakersfield College v. California Community College Athletic Ass’n. An intercollegiate athletic association sanctioned a college for providing its football team with prohibited meals and other benefits. The school sued to challenge the binding arbitration process imposed by the association. After a trial court denied its motion for relief, the college appealed. A state appellate court found that the arbitration provision was procedurally and substantively unconscionable. Furthermore, because the arbitration clause was permeated with unconscionability, the entire provision was unconscionable.
6. Athletes Agree to Contracts that Lack Mutuality. The SEC contract lacks mutuality by providing fourteen separate grounds for a school to terminate an NIL contract, while failing to provide an athlete a single basis for terminating this agreement.
SEC NIL Form Contract
The Ward court in 1890 was presented with a similarly one-sided contract between a club and player. In denying an injunction to the baseball club that sought to restrain this player from signing with another club, the court found the contract lacked mutuality. Several courts also found that the uniform baseball contract lacked mutuality.
7. Athletes Waive Remedies for NIL Violations. The Big Ten NIL contract requires athletes to sign a global release of liability.
Big Ten NIL Form Contract
General releases are not valid when they fail, like the Big Ten agreement, to describe specifically the nature of intellectual property rights that are conveyed. A concrete illustration involves an athlete’s face—the very essence of NIL, which is mentioned in the Big Ten’s expansive grant of rights.
Big Ten NIL Form Contract
Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) applies to the Big Ten Conference, which maintains headquarters and a broadcast studio in Illinois. That state’s BIPA has broadly stated purposes, including that “the public are deterred from partaking in biometric identifier-facilitated transactions.” The law broadly defines “biometric identifier,” “biometric information,” “confidential and sensitive information,” and “private entity.” A “written release” is defined broadly. Many employers in Illinois have faced litigation over their use of a basic timekeeping system that uses biometric identifiers to track employee working hours. If these athletes can prove bad faith or fraud in the Big Ten’s failure to comply with BIPA, the release in the NIL contract would not be enforceable in Illinois.
Apart from athletes selling publicity rights to their face, they also sell social media posts via the Big Ten NIL contract. TikTok, a global social media platform, settled a class action lawsuit under BIPA and privacy laws in other states in In re TikTok, Inc., Consumer Privacy Litigation. Plaintiffs in In re TikTok, Inc. claimed that the social media platform violated BIPA by harvesting users’ facial scans without obtaining their consent, transferring and selling users’ biometric information to third parties, and violating BIPA’s disclosure and retention requirements. BIPA requires any user of biometric data to “inform the subject or ‘the subject’s legally authorized representative’ in writing about several things, such as the purpose of collecting the data and how long they will be kept, and obtain the consent of the subject or authorized representative.”
In sum, Part III distills seven legal vulnerabilities in the Big Ten and SEC NIL form contracts. This analysis builds from Part II.B’s enumeration of contract terms that connotes a one-sided bargain that tilts negotiation, enforcement, and substantive rights in favor of schools, conferences, and their business partners. The two contracts are asset-stripping vehicles to sell off an athlete’s NIL rights without ensuring that athletes have access to neutral enforcement processes or arm’s-length negotiation procedures for the next season. These provisions appear to be adhesive and unconscionable. The contractual infirmities in the Big Ten and SEC form contracts are essentially the same problems that courts identified from 1885 to 1917 in baseball player contract disputes. Most of those cases resulted in rulings that allowed players to break their contracts and accept better offers from other clubs. The same future may be in store for athletes who seek judicial relief to participate in a free market for their labor.
IV. CONCLUSION: THE REVERSE LOGIC OF COLLEGE NIL
CONTRACTS—A LEGAL GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
University leaders have succeeded in transforming a devastating antitrust lawsuit into a promising new model to turbocharge an already hypercommercialized enterprise. Today, more than ever, the NCAA’s fraught history of concealing athletic professionalism is relevant in understanding the new NIL model. For more than a
century, the NCAA and its schools have mastered the tension between academics and athletics by a series of ingenious reverse logic arrangements that tolerated or acquiesced to pay for play for athletes.
To reach this point, the NCAA and power conferences have agreed to pay athletes directly while avoiding an employment relationship. While this enigma seems perplexing, it makes reverse-logical sense when seen through the historical lens of the NCAA’s deceptive characterization of amateur athletics since 1906. The House settlement goes beyond employment by prohibiting pay for play. Where else, but in college athletics, are people who earn billions of dollars annually for their organizations deprived not only of a right to employment but a right to be paid for performance? The third-party clearinghouse for future NIL deals rejected some NIL deals within its first few days of operation because the agreements do not conform to “valid business purpose” requirement under the House settlement. That, too, is a reverse logical system that settles a market-rigging antitrust violation with a new market-rigging process.
The new NIL era is merely a reprise of the NCAA’s first convention, when the association passed rules to ensure amateurism—full-time enrollment of an athlete, loss of eligibility for accepting payment, no possibility to play for another school without sitting out for a year, and a limit of four years of eligibility. By
its third annual convention, the NCAA confronted the professionalism issue in a debate—an inconclusive debate that was referred to a committee. In 2025, a judge’s approval of the House settlement implicitly settled that lingering debate, even as she strongly suggested that athletes in nonrevenue sports were being shortchanged. The settlement is another triumph for the reverse logic world of college athletics, which prizes corporate engagement over athlete education and double-talk over truth-telling.
The reverse logic world on NIL contracts is also revealed by ongoing efforts by universities to seek legislation that would codify the House settlement. This only makes sense when the curtain is pulled back on recent state laws that prohibit any athletic association or school from limiting NIL income. In a strange twist, these laws intend to let the marketplace decide the value of athletes, not faceless administrators whose NIL valuation metrics mimic a centrally planned economy.
These reverse logic realities explain why litigation over the reserve clause in professional baseball’s early history offers a potent model for lawsuits to challenge NIL contracts. The NCAA’s earliest amateurism rules resembled the reserve clause in major league baseball. Today, the Big Ten and SEC NIL form contracts replicate the mobility-suppressing features of the National League’s uniform player contract from 1880 to 1917. Like their baseball ancestors, college athletes are so heavily constrained by adhesive NIL contracts that they cannot capitalize on their true labor market value.
On this point, it is fair to ask, What precedential value do baseball cases from the late 1880s through early 1900s have to possible NIL lawsuits by college athletes? On the one hand, most of the cases cited in this study have few or no citations. But this citation check misses a more discomforting possibility for schools, conferences, and the NCAA. A few of these older baseball cases have been cited in the modern era, with the effect that some players have been granted freedom to enter into new contracts with other teams or a new league. And while other modern era cases
have denied players this freedom, these courts have found that the athlete had a unique or irreplaceable skill. For lawyers who represent college athletes in NIL contract challenges, there are enough favorable cases to bring the past current to the present. And the most disquieting point for schools and conferences is that they cannot claim that most, or even many, college athletes who sign NIL contracts have unique and irreplaceable talents. Indeed, the fact that NIL contracts strictly prohibit employment moots cases where an injunction was issued to prevent a baseball player with a unique talent from breaching his employment contract.
College athlete lawsuits arising from these take-it-or-leave-it contracts appear to be inevitable. These contracts raise issues related to adhesion, illusory terms, good faith and fair dealing, unjust enrichment, restrictive covenants, unfair business and trade practices, unauthorized exploitation of publicity rights, and more. These problems will likely fester until court rulings establish clear legal boundaries of permissible and illicit contract terms.
The future of college athletics is foretold in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. This fantasy story re-created a child’s reverse logic thinking. The story’s continuing popularity may owe to the fact that adults re-create an exaggerated reality for others in the imperious way that Humpty Dumpty lectured a skeptical and precocious Alice in Wonderland:
‘“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you…. When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.’”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
While college leaders alternate between boastful claims about the commercial future of college athletics in the NIL age, and their contradictory quest for
legislation from Congress, they should be mindful that they cannot completely bar a college athlete’s right to sue over a contract. Nor should the NCAA, power conference commissioners and athletic directors ignore the immortal limerick that relates to the sudden demise of the insufferable authority on the infinite elasticity of words.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
