Agreed......NIL but keeping the transfer-sit out rule unless your coach leaves would've been the ideal scenario.
But at the end of the day I think the courts still wouldn't have sided with the NCAA if a player chose to litigate.
I think the issue with the first point indicates the issue with the second.
"Unless your coach leaves" is still emerging from the framework the NCAA itself opened up, that not playing automatically upon transferring is a right of the athlete that is being withheld.
The thing, the ONLY thing, that college athletes have an inalienable moral right to is the fair share of the money their talents bring into the University on the basis of their labor. That's the north star here.
Over the course of the 20th Century the NCAA got a comical amount of leeway to make the "student-athlete" concept stand up as something distinct from an employment relationship in the course of business. Courts and legislatures deferred and deferred and deferred in hopes that the NCAA could create a defensible framework for them to affirm.
All they had to do was cut the kids in on the money. It wouldn't have been easy, it wouldn't have been simple, it wouldn't have solved every problem, but had the organization accepted that the status quo was untenable it could have LED on building a new system that worked.
Instead they panicked, started throwing everything overboard that wasn't "amateurism" and torched their credibility to the ground. They have painted themselves into the corner of being SELF-ACKNOWLEDGED monopolists in the business of college athletics. And part of that process was bedding in the notion that free transfers are an integral component of player rights, in a totally unintentional and path-dependent way.
The system could survive, indeed thrive, with the players getting paid. It would collapse in a decade without any restrictions on player movement. Everyone can see that now, but some of us were saying this in the mid-2000's (and others even before that I'm sure).
It's a spectacular failure of institutional stewardship, and I will continue to beat the drum that it COULD have been different.
Now though, proceeding from where we are? Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is one heck of a riddle.
