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When Andrew Luck, the former star ��ɫ��Ӱ quarterback and NFL standout, was named the general manager of The Farm’s football program late last year, he worried about head coach Troy Taylor’s reaction. In his newly-created role, Luck would effectively serve as the team’s CEO and report directly to ��ɫ��Ӱ President Jonathan Levin — a line of command that puts him on top of the university’s football leadership.

Taylor, it turned out, was grateful for the assist, Luck recounted at the 2025 SIEPR Economic Summit during a session on the present and future of college sports.

“He was relieved,” Luck said. “It’s too much.”

By that, Luck meant the job of running a college sports program today. There’s been a lot of disruption lately: Players can now make money off their “name, image and likeness” (NIL) and some are striking endorsement deals worth millions of dollars — sometimes taking advantage of relaxed rules around transferring schools to secure juicy NIL deals. Division 1 schools may soon be sharing revenues with players, pending approval of a $2.8 billion court settlement against the NCAA and its biggest athletic conferences over athlete compensation. The prospect of windfalls from the likes of ESPN and Fox in exchange for the rights to broadcast or stream games has dramatically redrawn the college sports map. And now private equity firms are muscling in on the action, too.

The result of these and other changes is chaos, said the session’s panelists. Also speaking were Tara VanDerveer, the second-winningest coach in NCAA basketball history who led the ��ɫ��Ӱ women’s team for nearly 40 years before stepping down last year; Gene Sykes, a senior Goldman Sachs executive who is president of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee; Roger Noll, a SIEPR senior fellow emeritus and ��ɫ��Ӱ professor emeritus of economics, who is considered the godfather of sports economics; and ��ɫ��Ӱ women’s soccer alumna Nya Harrison.

“It’s the Wild West,” said VanDerveer. “The landscape of [college] athletics has gone haywire.”

Looking for a level of ‘sanity’

The session explored some of the bigger implications of this new world order, including what it could mean for Title IX funding of women’s sports and the ability for schools like ��ɫ��Ӱ — which is also a major pipeline for Olympic athletes — to compete for players.  Then there’s the toll that ��ɫ��Ӱ’s move to the Atlantic Coast Conference, whose teams mostly hail from eastern and southern states, is taking on students who must now travel extra-long distances for games.

Life as a college athlete “feels like more than a full-time job,” said Harrison, who is a named plaintiff in the $2.8 billion NCAA case known as the “House settlement.” While the deal is “a good step in the right direction in terms of compensating athletes,” a lot more needs to be done to pay student-players fairly, Harrison said.

Sykes suggested that the “source of the dysfunction” in college sports is the outsized role that football plays, even as women’s sports have become more popular. This is the case even though most Division 1 football programs are money losers and will bleed even more red ink if the House settlement’s revenue-sharing rules go into effect.

“A big rethink [of the college-sports business model] is necessary,” Sykes said. He suggested that football and other college sports teams could one day play in separate conferences.

Luck agreed that separating football from other college sports might be necessary. “A level of sanity does need to come into the system,” he said. “I’m curious [to see] where this goes, of how much more does football begin to untether itself from the traditional model of college sports.”

One sure bet? The lawsuits challenging NCAA rules governing student athletics — which have been a constant for nearly 20 years — won’t end, Noll said.

“The House settlement is just the current way station and there’s more antitrust suits lining up behind it,” said Noll, noting repercussions student-athletes face if they try to transfer schools. The NCAA restrictions on players are “why we’re in a state of chaos.”

Highlights of the 2025 SIEPR Economic Summit

Photos by Ryan Zhang.