​CHAMPAIGN — For several years, Josh Whitman has posed a familiar question during his annual media roundtable, a question that has grown even more pertinent amid the sweeping shifts in college athletics. The era when athletes could benefit from their name, image and likeness began in 2021, followed by an open transfer portal in 2024, and last year’s approval of the House v. NCAA settlement that allowed universities to directly compensate athletes through revenue sharing. Whitman’s recurring inquiry has gained urgency as answers emerge that the Illinois athletic director would prefer were different.
“Do college athletics want to be governed?” Whitman said. “To date, I think the answer is, at best, mixed. The challenge is that if significant elements of our membership choose that they don’t want to be governed, then it puts a lot of pressure on everybody else to remain competitive and continue to push the envelope in similar ways.”
There is even a potential shift in governance away from the NCAA if the federal government steps in. The bipartisan Protect College Sports Act cleared the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation with a 19-9 vote, and a full Senate floor vote is on the horizon. Yet the bill faces opposition from both the Big Ten and the SEC, with Alabama and Auburn among the first schools publicly opposing the legislation. A joint letter from the SEC’s two rival programs contends that the bill, as written, “solves little of what genuinely challenges college athletics.”
Even if some member schools resist broad governance, it’s clear from the NCAA’s two most prominent brands that they intend to have at least some input when governance is on the table. The College Sports Commission, established in the wake of the House v. NCAA settlement, was intended to oversee revenue-sharing distribution and NIL deals. Although the CSC was formed hastily after the settlement’s final approval last June, with immediate implementation, Whitman hasn’t found much fault in it as a governing body. “Any challenges that exist stem more from us, not them,” Whitman said. “It’s like the old breakup line — it’s not you, it’s me. … Everybody has an incentive, if they can identify money, to make incremental investments. The only way to manage that is to somehow figure out a way to have some external governor on that spending.”
What form that external governor might take remains unsettled. Whitman and others hoped the CSC would fulfill that role, and there remains the possibility that it could still do so. But the broader point is clear: there is growing recognition that governance is not merely a theoretical issue but a practical challenge with real implications for how colleges compete and how resources are allocated.
The rise in lawsuits targeting rules or their enforcement over the past year underscores the pressure. The legal battles have, in part, been driven by efforts to gain better SEO positioning for plaintiffs, but they reflect a deeper, tangible friction: when rules change, so too do the disputes about how those rules should be interpreted and enforced. As college athletics continues to evolve, the question Whitman repeats—whether the sport will be governed at all, and by whom—remains central to the future of collegiate competition, revenue distribution, and the balance between autonomy and oversight.