2025 in Review: The Year College Sports Got Awash in Cash and Starved of Chance

OPENING STATEMENTS

When I launched Motion to Disrupt, the goal was simple: cut through the noise and talk honestly about what the law is actually doing to college sports, as well as the people inside it. It couldn’t have been a more important time, as I walked straight into perhaps the biggest structural shift in the history of college athletics.​

Courts, Congress, billionaire donors, and campus lawyers all pulled on the same fragile system at once, and the result was a landscape that looks nothing like a quaint amateur model and entirely like a contested, professional labor market. The uncomfortable truth is that everything you lived through in 2025 may only be the appetizer. The main course - formal employment status, collective bargaining, and a complete rewrite of who owes what to whom - still sits ahead.​

If the core promise of college sports used to be opportunity, 2025 recast it as allocation. Who gets paid. Who keeps a roster spot. Who gets quietly squeezed out so someone else can hit a court‑approved cap. Legally, the story of the year was not simply “athletes finally got money.” It was a far more complicated, and, for many, harsher, story of who gained leverage in the new order and who lost it.​

So, for my final newsletter of the year, here is the money‑and‑opportunity scoreboard, drawn from what has shown up in my calls, cases, and inbox.

THE WINNERS

• Power-conference football and men’s basketball stars. The House settlement and school‑funded revenue sharing pushed the biggest checks toward the same athletes who already drove TV deals, giving top‑end players real leverage in negotiations now and in the coming employment debates.​

• Donors and NIL collectives at resource-rich schools. Boosters and collectives have become de facto roster architects, writing multimillion‑dollar agreements that function like employment contracts without yet triggering the full wage, benefits, and bargaining obligations formal employers carry.​

• Schools with big budgets and sophisticated counsel. The wealthiest athletic departments can both hit the $20.5 million cap and lawyer their way through House, SCORE, and Title IX risk, treating new rules as design challenges while less‑resourced peers experience them as existential threats.​

• Athletes (and lawyers) who litigate early and aggressively. From eligibility to redshirt limits to backpay formulas, the athletes who sued—rather than waited—secured blanket waivers, extra seasons, and better settlement positions than those who trusted internal processes to work on their own.​

• Private equity and institutional capital. Through conference‑level entities and school‑specific deals, private equity has secured a claim on future media and athletics revenue without assuming any statutory duty to protect athlete rights, Olympic sports, or Title IX compliance.​

THE LOSERS

• Non-revenue and Olympic sport athletes. As schools scrambled to fund revenue sharing and stay ahead of lawsuits, roster caps and budget triage landed hardest on Olympic and non‑revenue sports, shrinking the pipeline that has long fed Team USA and broad‑based participation.​

• Walk-ons and fringe roster players. The new math of caps and liability made it easy to justify cutting marginal spots, stripping away the quietly life‑changing opportunities that never show up in NIL leaderboards but defined the old model’s promise.​

• Mid-major and low-resource Division I programs. These schools face the same legal obligations as the giants: House contributions, Title IX exposure, evolving NIL norms. But without comparable revenue, pushing them toward cuts, reclassification, or a permanent position on the brink.​

• Women athletes as a class (for now). Even as individual lawsuits advanced, the aggregate picture was stark: roughly 90 percent of athletic departments still miss basic Title IX benchmarks, leaving women shortchanged by hundreds of millions in scholarship and roster opportunities each year.​

• Athletes who treat NIL as free money, not legal contracts. Those who signed vague or one‑sided deals learned that “marketability” and off‑campus conduct clauses can quietly erase income, especially after injury, and that every NIL agreement is a legal instrument first and a celebration post second.​

What ties these lists together is not just who got richer or who lost a team. It is who was positioned, legally, to either exploit or absorb the shocks of a system in transition. Power‑conference stars with counsel, collectives with lawyers, and schools with deep compliance benches could treat 2025’s upheaval as an opportunity. Everyone else was mostly asked to live with the consequences.​

The through line of every conversation this year was simple: the rules are no longer settled, and they will not settle on their own. For athletes, families, and even coaches, the next phase is not just about chasing the biggest offer—it is about understanding the contracts, statutes, and court orders underneath those offers well enough to avoid being the ones who pay for everyone else’s “progress.”​

EXHIBIT A

Tom Burman’s line about choosing between staying Division I or “competing against Chadron State College” is blunt, but it captures the fork in the road bearing down on dozens of non–Power 4 schools. Wyoming’s request for an extra $6 million is not about gold-plated facilities; it is about plugging holes in a $53 million budget already stretched by travel, health care, staffing, and escalating competitive expectations. When athletic directors warn of “draconian cuts” or dropping levels if new money does not materialize, they aren’t really saying the quiet part out loud: in this new era of revenue sharing and arms races, taxpayers, students, and legislators will have to decide how much visibility and prestige are worth. And when the public price of chasing big-time sports finally becomes too high.

EXHIBIT B

Good story in the Detroit News about Michigan State’s “sports IPO.” Nolan Finley lays out some of the things we’ve been warning about: once outside investors buy into your athletic department, they expect a return and a say. That shifts decision-making away from students, faculty, and the educational mission toward a boardroom logic that prioritizes revenue over everything else. Today it is branding and media rights; tomorrow it could be roster decisions, sport cuts, or pressure to chase ever-riskier payouts to satisfy investors. In that world, losing control of who ultimately runs college sports is not a glitch but the business model. 

ON THE DOCKET

The year can’t seem to end soon enough for the NCAA. Judge Andrew Hairston’s ruling in Jeremy Pruitt’s case looks small at first glance: one Alabama circuit court, one coach, one show‑cause order put on pause. But the opinion does something far bigger than help a single plaintiff. By zeroing in on due process flaws, the court invites others to attack the NCAA’s entire enforcement model.​ As Dan Wetzel points out, college sports has seen this movie before: one federal injunction out of West Virginia in 2023 ended sit‑out rules for multi‑time transfers and supercharged the transfer portal, reshaping rosters almost overnight. If Pruitt’s case becomes the next domino, the last significant NCAA sanction - the show‑cause penalty - may not survive.

FOOTNOTES

“It is well-known that college students’ betting and gambling is near epidemic levels on campuses across the country. Student-athletes are around it on their campus every hour of every season. Gambling is a very normalized part of the college culture.”

- Scott Polio, 3-time Super Bowl winning executive (via SportsBusiness Journal op-ed about the problems of gambling on college campuses).