Collective Bargaining + Private Equity: The Yellow Brick Road to Hollowing Out College Sports

OPENING STATEMENTS

This week, the noise around collective bargaining finally matched the reality on the ground: athletes’ groups are circulating model CBAs, lawmakers are introducing bills to lock in organizing rights, and industry leaders are saying out loud that some form of union-style structure is coming. At the same time, the University of Utah’s board approved a new for‑profit company, Utah Brands & Entertainment LLC, and a private equity partnership with Otro Capital that is expected to drive roughly half-a-billion dollars into the business side of its athletic department in exchange for a cut of future revenues.

While unrelated in some ways, they directly correlate in others. College sports is no longer just acting like a professional league; it is starting to finance itself like one, and the legal question is simple and uncomfortable: as athlete costs rise through revenue sharing and eventual bargaining, and institutions respond by selling slices of the enterprise to investors, whose interests are protected by law, and whose opportunities become expendable?

After the House v. NCAA settlement, revenue sharing is real, but it sits on a shaky legal foundation because it was imposed through antitrust litigation, not negotiated through a collective bargaining agreement that would enjoy the labor-law shield pro leagues rely on. That is why you now see athlete organizations, members of Congress, and even athletic directors, including UNC AD Bubba Cunningham, shifting perspectives on collective bargaining: moving athletes toward employee status, standard contracts, negotiated health protections, and a non‑statutory labor exemption that can stabilize rules and compensation. But none of that comes free, and once pay floors, benefits, and enforcement mechanisms are locked into a CBA, those obligations show up as hard costs on institutional balance sheets, particularly in football and men’s basketball.​​

Utah is giving us a preview of how schools plan to fund those costs: by carving out a for‑profit company to run ticketing, media rights, sponsorships, NIL operations, and game‑day revenue, then selling a minority stake to a private equity firm that provides capital and operational leadership in exchange for a share of future income and an exit opportunity in five to seven years. Legally, that move separates “the business” of athletics into a commercial vehicle with its own board and outside president, shifting fiduciary duties so that decision‑makers now answer not only to students and the educational mission but also to investors demanding a return. It also complicates basic labor questions. If and when athletes are recognized as employees, will they be bargaining with the university, the spin‑off entity, some other entity (i.e., NCAA, conferences), or some combination of multiple, and how will that structure be scrutinized under labor and tax law.​​

If we are not careful, the sequence here is predictable: collective bargaining (or its functional cousin) arrives, athletes secure enforceable pay and protections, and competitive pressure pushes schools in the power conferences to spend at or near any agreed‑upon caps or minimums to keep pace in football and men’s basketball. To afford that, more institutions will follow Utah’s lead, offloading commercial operations into joint ventures, inviting private equity and select donors into ownership, and writing contracts that prioritize profitability and growth targets over broad‑based participation.

When the rosy revenue projections don’t fully materialize (see: University of Colorado), the easiest levers to pull will be non‑revenue and Olympic sports, where we are already seeing dozens of Division I programs cut or consolidated and more than a thousand athletes lose opportunities in the wake of House, turning roster caps, scholarship reductions, and entire program eliminations into a quiet subsidy for a small slice of highly commercialized teams.​​

That isn’t an inevitable side effect of paying athletes fairly; it is a legal and policy design problem about what is allowed to be cut to make the math work and who actually has leverage in those decisions. From my perspective, this model raises three clusters of red flags:

• Labor and employment: how unions bargain when investors influence employment terms and “employer” status is fragmented

• Title IX: what happens when investor‑driven spending deepens gender gaps while women’s and Olympic sports are trimmed

• Governance: whether boards and trustees can credibly claim educational priorities while signing contracts that hard‑wire revenue and return targets

We have been here before in other policy shifts. When the rules change faster than the guardrails, the people with the least power - often women and athletes in non‑revenue sports - pay the highest price, even as schools prove they can find money for coaching buyouts, facilities, and now private equity returns.

If college sports chooses a future of collective bargaining, it needs to choose, in the same breath, hard limits on runaway spending, binding protections for non‑revenue and women’s sports, and transparent, athlete‑inclusive governance in any new entities that control the money, or we will look up in a few years and see a professionalized cartel wrapped in a university logo, with the educational mission and thousands of opportunities left on the auction block.​​

EXHIBIT A

What makes this CFP cycle so darkly funny is that the loudest complainers are the same people who wired the system. Notre Dame helped shape the new playoff contract and protected its independence while securing a rich CFP revenue stream, then turned around and blasted the ACC and the format when that structure predictably worked against it. ESPN locked itself into five weekly rankings shows, only to have its own talent call the production a “mistake” and urge the network to kill it on air. So if you think this group can solve the bigger problem of college athletics, remember: these are the architects of the CFP.

EXHIBIT B

My best piece of advice this week? Follow @JMUSportsNews. It’s not affiliated with JMU, which is exactly why it’s so good. In a postseason drowning in corporate graphics and canned quotes, this feed is pure, unfiltered Dukes energy. The tone is just right: joking about “resting starters for Oregon” while the rest of the country is still wrapping its head around JMU even being in the CFP. If you want a reminder that college football can still be fun and a little ridiculous, this is your must‑follow.

ON THE DOCKET

Keep an eye on Georgia’s NIL lawsuit against former edge rusher Damon Wilson II. Georgia is asking for roughly $390,000 in “liquidated damages” after he transferred to Missouri, arguing an NIL clause operated like a buyout for leaving early. If a court blesses that structure, NIL buyouts could quickly become the preferred way for schools and collectives to lock athletes in place, functioning like noncompetes in everything but name. For those who want to dig deeper into why that’s so alarming for athlete mobility, Professor Dave Hoffman has a smart breakdown of the case and its implications here.

FOOTNOTES

“You know what happens when you come to Nevada? You go get $1.4 million to go to Oregon if you develop the right way.”

- Nevada football coach Jeff Choate explaining his sales pitch to recruits, which starts to sound an awful lot like the multi-tiered system of minor league baseball.