The NCAA’s New Transfer “Crackdown” Is an Antitrust Magnet

Feb 27

OPENING STATEMENTS

If college football is going to act like pro sports, it needs to stop pretending it can regulate player movement like it’s the 1970s.

The NCAA’s FBS Oversight Committee this week recommended emergency legislation to punish what it calls “circumventing” the transfer process. More specifically, schools adding a transfer who was not active in the transfer portal at the time of transfer. If approved at the Division I Cabinet meeting in April, it would become effective immediately, with penalties triggered once the athlete participates in any athletically related activity at the new school.

The proposed penalties are significant: the head coach would be barred from all football and administrative duties for six games; the football program would be fined 20% of its budget; and the program would lose five roster spots the following season.

What the NCAA is really regulating, though, is something it doesn’t have the power to do. The NCAA will say this is about process; making sure athletes use the portal window, preventing tampering, and restoring some order after it moved to a single January window. But substantively, the rule targets the same thing every mobility restraint targets: the ability of a participant in a labor market to change employers when leverage is highest.

And that’s the key legal problem. The NCAA cannot stop a student from enrolling elsewhere. So it’s doing the next best thing: deterring the receiving school from taking the student-athlete by attaching significant penalties. Call it enforcement, but the practical effect is chilled movement.

What this continues to reflect is an organization out of touch with, and unable to truly grasp, just how fundamentally the ground has shifted around it - with a belief that there is a way to put the genie back in the bottle.

This move looks anticompetitive and risky. Antitrust law doesn’t require a rule to be an absolute ban to be unlawful. A restraint that makes movement so costly that rational actors avoid it can still suppress competition. Here, the NCAA is coordinating member institutions, its horizontal competitors for athletic talent, around a rule that predictably reduces post-spring mobility options.

The penalties matter as much as the rule. A six-contest prohibition is not a wrist slap but a competitive event, a donor event, and a contract-extension event. A 20% football budget fine and a five-man roster reduction are not process corrections but competitive handicaps that will make compliance offices veto risk, which means athletes lose destinations, leverage, and bargaining power. This is exactly the kind of mechanism that invites the core antitrust question: are schools, through the NCAA, agreeing to restrict the terms on which athletes can offer their services?

The NCAA will argue competitive balance, integrity, and rules-based recruiting — i.e., that a defined window is necessary and blind transfers are a loophole. The problem is proportionality and less restrictive alternatives.

If the concern is impermissible contact, enforcement should focus on the conduct (i.e., tampering), not a rule that effectively blacklists an athlete from joining a new program outside a window by threatening severe institutional sanctions. You don’t fix a speeding problem by impounding every car that ever drove on the road.

And in the post-House landscape, restrictions on athlete mobility are going to be viewed as restraints on an economic market, not as amateurism-era “eligibility rules.”

This isn’t about reducing revenue at the top. It’s about reducing volatility — and, more pointedly, preserving advantage. A rule that limits spring movement stabilizes rosters for the programs with the most money, the deepest NIL ecosystems, and the strongest retention “infrastructure.”

When movement is harder, leverage shifts. Athletes have fewer credible alternatives. Coaches and collectives can price risk differently. And the programs already sitting on talent and resources are insulated from the chaos they helped create.

That is why this proposal doesn’t just tighten the portal but shifts the playing field.

Given all of this, here’s what I’m watching: the April Division I Cabinet vote; the first real enforcement scenario; and whether this accelerates the inevitable question of pro-style bargaining?

EXHIBIT A

Follow the money is a pretty good rule of thumb. And it certainly applies to a white paper released this week by the SEC and Big Ten. The preemptive strike urges Congress to reject any move toward federally-sanctioned, FBS media rights, arguing that consolidation would create bureaucracy, legal chaos, and ultimately reduce long-term revenue. The paper also frames conference-by-conference dealmaking as a feature, not a bug, preserving “optionality” to innovate with formats, scheduling, and streaming packages. Another way to look at it: the SEC and Big Ten are protecting the system that made them dominant: inventory control, brand stewardship, leverage in a marketplace where they currently excel. The real risk to them isn’t smaller top-line dollars but revenue redistribution and a flatter landscape that dilutes their structural advantage.

EXHIBIT B

The latest flashpoint in the enforceability of NIL agreements between student-athletes and institutions arose this week. And, given the statements from both sides, perhaps this is the one that leads to a ruling. Cincinnati is suing its former quarterback, Brendan Sorsby, for a $1 million “exit fee” after he transferred to Texas Tech, alleging he breached an 18‑month NIL/revenue-sharing agreement that ran through Dec. 15, 2026 and included liquidated damages if he left for another college program. If a court treats the $1 million figure as a valid estimate of harm rather than an unlawful penalty, it could become the clearest judicial signal yet that these NIL agreements are fully enforceable. Either way, it could have major implications on the portal era.

ON THE DOCKET

What are the material terms that the NCAA and UNC women’s tennis player Reese Brantmeier said they agreed to this week in her prize-money case. The agreement appears to defuse the biggest institutional threat: classwide damages exposure tied to years of forfeited prize money. But the final terms may reshape the rules, opening a lane for “individual-sport” athletes (i.e., tennis, golf, track) to keep what they earn in pro events while staying eligible. In the post-House era, that’s the twisted irony: schools can pay athletes, yet some athletes still can’t keep winnings they personally compete for.