What are the biggest legal and policy challenges on the horizon for NCAA sports? Kate Roggio Buck discusses some of these challenges, including its new age-based, five-year eligibility rule, the Protect College Sports Act, and developments concerning NIL contracts. With the five-year eligibility rule, Kate thinks the NCAA acted too late. “Things change over time, and people and systems adapt,” she says. “Unfortunately, here I think that maybe those systems didn’t adapt soon enough. Now it seems like more of a process of putting out the most recent fire, one at a time, and frankly there’s a lot of fires going on all at once.”
Kate also believes the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act will face an uphill battle to become law. “I feel like no matter what new rules keep developing, there’s going to continue to be problems when the group of individuals, the student-athletes who are most impacted, are not part of the process,” Kate says. She also notes despite ongoing legal challenges, the bill largely protects the NCAA’s existing structure, which largely leaves out some of the smaller, lower-revenue NCAA members. “My experience in dealing with various schools has been, by and large, that they care about their athletes,” she says of the majority of programs that are not in the power conferences. “They want to do the right thing for their athletes. They care about their students as a whole.”