If you think that schools should restrict transfers because it's challenging to get credits to transfer, and you think that because "education" and "student" go hand in hand, then why are the restrictions you're supporting only in place for the subset of students that play college sports? Since education is so important to you and transferring complicates that, seems like we should be favoring restrictions on transfers for why scholarship student and give schools and some governing body the power to stop transfers more broadly, no?

What makes athletes special here?

What can the NCAA do about the NIL? NIL is law in 32 states, with many more having pending legislation. NCAA cannot supersede state law! And the NCAA is NOT going to ban NIL in 18 states. As for the portal, after the Deppe v National Collegiate Athletic Association case, the NCAA decided they are one ruling away from losing total control.

I think we will quickly find ourselves in a world where smaller programs like ours will be better off paying players a fixed salary to "lock them in" to a four-year scholarship agreement.

It's a scary precedent to set because of the looming issue of how large a football roster is (you wouldn't be able to pay basketball players without paying everyone) but it is easily doable in basketball.

There's nothing worse than losing an investment you have in a player (development, tuition, room and board) who is suddenly better than you thought he could be and has eyes for a larger school.

Those agreements are no longer binding though with the transfer portal. And the NCAA allowed extra payment to players 10 years ago with the "full cost of tution" deal, where some places it was 5 figures over scholarship value.

I don't think the gambling comparison's all that apt, personally. States didn't legalize sports betting as a direct result of the NCAA's failure to do so. Whereas the NIL was a direct response to the fact that the NCAA was profiting on players NIL but prohibiting players from doing so. The courts agreed -- but before they did, the public sentiment shifted over the course of decades and the NCAA opted not to make meaningful changes. They could have, and I suspect they could have gotten away with changes that were far less drastic than state NIL laws have been. The play was to acknowledge the issue, share more revenue with players, and attempt to shift public sentiment. Maybe that revenue share took the form of a trust that couldn't be accessed for a set number of years; maybe it was cash, but that cash had to come from approved sponsors that also invested in the program. Maybe it could have been capped -- the NBA salary cap is negotiated as a percentage of revenue, for instance. And that's league revenue, not team revenue. You could easily envision taking the average revenue of D1 programs (or at a conference level) and capping player NIL earnings at a percentage of that.

Instead, the NCAA gave only an inch or two and politicians seized on a popular issue to pass legislation because the NCAA did nothing. Bottom line is that if the polling didn't show that people thought it was broken, legislators wouldn't have scrambled to fix it. NCAA inaction allowed that to happen. And there were paths that would have addressed the inequity the public perceived without upending the system. The NCAA didn't take any of those paths.

Now, I suspect there's no putting the cat back in the bag. But the NCAA made their bed here. Anybody paying attention knew their model wouldn't stand up to scrutiny; it ended up a unanimous decision on the Supreme Court. There aren't many of those these days, given how politicized the court's become. They had years to adapt and attempt to set the terms, and their inaction ended up leaving it to the states.