by Michael Lewis

On Friday, Mar. 6 President Donald Trump brought university presidents, coaching legends and commissioners to the White House to tackle some of the biggest issues in college sports: Transfers, eligibility, finances and name, image and likeness (NIL) payments. 

It’s all important, but something and someone critical was missing from the space – the fans that make college sports fandom special in the first place. 

When I was a student at the University of Illinois in the 1980s, players stuck around. 

Nick Anderson, Kendall Gill, and Kenny Battle spent years in the program before leading the Fighting Illini to the 1989 Final Four in the NCAA Division I Tournament. That Final Four run is among my most foundational memories of being a student. 

As an alumnus, I watched in 2005 as Dee Brown and Deron Williams grew from recruits into stars. Being a fan meant following players from before their arrival to graduation day. You knew them, invested in them and their success felt like yours. Illinois basketball and Saturday football games are still my most direct connections to campus. 

That connection is not incidental. That is the whole point. 

College football and basketball have always been engines for building awareness, loyalty, and attachment, not just to teams but to institutions. They are memory creators and relationship builders. 

But the nature of those relationships, the depth and history of these brands, is almost entirely absent from the current debate about college sports’ future.

The Roundtable and The Chaos

The White House roundtable had about 50 collegiate sports leaders and a substantial policy agenda, focusing on national standards for NIL, regulating the transfer portal, revenue sharing structures and how to protect the sports programs that rely on revenue from football and basketball to survive.
There was one notable absence – an advocate for the fans.

This is not as simple as it sounds. Everyone in the room would claim to represent the interests of fans. Coaches and university presidents depend on fan support and commissioners sell fan eyeballs to television networks. But none of them are structurally accountable to fans, and when institutional interests and fan interests diverge, as they increasingly do, fans have no seat at the table and no voice in the outcome.

It’s an urgent issue. After the unprecedented meeting, Trump promised to sign an executive order to “solve all of the problems” facing the industry.

Basketball illustrates the college sports chaos most clearly. Small roster sizes make the disruption impossible to ignore. Programs now cycle through a nearly entirely new cast each year, with a couple of returnees, a handful of freshmen, and a half dozen transfers filling the gaps. This is the new normal, and the offseason has become a roster demolition derby.

Last offseason, the University of Georgia brought in 11 players, with five transfers and six freshmen. Georgia Institute of Technology brought on 10 new players with four returning ones. My Fighting Illini are about the same.

The result is a fan base that has to learn a new set of names every season.

Connections between players and fans are getting shallower every year. University of Illinois fans no longer have players like Dee Brown or Nick Anderson – athletes you can watch arrive, develop and carry the program across multiple seasons. Now, the best case is a one-and-done superstar.

For cultural brands like sports teams and universities, the archive of stories and shared narratives that bind fan communities together is everything. But the source material is getting fainter.

And it is the cost of the current system that nobody in the White House room was talking about.

Who Owns the Brand, and Who Should?

The fundamental problem is a failure to grasp the nature of college sports brands and the fandom that gives them their value.

The money that flows into college sports is chasing the eyes of fans. Those fans are passionate about teams and players, but the institutions and media companies that monetize that passion have different incentives. To them, the teams are brands that attract attention which can be converted into ticket revenue and advertising dollars. The perspective gap at play is the root of the current crisis.

College sports are not ordinary consumer brands, they are cultural brands. Their value does not come from a product or a logo, it comes from their position as a focal point for community and subculture. Sports illustrate cultural branding with striking clarity.

Put an athlete in Georgia Bulldog red or Fighting Illinis orange and tens of thousands of people will shell out hundreds of dollars to watch. Put Georgia red on television against Notre Dame gold and millions will tune in.

Take away the uniforms, strip away the institutional identity, and the revenue collapses with it.

It raises the questions that should be at the heart of current debate: What creates these cultural brands, who owns them, and who should?

The history of college sports offers an answer. College football and basketball were not invented as commercial spectacles, and they were not designed by administrators or television executives. They grew from the bottom up, out of campus pride. College football dates to the late 1800s, and almost everywhere it began the same way: the boys from one school wanted to test themselves against the boys from another. Institutional pride is the foundational concept for understanding everything that follows. Pride created identity, and identity created fandom.

History compounded that pride over decades. The programs that draw the largest audiences year in and year out are almost always the ones with the deepest histories. In football it is University of Alabama, University of Notre Dame, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, University of Southern California and University of Texas.

That list probably just enraged half the readers. The omission of UGA likely raised someone’s blood pressure. You know why: history and pride. Fran Tarkenton and Vince Dooley in the 1960s and 1970s. Herschel Walker and a national championship in the 1980s. Garrison Hearst, Hines Ward, and Champ Bailey in the 1990s. Matthew Stafford and Todd Gurley in the Mark Richt era. Stetson Bennett, Brock Bowers, Jordan Davis and two more titles in the Kirby Smart era. The Georgia football brand is134 years of accumulated history that connects UGA fandom.

Which brings us to the insight that the entire NIL debate skips over. The current players did not create that value. The revenue flows in because of the Georgia fan community. The players who suit up each fall are not founders. They are temps, albeit extraordinarily talented temps. The fan community is the enduring asset.

The First Takeaway and What’s Next

Every discussion about fixing college sports misses a key stakeholder: The fan.

Not in the abstract sense that everyone in that White House room would invoke when asked, but as a genuine constituency with interests that deserve explicit consideration. Cultural brands have value because there is a community that loves them. In the case of college sports, they are co-creators of the brand itself, built across generations through loyalty, memory, and identity.

The debate in Washington is focused almost entirely on the economics of player empowerment and the mechanics of NIL regulation. Those things matter. But discussions about the future of college football and basketball need to be centered on community and culture at least as much as they are on media deals and transfer rules.

Any solution that optimizes for player compensation, media revenue, and institutional finances while eroding the fan experience is not saving college sports. It is harvesting rather than investing. The fan community is the enduring asset. Every policy decision should be evaluated against what it does to that asset.

There is a critical blind spot among the people currently making decisions. There are 90,000 fans in the bleachers, but none made it to the Mar. 6 roundtable.