By Mike Lewis

College sports is in chaos.

This offseason, Georgia football lost 15 players to the transfer portal, the fewest in the SEC. Georgia Tech lost 17, and an anonymous ACC staffer told The Athletic the Yellow Jackets “got absolutely decimated in the portal.” The churn is even more intense on the hardwood, where transfers, graduations, and early pro departures routinely turn over half or more of a roster in a single offseason.

Coaches can’t plan beyond a single year. Rosters change so quickly that fans struggle to build lasting attachments to players.

That instability is driving a broader policy response. President Donald Trump convened a college sports roundtable in March with conference commissioners, NCAA leadership, and other stakeholders. He later signed an executive order aimed at restoring order through eligibility caps, transfer limits, and protections for women’s sports. It also threatens federal funding cuts for schools that do not comply.

But there’s a paradox at the center of all this.

College sports are also thriving financially. About 30.1 million people watched the College Football Playoff national championship. The SEC has a 10-year, $3 billion media deal with ESPN. The Big Ten’s media rights agreement exceeds $8 billion over seven years, the largest in college sports history. Revenue continues to climb even as instability grows.

The conventional diagnosis is that college sports need order. But that framing misses something deeper: chaos and record revenue are happening at the same time. The explanation is that short-term market success and long-term fandom are not the same thing. College sports brands were built over a century of shared community identity. Today’s system is largely harvesting that equity, not building it.

That tension exposes a deeper problem: regulation is difficult because there is no agreed definition of what college sports are for, or what fairness looks like across such a diverse system. “College sports” is not one thing. It is a collection of institutions and sports with different economics, histories, and purposes. Any single rule will hit programs in very different ways.

Trump’s order is the first serious attempt to impose structure on the post–NIL landscape. The question is what it can actually fix – and what it cannot.

The Order: Filling the League Rules Vacuum

Every sport has two sets of rules. The first governs play: four downs, three strikes, no traveling. The second governs the league itself: salary caps, drafts, free agency, and revenue sharing. In pro sports, those rules are set through collective bargaining between owners and players.

College sports has never had that structure.

The NCAA once played that governing role through amateurism rules, transfer restrictions, and compensation limits. But court rulings, especially those opening the door to NIL, invalidated much of that framework without replacing it. Schools and athletes have been operating in a regulatory vacuum ever since.

The executive order, set to take effect Aug. 1, 2026, includes four major elements:

Core restrictions: Athletes would be limited to five years of eligibility, with narrow exceptions for military or missionary service. They would be allowed one transfer with immediate eligibility, and a second only after earning a four-year degree.

Women’s and Olympic sports protection: Revenue-sharing must preserve or increase funding for non-revenue sports, and schools would be barred from cutting women’s or Olympic programs to pay athletes.

NIL regulation: The order bans “fraudulent NIL schemes” — payments routed through collectives without legitimate marketing value — while allowing bona fide endorsements from third parties.

Enforcement mechanism: Federal agencies would evaluate compliance and could suspend or debar schools from federal funding and contracts.

It also calls for a national student-athlete agent registry, authorizes Federal Trade Commission enforcement against agents, and urges Congress to pass follow-on legislation.

Core Restrictions: Locking in Brand Power

The order’s transfer and eligibility limits are designed to reduce roster volatility. Athletes would have one unrestricted transfer window and a second only if they complete their degree.

In practice, that targets the most visible source of instability: players moving annually in search of better opportunities or NIL deals.

But the tradeoff is uneven.

Coaches and institutions remain fully mobile. Coaches can still leave mid-contract for higher-paying jobs. Schools can still pursue media deals and conference realignment. Athletes, by contrast, would face stricter limits on movement.

That asymmetry raises two issues.

First, legal. In professional sports, limits on free agency are negotiated with unions. Here, they would be imposed on athletes without representation, inviting litigation.

Second, competitive. Elite programs like Georgia, Alabama, and Ohio State already hold recruiting advantages in high school talent acquisition. Restricting transfers strengthens those advantages by limiting roster correction for smaller programs. For top programs, transfers are mainly about retention and depth. For mid-tier programs, the portal is often the primary tool for competitiveness. The same rule produces different outcomes depending on program tier.

Women’s and Olympic Sports: The Cross-Subsidy Problem

The order also seeks to stabilize funding for women’s and Olympic sports by requiring schools to preserve or expand existing investment levels.

The intent is clear. Without constraints, revenue naturally flows toward football and men’s basketball, which generate returns. Non-revenue sports depend on internal subsidies.

But the policy effectively freezes a system that is already inconsistent.

Within schools, funding for non-revenue sports varies widely without clear logic. If these programs are all “student development” or “community goods,” it is difficult to explain why some coaches are paid significantly more than others or why certain sports are treated as institutional priorities.

Across schools, the disparity is even larger. Programs like Georgia gymnastics benefit from SEC football revenue. Schools with weaker football brands cannot match that support, even if their athletic programs are equally successful within their sport.

Title IX was designed to ensure equal access to participation. But it was built on a system that assumed football and men’s basketball function like other sports. They do not. They operate as major revenue and branding engines that subsidize broader athletic departments.

The order preserves that structure rather than reconsidering it. It stabilizes funding but locks in underlying inequalities.

NIL Refinements: Coherent in Principle, Hard to Enforce

The order’s NIL provisions are the most conceptually consistent.

It attempts to distinguish between legitimate endorsement deals and payments disguised as marketing agreements. In theory, NIL should allow athletes to monetize their individual brands. Olivia Dunne’s endorsement deals are a clear example of that model working as intended.

The problem is enforcement.

“Fair market value” is difficult to define even in traditional advertising. It becomes far more subjective when applied to athletes whose value is tied to program exposure, conference affiliation, and national television presence.

A Georgia football player, for example, has far greater NIL earning potential than a player at a smaller program due to built-in exposure and fan base size. Even perfect enforcement would not eliminate that structural gap.

The order also leaves unresolved questions about revenue sharing. It references governing body rules that do not yet exist and provides no clear mechanism for determining how revenue is allocated or who represents athletes in that process.

Why the Order Likely Helps UGA and Hurts Georgia Tech

Competitive imbalance is not new to college sports. It is embedded in the system.

But the order reinforces existing hierarchies.

Georgia benefits from elite recruiting, national exposure, and a large built-in fan base. It can absorb roster stability and rely less on the transfer portal. Georgia Tech, by contrast, operates with fewer recruiting advantages and greater dependence on roster turnover to remain competitive.

Transfer limits reduce that flexibility.

The same dynamic appears in NIL. Exposure matters. Georgia appears on national television regularly, hosts major broadcast events, and competes for championships. That visibility drives brand value. Georgia Tech has significantly less national exposure, which limits athlete marketability regardless of on-field performance.

Revenue differences compound the gap. While exact figures vary, Georgia football generates significantly higher revenue and profit than Georgia Tech football, allowing broader investment across non-revenue sports. The order preserves those linkages rather than redistributing them.

The Fundamental Question

The order addresses instability by limiting athlete mobility. Coaches, administrators, and media partners remain largely unaffected.

That imbalance will likely face legal and structural challenges, especially given recent court decisions favoring athlete compensation rights.

But the larger issue is definitional.

College sports continues to operate without agreement on its purpose. Is it primarily education and student development? Or is it commercial entertainment built on institutional brands?

The current system attempts to be both. The result is a set of rules that govern athletes as students while treating the enterprise as a professional industry.

At some point, that tension becomes unsustainable.

The honest answer is that college football and men’s basketball function as professional entertainment supported by student-athletes, while most other sports operate under a different model entirely. Until that distinction is acknowledged, regulation will continue to struggle to apply one framework to two very different systems.