Let's set aside the fall sports postponements for a minute to look at the bigger picture...
1. In late July, at the Senate judiciary committee hearing on college sports (mostly about NIL) Senators Blumenthal & Booker shared they are working on a college athletes' bill of rights

NCAA/schools asked Congress for help w/ a “national solution” to states passing varying NIL laws.
But now Congresspeople have become invested in the bigger question of whether schools should restore to athletes the economic rights of all students to make money from third parties

And many policymakers and politicians, who might not have known much about college sports, have become troubled by what they have found once they started to learn about the enterprise (ex. CT Senator Chris Murphy)
Be careful what you wish for, NCAA!

2. Today SCOTUS (Kagan) gave the green light to begin expanding athlete compensation as long as the money is tethered to education, rejecting the NCAA request to press pause. The NCAA plans to appeal the Alston decision. (I’m guessing SCOTUS will decline Alston, like O’Bannon)

3. The biggest, most novel threat: athletes are organizing. Nationally. They're working to form a players’ association. After decades of athletes being too busy balancing school and sports and college life and work and family and friends, they’ve had time to stop, think and talk.

While athletes have organized w/in their own campuses before, conference-wide, nation-wide organizing is new. Players want to play. They also want to build a better system 4 future athletes. The more athletes talk, the more they learn. Experiences are shared. Feelings validated.

People who work in college sports (understandably) are focusing in on a spring seasons, what FB and other sports will look like. They’re in crisis mode. This is all very hard, for athletes, coaches, administrators. We need to be mindful and compassionate w/ everyone in athletics

But this greater crisis (again, setting aside the pandemic and fall sports postponements for a minute) is one of the colleges’ own making, outlined in the three points above

To build a better college sports system, we must begin to think long-term and not focus short-term on 2020-2021 seasons of triage. It would be tragic to miss this opportunity to re-imagine college sports. Because if colleges don’t get to work, it will be out of their hands.

The tragedy would be that American institutions of higher education, world leaders in innovative thinking & creative solutions, failed to stop and get to work fixing a broken business that had taken advantage of, and even caused great harm to, too many brilliant young people