For 100 years the NCAA was the sheriff of college football. Today there's no sheriff at all - and the fight to replace it is reshaping the sport. This is college football's Cold War.
NIL, the transfer portal, conference realignment, playoff expansion - they aren't separate crises. Host Seth Saunders makes the case that they're all symptoms of one massive transfer of power, and breaks down who's actually fighting to control the future of the game.
We trace the legal through-line from the 2014 O'Bannon case to Justice Kavanaugh's unanimous Alston concurrence, through state NIL laws and the House settlement, to the Brendan Sorsby eligibility fight, the case that proves the NCAA is now just the trial court, not judge, jury, and executioner.
Then: why the SEC and Big Ten are the sport's two superpowers, why the ACC is the "Berlin Wall" everyone's watching, how NIL Go exposes college football's enforcement problem, the six proxy wars driving every headline, and three possible futures for...
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