Starting Nov. 22, the NCAA plans to allow student-athletes and athletics staff to bet on professional sports in states where it's legal.1
The change was originally slated for Nov. 1 but was postponed by the Division I Board to accommodate a 30-day membership rescission window after the initial approval fell below the 75% threshold.
Regardless of whether the change ultimately takes effect, the long-standing ban on college-sports betting — and on sharing inside college information — remains in place.2 This article discusses where we are and how we got to this point.
Within days of the vote, Greg Sankey, commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, urged the NCAA to reverse course, arguing that letting insiders gamble, even on pro leagues, normalizes behavior and blurs judgment. His warning arrived the same week federal prosecutors announced gambling-related charges involving NBA figures.3
Pressure is now coming from Washington too. Days after the policy vote, members of Congress sent NCAA president Charlie Baker a letter demanding justification for the change and warning that allowing athletes to bet on pro sports could undermine public trust in college athletics.4
So how did we get here? In short, a decade of litigation steadily expanded what college athletes are allowed to do.
When Amateurism Met Antitrust
For most of the last century, the NCAA has enforced one core rule: College athletes cannot be paid. The system, often described as amateurism, was built to ensure that athletes remained eligible only if they received no compensation tied to their athletic ability.
Schools, coaches, conferences and media partners could generate and share revenue. Athletes could not.
Athletes risked ineligibility for taking money from boosters, signing with an agent, or accepting payment for use of their name, image and likeness. An athlete who appeared in a video game, on merchandise, or in an advertisement could not be paid for it. In practice, athletes could not be compensated for the commercial value they helped create.
That model eventually collided with antitrust law.
Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits agreements that unreasonably restrain trade. For years, the NCAA argued that its amateurism rules were different — that limiting athlete compensation was necessary to preserve the distinction between college and professional sports, and that those limits should be insulated from antitrust scrutiny. Courts began to reject that position.
Take, for example, the 2015 O'Bannon v. NCAA decision. There, former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon challenged the NCAA's rules that barred athletes from being paid when their name, image or likeness appeared in commercial products like video games and broadcasts.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the NCAA couldn't use amateurism to avoid antitrust scrutiny and required that schools be permitted to offer scholarships up to the full cost of attendance. O'Bannon was the first major appellate decision to say parts of the amateurism model unlawfully restricted athlete compensation.
Six years later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously affirmed an injunction against NCAA caps on education-related benefits in the 2021 NCAA v. Alston decision.
The court reaffirmed that NCAA limits aren't exempt from antitrust review. Justice Brett Kavanaugh's concurrence went further, noting that similar pay restrictions would be "flatly illegal in almost any other industry."
Those decisions led to the NCAA's July 1, 2021, interim NIL policy, which allowed athletes to monetize their NIL.5 With that, power began to shift from institutions to individual athletes.
The Arrival of Revenue Sharing
On June 6, the settlement of House v. NCAA was approved by U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, authorizing roughly $2.8 billion in back payments to Division I athletes, compensating for years when NCAA rules barred them from being paid for their NIL and related economic opportunities.
The deal also creates a forward-looking model that allows schools that opt in to pay athletes directly under a capped revenue-sharing framework.6 Many describe it as a soft salary cap, initially around $20.5 million per school, expected to rise. The settlement also replaces scholarship limits with roster caps and adds new NIL oversight. It is the clearest break yet from the old amateur model.
NIL and the Transfer Portal Leads to College Sports' Free Agency
The NIL era arrived alongside another transformational change: the NCAA transfer portal. Introduced in 2018, the portal allows athletes to change schools without sitting out a year, effectively granting immediate eligibility upon transfer.
When combined with the ability to earn NIL income, this mobility has created what many describe as a form of free agency in college sports. For example, in 2025, more than 3,200 Division l college football players entered the NCAA transfer portal during the offseason.7
Top athletes can now leverage their marketability — and their transfer eligibility — to seek better financial, competitive or personal opportunities elsewhere. Collectives and boosters actively court players with NIL promises, and coaching staffs navigate what amounts to annual roster re-recruitment. The system rewards programs with sophisticated compliance and marketing infrastructure while challenging smaller schools to remain competitive.
The Next Frontier: Gambling
From the NCAA's perspective, allowing athletes to bet on professional sports is an attempt to meet the reality on the ground. Legal sports betting exists in 38 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and it's already part of campus culture. In a 2024 NCAA survey, roughly 21.5% of male college athletes said they had placed a sports bet in the previous year; in Division I, the figure was 12.6%.8
The NCAA's new line is less about policing a vice and more about acknowledging the shift. College athletes are being treated more like adults in a commercial system. NIL and House brought compensation into the open. This policy channels betting the same way, into a narrow, regulated lane.
That points to where college sports are headed. As athletes become paid stakeholders with NIL income, potential revenue sharing, and limited permission to engage with a legal betting market, the model will look more like the pros, and so will the compliance load.
The hard questions now are about boundaries and enforcement. In short, NIL and revenue sharing gave athletes real agency. The test now is whether the governance around that agency can keep up.
How to Keep Up
The convergence of antitrust, labor and gaming regulation has created a legal landscape unlike anything the NCAA has faced before. Attorneys representing schools, collectives, conferences, or athletes must navigate overlapping and evolving frameworks. Below are several practical considerations for practitioners working in this space.
Reassess compliance infrastructure.
Traditional athletic compliance departments — built to monitor eligibility and recruiting — must now integrate financial, contractual and licensing oversight. Counsel should help institutions design centralized systems that track NIL payments, direct revenue-sharing allocations and potential conflicts with existing sponsorships.
Anticipate employment classification challenges.
With House ushering in direct compensation and collective negotiations on the horizon, litigation and administrative proceedings will increasingly test whether athletes qualify as "employees" under federal or state law. Practitioners should monitor these developments.
Build guardrails around NIL and gambling.
The coexistence of NIL monetization and legalized betting creates new risks of insider misuse and reputational harm. Attorneys should advise schools and collectives to adopt written policies defining "inside information," and require disclosure of betting relationships.
Conclusion
College athletics is now defined by practical questions of compensation, mobility and compliance. The task for lawyers is to track fast-moving rules, build workable policies and help clients manage risk while staying competitive.
B. Todd Jones is a partner at Robins Kaplan LLP. He previously served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota and as the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Most recently, he served as senior vice president and special counsel for conduct at the NFL.
Zac Cohen is an associate at Robins Kaplan.
Stephanie Quartararo is an associate at the firm.
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer, its clients, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
[1] https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/46689420/ncaa-allows-athletes-bet-pro-sports-starting-nov-1; https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/46762598/ncaa-delays-rule-change-permitting-college-athletes-bet-professional-sports.
[2] Id.
[3] https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/46695228/sources-terry-rozier-arrested-part-gambling-inquiry.
[4] https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/46793008/congress-ncaa-charlie-baker-betting-rule-change.
[5] https://www.reuters.com/sports/ncaa-rule-change-would-permit-direct-payment-athletes-2025-04-22/.
[6] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ABEQ_aswcOAYKebtFSy6_5Z93kYvVD62/view?pli=1.
[7] https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/44634749/ncaa-football-spring-transfer-portal-player-rankings-scouting-reports-overall.
[8] https://www.ncaa.org/news/2025/1/14/media-center-ncaa-study-education-shows-promise-in-changing-sports-betting-behaviors-harassment-from-bettors-prevalent-in-di.aspx.
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