Is a lockout actually what college sports needs?

To negotiate with who exactly?

There is no Players’ Union.
There are no representatives.
The people you’d be seeking to come to some sort of compromise with are teenagers who don’t even the legal capacity to agree to terms.

Universities need to drop the amateur facade of all sports and classify all athletes as employees. Within the employment contracts there needs to be buyout clauses that are negotiated. This will do 2 things:
1. End the unlimited transfer because the recruiting school will have to buyout the transferring players contract
2. Limit the cutting of players as now teams will have to pay a buyout of the remaining contract

Included in the paycheck/contract can be reduced tuition or waving of fees associated with enrollment.

If college athletes lockout, it will be the death of college sports for an extended period of time.

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NCAA is so stupid. They had complete control and just totally gave it up.

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They didn’t give it up, they were stripped of it by the courts due to them wanting to eat their cake and have it too.

Treating FCS, Div II, and Power 5 schools the same is what got us here. P5 schools can afford to pay football and basketball players. Nobody else can. But there are many, many more schools in G5, FCS, and Div II than the P5 and they have essentially the same voting power.

That’s why we are here. We didn’t acknowledge the difference between schools and tried to govern with a single brush.

The big schools just need to stop negotiating and just get the players they can get without it. Eventually it will correct itself.

The issue would be a lot more easily solved if people griped about the actual problematic aspect of it (unlimited transfers with no rules) rather than getting caught up in pocket watching how much players are getting paid.

The madness is from the untethered player movement, not from them getting paid. If you cap a player payment in NIL like most in here want, teams will just go right back to paying players under the table. Folks Getting mad at the players taking the money but absolving any responsibility of the teams paying it.

Implement a max for per annum player NIL compensation as well as a cap for program NIL spend, make players sit out a year if they want to transfer, and this shite goes away.

You can't have a lockout until the players unionize. A collective bargaining agreement would be the best thing for the NCAA and the universities. The basic solution is to replace scholarships with four or five year contracts. The only way to transfer would be if both parties agreed to release the player from his contract. Athletes still get paid but every off season is not pure chaos with the transfer portal.

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bring the players to the table to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement.

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First the player’s status as student-athletes would have to change… seems it would be hard to collective bargain with someone who isn’t a employee with defined labor arrangements

Not to mention the school would have to lockout players that they make money off of so that a separate group that pays them and makes nothing off of them can save money? Situation is too messed up to fox