Don't Let the Lawyers Finish What the Coaches Started

"Increased pressure on Congress to create federal legislation." That's the line that keeps me up. Because pressure from who? Pressure to do what, exactly? I've seen what happens when the people who've never taped an ankle start drawing up the plays. The settlement already moved the ball — schools can now directly compensate athletes. That's real. That happened. But now we've got a vacuum, and vacuums get filled fast, usually by whoever's got the most lobbyists in the room. The kid in the weight room at 5 a.m. doesn't have a lobbyist. The kid redshirting through a knee injury doesn't have a lobbyist. Congress stepping in sounds like help. Sometimes it is. But federal legislation without the right voices in the room just trades one bad system for another one with better letterhead. The settlement created an opening. What fills it matters more than the opening itself. So here's the question: before Congress drafts a single word of this federal framework, are the athletes — not the commissioners, not the university presidents, not the TV executives — actually in the room?