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A quick note before we get to today’s story.
November 21st is the Extra Points Bowl, a showcase of elite D-III football at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio. While we want everybody to come and hang out with us, we’re offering a special invitation to college professors. If you teach sports business, law, media or a related field, click here for a free ticket and pass to our luxury box. We’d love to talk shop with you!
If I wanted to, I feel like I could have spent the past six months writing virtually every single day about college sports lawsuits. The last update to the College Sports Litigation Tracker included updates to 10 different cases, with more popping up almost every week.
Most concern athlete eligibility, particularly around athletes from the class of 2022 seeking additional playing time after the NCAA’s shift to a “5-in-5” model. Other lawsuits over the past year or so have covered athlete compensation, potential athlete employment status, exit fees and realignment drama between conferences, and whatever the heck the state of Louisiana and the SEC are fighting about now.
Those cases are still important! They’re expensive, they could dramatically shift what happens on the court this season, and they touch on very important questions, like the power of conferences to set and enforce rules, or who gets to be a college athlete and for how long.
I wouldn’t consider any of them an actual existential threat to college sports, except perhaps Johnson v. NCAA, which could classify tens of thousands of college athletes as employees. But one lawsuit filed last week, while by no means a slam dunk to win or even make it to trial, threatens a financial cornerstone of the Division III model. Should the plaintiffs win, I could absolutely see a world where not only are hundreds of programs shuttered, but some colleges could also actually close.
The core question: Is it an antitrust violation for D-III colleges to refuse to offer athletic scholarships?
In a complaint filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, a current D-III football player, former men’s basketball player and former dual-sport athlete seek to represent a class potentially comprising hundreds of thousands of athletes who have competed in the NCAA’s lowest division since Oct. 21, 2022.
“The NCAA has engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to fix the price of Division III athletic labor at zero by prohibiting every member of Division III, the NCAA’s largest division at more than 400 schools, from offering a single penny of athletic scholarship,” the complaint states.
The named plaintiffs are Jackson Hale, a senior defensive back at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington; Connor Printz, who played basketball at Claremont McKenna College in California from 2020 to 2024; and Chris Jennings, who swam and played lacrosse at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia from 2019 to 2023.
Their lawsuit takes aim at NCAA Division III Bylaw 15.01.3, which states that a member institution “shall not award financial aid to any student on the basis of athletics leadership, ability, participation or performance.”
To better understand why this case matters, we need to take a step back and look at how D-III athletic departments actually generate money and how recent court decisions could change how the courts view Bylaw 15.01.3.
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A bi-weekly look at the rapidly changing licensing landscape in college sports, as part of a paid sponsorship with Desert Cactus.
In the middle of every campus, there's massive untapped potential for increasing licensing revenue: the university bookstore.
Bookstores are the perfect places to launch new vendors and licensing categories. Take Mississippi State, which had its highest royalty revenue in program history in fiscal 2025 and added 106 new vendors; a new-brand launch through its campus bookstore produced record sales. Or Texas A&M, which became the first university to sell official Buc-ee’s products on campus earlier this year. In August, it launched its first co-branded line with both logos, starting with a maroon T-shirt, which is sold at the Barnes & Noble campus bookstore in College Station and at 20 Buc-ee’s locations across Texas.
Demand is huge. At a 2022 campus-store panel, representatives from NC State said its bookstore buys from 71 of its 281 licensed vendors, which accounts for 17 percent of royalties. Another 34 percent comes from the local market. Campus and community buyers are a meaningful share of what a program earn. And it can pay off to keep some products bookstore-exclusive, like NC State's “College of” shirts. Exclusive, campus-specific designs give bookstores something fans can’t get from a mass retailer.
At West Virginia, a “Built on Bravery” collection brought in $785,247 in sales and $111,781 in royalties on 36,757 units, and Maryland’s “Kermencement” line — products sold in 2022, when Kermit the Frog served as commencement speaker — sold out at all retailers by the end of the ceremony. In those cases, timing products to campus events created sellouts.
Campus pop-ups are also highly effective. Tennessee’s Vol Shop hosted a two-day Roller Rabbit pajama pop-up, selling a UT-exclusive design with the Power T, outside the Student Union. The line stretched nearly a quarter mile, with wait times of up to six hours. At William & Mary, Rally House runs mobile pop-ups around campus tied to orientation, family weekend and Charter Day.
