Sports reporters rarely cover college athletes as employees — they should.

Headlines and news commentary routinely criticize college athletes and, more pointedly, their decisions to transfer to new schools and sign name, image and likeness deals.

Perhaps some of that scrutiny stems from fandom — the intensely personal connections we have with college sports — combined with the insulated, protective structure of collegiate athletics.

But the result is a profound misunderstanding and contextual mischaracterization of college athletes and college sports more broadly. College athletes, after all, did not create the increasingly commercial structure of college sports.

A recent peer-reviewed study I wrote with several colleagues illustrates how geography can shape the tone of news coverage of athlete transfers and NIL compensation. When an athlete transfers out of an institution within a news outlet’s coverage area, local reporting tends to be more critical. Across local and national outlets, criticism intensifies when financial compensation is believed to have influenced the transfer.

In this context, reporters often treat NIL deals — and financial incentives more broadly — as suspect in ways that would be unusual in most other U.S. labor markets.

A paradigm shift could improve both media coverage and public understanding of college athletics, particularly now that direct financial compensation is increasingly important for athletes in major Division I football and basketball programs.

The transfer portal often reflects rational labor market decisions.

The annual transfer rate among traditional college students at four-year universities hovers around 13%.

Among NCAA athletes, the transfer rate was 7.7% in 2025, up slightly from 7.3% in 2024. Simply put, NCAA athletes transfer at a lower rate than their non-athlete peers.

When athletes do transfer, their reasons are often both rational and familiar.

NCAA data on Division I and Division II transfers show athletes making decisions that resemble those of workers considering new employment: They weigh opportunity, fit, status, future prospects and, increasingly, compensation.

Over the past four years, 30.9% of Division II transfer athletes moved to a Division I institution. In the overall labor market, this would resemble an employee at a regional company accepting a position at a national one in pursuit of greater status, exposure or opportunity.

Meanwhile, 96.4% of Division I transfer athletes from 2022 to 2025 moved either to another Division I institution or to a Division II program. That movement can also be rational as research indicates athletes seek playing time and institutional settings better aligned with their abilities and goals. A marginal Division I athlete moving to Division II, for example, may be making the equivalent decision of a mid-level manager accepting a more senior role at a smaller company.

On the whole, the transfer portal reflects labor movement that would be considered ordinary in many other settings — and even in collegiate athletics.

Among NCAA Division I athletic departments, the average employee turnover rate is 48% every two years, according to one analysis. Division II and Division III athletic departments have average turnover rates of 58% and 44%, respectively. Those figures are comparable to turnover rates in sectors such as food service, general retail, and construction — industries defined by part-time status and consistent labor mobility.

An assistant basketball coach at a major program that accepts a position as head coach at a mid-major program is celebrated as taking the next step in their career.

A head football coach at a Group of 6 program that accepts a coordinator position at a Power 4 program is similarly praised.

However, the labor decisions that college athletes make are often viewed and treated differently. This is the case even though they exist within the same setting as coaches and athletic administrators.

Collegiate athletics increasingly resembles a textbook labor market.

College sports have never been wholly detached from compensation.

Long before NIL, revenue sharing and the transfer portal, top athletes could receive benefits beyond an athletic scholarship through informal or prohibited channels. Although what once happened largely “under the table” is now increasingly happening above it, the formal status of college athletes is largely unchanged.

I encourage reporters to consider the basic relationship: A university recruits an athlete for a specialized skill, trains that athlete, outfits the athlete in its uniform, and benefits financially and reputationally from the athlete’s performance.

Today, at institutions that have opted into revenue sharing, athletes can also receive direct compensation from their schools. Yet they are not treated as employees by their universities or, typically, in news coverage.

Among institutions participating in revenue sharing, athletes receive 1099 tax forms, which are for freelance or self-employed workers, rather than W-2s, which go to regular employees.

Payments directly from colleges and universities are characterized as royalties tied to conference multimedia rights agreements — agreements negotiated independently of an individual athlete’s enrollment or participation on a team.

Calling these payments royalties may have practical advantages. In particular, classifying revenue-sharing payments as passive income can allow international athletes studying in the U.S. on F-1 visas to receive compensation from their institutions, while traditional NIL compensation is generally treated as active income and can raise immigration restrictions.

But the arrangement also exposes the conceptual tension in the system. Athletes receive money from the institutions they compete for, based in substantial part on the value they provide to those programs, while the institutions deny an employer-employee relationship.

This same ambiguity surrounds NIL.

When an athlete signs a genuine third-party endorsement deal, independent-contractor status makes intuitive sense. Nike, for example, does not employ an athlete who appears in an advertisement. Rather, it contracts with that athlete to license their name, image or likeness.

Many NIL opportunities for college athletes, however, are much smaller and more local. For example, they may be endorsement deals with a restaurant, apparel company or other business partnering with a recognizable athlete to reach consumers in a college market. Those arrangements are essentially influencer-marketing tactics applied to college athletes.

The more complicated category of NIL compensation involves booster-backed NIL collectives.

After the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston, NIL collectives proliferated around major athletic programs. Formally separate from universities, they solicited money from boosters and used those funds to compensate athletes for promotional appearances, autographs, youth camp instruction, and other NIL-related activities.

Following the House v. NCAA settlement in 2024, and the introduction of direct institutional revenue sharing, the distinction between institutional and NIL compensation has become even more ambiguous.

At some schools, payments from athletic department revenue-sharing budgets and affiliated NIL entities can reach athletes through the same payment systems, even though the money is legally characterized in different ways.

The practical result is that athletes can now receive compensation through multiple mechanisms connected to the institutions for which they compete — while still lacking employee status, benefits, or collective representation.

Regardless of one’s view of athlete compensation, this structure matters because it shapes how athlete behavior is interpreted. If collegiate athletics is understood as a labor market, then actions such as transferring, negotiating compensation, or seeking better opportunities looks less like instability and more like ordinary economic behavior.

The final takeaway: Stop blaming athletes.

College athletes did not negotiate billion-dollar media-rights agreements, expand athletic department staffs, approve escalating coaching salaries or spark the facilities arms race that for decades has defined major college athletics.

Yet athletes are frequently positioned as the source of instability when they transfer, seek greater compensation, or make decisions based on their economic interests.

That framing gets the economics backward.

Ticket prices, operating expenses and athletic department budgets were rising long before athletes could legally benefit from NIL or receive direct compensation from their institutions.

Consumer interest has hardly disappeared. Football and basketball remain enormously valuable media properties, while sports that historically drew smaller audiences have found new opportunities for exposure and growth.

Even the transfer portal — often described as evidence of chaos — can be viewed differently.

Player movement creates year-round storylines, much as free agency does in professional sports.

For media companies and athletic conferences whose business models depend heavily on consistent sports content, there is economic value in keeping college athletics in the news beyond the traditional playing season.

None of this means the current system is functioning perfectly. Really, it’s quite the opposite.

The larger problem is that collegiate athletics has embraced many characteristics of a traditional labor market without fully acknowledging the labor relationship at its center. Athletes can receive revenue-sharing payments, earn NIL compensation, be recruited according to perceived market value, and move between institutions when better opportunities emerge.

However, college athletes still lack formal and recognized employment status, benefits or collective representation that accompany comparable labor relationships elsewhere.

Such contradiction matters as financial compensation can expand opportunity while simultaneously preserving institutional control. The availability of NIL deals should not automatically be understood as liberation, nor should revenue sharing be treated as evidence that the underlying power relationship has been resolved. Compensation and autonomy are related, but they are not synonymous.

For many athletes, the transfer portal remains one of the clearest mechanisms through which they can exercise individual leverage. An athlete who lacks playing time, believes they are undervalued, wants a different academic environment, or otherwise receives a better opportunity elsewhere can choose to leave.

Those decisions may frustrate coaches and fans, but frustration does not make an athlete’s decision irrational. Such decisions look irrational when we apply a framework to college athletes that we would scarcely apply elsewhere.

An employee who changes organizations for more money may be called ambitious. A student who transfers universities in search of a better fit is making a personal choice. A professional athlete who signs with a new team is participating in free agency. When a college athlete acts on some combination of those same considerations, the choice is often presented as evidence that something has gone wrong with college sports.

I encourage journalists covering collegiate athletics to be especially attentive to that distinction.

Terms such as “chaos,” “greed,” “overpay,” “turmoil” and even “free agency” can carry assumptions about what athletes owe institutions and which motivations are considered legitimate. Coverage that emphasizes a departure without considering playing time, educational fit, professional opportunity, compensation, or institutional circumstances risks presenting ordinary economic decision making as deviant behavior.

The challenge for reporters is to apply a consistent framework when covering athletes’ decisions.

Collegiate athletics has changed dramatically, but athletes seeking opportunity is not evidence of irrationality. Indeed, in many cases it is actually evidence that they finally possess enough economic leverage to behave much like everyone else participating in an American labor market.

If we want to understand modern college sports, we could start by describing that behavior for what it is: rational decision making in a defined labor market.

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