Collegiate Capitalism: The Battle For The Future of College Sports (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781959993711)

He defended the NCAA for a decade. Now he is telling the truth about what came next and why.

When Donald M. Remy joined the NCAA in 2011 as its top lawyer, the institution was already absorbing pressures decades in the making: antitrust law reaching back to Board of Regents, state legislatures challenging NCAA self-governance, and the gravitational pull of billions in broadcast revenue. Over the next ten years, as Chief Legal Officer and then Chief Operating Officer, Remy developed litigation strategy, advised university presidents and administrators through governance challenges, and helped lead the institution's defense of amateurism. The Supreme Court opened the door to widespread sports betting in Murphy and ruled unanimously against the NCAA in Alston. The transfer portal enabled de facto free agency, reshaping recruiting and roster construction at every level. Name, image, and likeness contracts rewrote the rules for every coach in America. And the $2.8 billion House v. NCAA settlement set the terms of a new era in which schools, for the first time in history, could pay athletes directly through revenue sharing.

Collegiate Capitalism is the story of how college sports evolved, told by a man who helped shape the institutional response and who navigated scandals that exposed the limits of the old order. Remy traces the organizational challenges presented by O'Bannon, Alston, and House. He examines the institutional response to Penn State, Baylor, Michigan State, Miami, and North Carolina. He recounts the morning the FBI arrested college basketball and the investigation that followed. He revisits the Final Four canceled by COVID, and the viral video at the next Final Four that exposed gender inequity. And he considers how notable figures in culture, government, and business each shaped the trajectory.

This is also a leadership memoir. Remy traces his journey from a failed presidential nomination on Capitol Hill, to the NCAA general counsel's office, to public service as the ninth Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He confronts the cost of defending positions that grew weaker with each ruling, and the difference between defending an institution and serving its people.

Drawing on a century of college sports history and offering the clarity of someone who lived its most consequential decade, Remy lays out what college sports must become if it is to survive. He addresses revenue sharing under the House settlement, the future of NIL, private investment in college sports, the reshaping of higher education athletics administration, the unresolved question of student athlete employment and labor union recognition, the corrosive influence of gambling on integrity, and the federal legislative and policy debate over the SCORE Act and the Protect College Sports Act.

Collegiate Capitalism is essential reading for athletes navigating a new marketplace, administrators rebuilding a broken model, coaches recruiting in a transformed landscape, lawyers litigating the new questions, investors sensing opportunity, policymakers writing the next round of legislation, and fans wondering what is left of the game they love. It is the definitive guide to the most critical debates in college sports today.