What’s Org Design Got to Do with College Football?
If you ask this lifelong fan, everything.
One of my earliest childhood memories is going to a North Carolina State University football game with my pops. I was too young to remember the name of the other team, so I called them the “bad guys,” just like in the cartoons I watched. I don’t think we missed a home game for nearly 20 years.
Today, much has changed: For example, I’m an organizational designer and I spend my working hours helping complex organizations become more adaptive and resilient. What hasn’t changed is my obsession with college football. My dad and I still go to NC State games; I listen to college football podcasts; and lately, I’ve been lamenting the tragic state of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Ask any college football fan who today’s “bad guys” are, and most would probably say the NCAA.
Of course, the NCAA isn’t a collection of individually malicious or incompetent people, the so-called “bad guys” of my youth. The real culprit here is the NCAA’s own internal system, which prevents it from addressing the myriad issues that threaten college football’s future. Just say the words “Name, Image, and Likeness” (commonly referred to as NIL) among serious fans and you’re likely to elicit reactions that can’t be shared in polite company. NIL represents the latest version of a longstanding tension — that the NCAA benefits from the labor of college athletes without paying them directly. Now, this tension is threatening to boil over and the NCAA’s leaders face the same challenge many other leaders face: If they don’t address this issue, and others currently facing their organization, they won’t be in charge much longer.
Yes, I’m still talking about football. But I’m also talking about an institution struggling to evolve its ways of thinking, working, and experimenting. The filter might be college football, but the larger story concerns a systemic failure to innovate.
Breaking Up with a Broken Cycle
What has the NCAA’s typical governance of college football looked like?
- Refuse to make policy changes until they get sued
- Change the rules but offer minimal guidance to member institutions
- Investigate violations of its own unclear rules, punishing schools and athletes
This cycle — where the NCAA sits back until compelled to make changes — represents a pattern found in many companies. Consider where you’ve worked or work; you can likely name the crises facing the organization and the ways in which it’s avoiding them.
At a systems design level, the NCAA is struggling because of unclear authority and an inadequate practice of innovation. When I say innovation, I mean how the body learns and evolves, and when I say authority, I’m referring to the way they share power and make decisions.
The typical response to failures and hurdles like these is to change leadership. “If we just go ahead and remove the people in charge,” goes this understandable (albeit flawed) line of thinking, “then things will get better.” The reality is that shaking up and replacing leadership rarely results in lasting, meaningful change. Why?
When we look at organizations in the midst of a leadership shift, a common pattern emerges: old leadership exits, new leadership enters, some things change, often for the better in the short-term. That problem they promised to fix? They usually fix it. But the underlying causes of those problems — and the organization’s inability to address them — woefully stay the same.
Let’s play that out within the NCAA’s context:
Let’s say a new entity emerges to run college football (like the College Football Playoff) and they fix an immediate issue or two. College football’s constituents might be happy for a month (maybe even for an entire season), but then the complex and rapidly shifting college football landscape, with billions of dollars at stake, inevitably runs into an emergent issue the new leadership is unequipped to deal with. Having ignored its bedrock problems, this “new” organization runs the same problem-solving plays the NCAA (and countless other institutions) has applied ad nauseam: Form committees with unclear authority and ask them to study the problem; have some people go away and devise a grand plan; wait a year (or five); get sued; and then finally, slowly, broadly implement the plan with no opportunity to either iterate or respond to a changing reality.
The result is what you’d imagine: a failure to adapt and meet the moment, resulting in fans, players, and coaches having the same conversation they’ve been having about the NCAA for more than 100 years.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Less Blocking, More Innovating
The NCAA is a convenient and oft-deserved punching bag, but the real enemy is the way most organizations operate. Again, the NCAA’s gnarliest problem is the internal system that shapes how it works (what we at The Ready call an Operating System, or OS). An antiquated OS can keep bureaucracy in place, slow decision-making to a glacial pace, and ultimately block an organization from serving its constituents and customers.
So, what could a new NCAA OS try and prioritize first?
It could develop a practice of disciplined, public experimentation.
Given college football’s quick-moving environment, no one is asking the NCAA to get every decision right the first time. A reasonable expectation, however, is for the NCAA to get clear about what’s not working (e.g., the aforementioned NIL regulations, the transfer portal, and a dearth of Black head coaches), what it’s going to try to address those tensions, and clear parameters for the experiments it will run. Afterward, the NCAA could explain their decision-making, share data, and then try the next experiment (I outline what this could look like below).
The NCAA will never please all of its constituents at the same time or get all of its decisions right. But it could rapidly experiment, share what it is learning, and improve policy at a pace that keeps up with the outside world.
It could push authority to the edge.
Some of the world’s most innovative organizations push authority to the edge, meaning they give decision-making power to those closest to the work. One of Ukraine’s distinct military advantages over Russia is the flexibility it has gained by pushing decision-making to the lowest level. If this type of mindset shift can happen in a sector as traditionally top-down as the military, it can happen in college athletics. The NCAA should explicitly involve its constituents (players, fans, coaches, athletic directors, television partners, etc.) and actually give its constituents authority to make decisions about how they’re governed. This pairs well with the suggestion above. Instead of the NCAA running experiments on its constituents, now they are the ones designing the experiments — and hopefully even the policies — themselves.
Here are three ways the NCAA could innovate by experimenting and pushing authority to the edge:
- Follow baseball’s lead and embrace cyclical experimentation with both on- and off-field rules. The NCAA could think of its seasons as one-year experimentation cycles and put forth hypotheses, in public, and how they’ll measure them. Then, assess them, in public, at the end of each season as decisions get made on what to do next. These proceedings could even be televised. By the time February rolls around, college football fans would watch literally anything related to the sport, and I guarantee they’d watch these deliberations.
- Charter a team of players, fans, coaches, athletic directors, and television partners to come up with an experiment to either pay players or share licensing fees. This article from The Athletic on the future of money in college sports goes into more detail, but the push here is to give this group real authority and decision rights to design and implement a policy. Do it for a year, see what shakes out, and reassess. (Spoiler: It won’t work exactly as planned. It never does. Keep iterating.)
- Instead of punishing schools for improper use of NIL funds (money used to “sponsor” certain college athletes), use them as case studies to inform the next policy. Schools are being forced by competition to innovate; instead of fighting that innovation, celebrate examples where schools and NIL collectives are navigating exceptionally murky waters in ways that benefit student-athletes.
Long have organizations like the NCAA run in a paternalistic manner, either implicitly or explicitly messaging they’re the experts. This hasn’t worked. Organizations, just like college football teams, that refuse to delegate authority to the edge sadly set themselves up to get left in the dust. The best organizations know the people closest to the problems are also closest to the solutions. This isn’t unlike what top head coaches in football do today; they hire great position coaches who are experts in their domain and trust them to do their job. In turn, those position coaches train and trust their players to be leaders on the field. That feedback-rich loop can then result in greater learning and innovation flowing throughout an entire team.
Creating Space for Change to Run
The NCAA is not alone in being a governing body in charge of a complex system. As such, there are things it can and can’t do. It can reasonably create clear policies, involve its constituents in decision-making processes, and institute creative solutions to complex issues. And it most likely can’t prevent the influx of money into college sports, create a perfect NIL policy on the first try, or fix the competitive balance issues between large and small universities. Perhaps then the most important role it could play is to create and hold space for change.
When pushing authority to the edge and experimenting, one of the most important roles leaders can step into is the one of “space-holder.” This may sound like doing nothing — but the opposite is true. If the NCAA committed to holding space, then it could create and protect the ability for its constituents to design and run experiments to improve college football. It could resist the pressure to exercise top-down authority and revert to old ways of operating. It could allow new ideas to surface that the NCAA can no longer bat away as too radical, because that ship has sailed. Ultimately, it could result in practicing the patience and humility that just might allow college football to transform itself.
As this NC State fan knows well, fandom is about supporting your team through wins and losses — and now it’s time for the NCAA to give us some of those wins.
The Ready is an organizational design and transformation partner that helps you discover a better way of working. We work with some of the world’s largest, oldest, and most inspiring organizations to help them remove bureaucracy and adapt to the complex world in which we all live. Learn more by subscribing to our Brave New Work podcast and Brave New Work Wednesdays newsletter, checking out our book, or reaching out to have a conversation about how we can help your organization evolve ways of working better suited to your current reality.
Many thanks to Sam Spurlin and Zoe Donaldson for editorial support.
