Some of those scenarios are strange. We’re now talking about athletes who finished their college careers, pursued professional opportunities and are exploring a return to college for another season. Conferences and professional leagues are trying to figure out where their lines should be, courts are getting involved and schools are trying to make roster decisions while the rules are still moving underneath them. There are going to be examples that make people uncomfortable. There are going to be examples that make us ask whether this is really what college athletics is supposed to look like. Those are fair questions.

But as we work through them, I think we have to keep coming back to the best interests of the student-athletes. That’s not the same thing as saying every athlete should automatically get whatever outcome he or she wants. There still need to be rules. There still needs to be structure. We also need to recognize that the structure of college athletics has changed dramatically while many of our ideas about eligibility, compensation and opportunity were built for a different era.

For a long time, college athletics fought against giving student-athletes a greater share of the value they helped create. Now the dominoes are falling. NIL changed the landscape. Revenue sharing changed it again. Eligibility is changing. The transfer environment has changed. None of these things exist independently of one another. When you spend decades holding one end of the system in place and then finally let it move, you shouldn’t be surprised when everything connected to it starts moving too.

I also think we need to be careful about putting all of this at the feet of “the NCAA.” It’s easy to talk about the NCAA as if it’s a group of people sitting in Indianapolis making every decision for college sports on its own. That’s not how a membership organization works. Schools and conferences participate in the governance process. Legislation can be proposed and voted on through that structure, while the national office administers, interprets and enforces the rules created through the membership process. The NCAA is part of this, but it isn’t some completely separate entity from the institutions it represents.

That means when we’re asking how college athletics got here, the conversation has to include the leaders throughout college sports. Presidents and chancellors. Campus administrators. Athletic directors. Conference leadership. Coaches. Committees and governing bodies. There have been a lot of people making decisions over a lot of years that built the system we’re now trying to reshape. Pointing at one organization might be easier, but it doesn’t help us understand how we got here or how we’re going to move forward.

The five-for-five conversation is a good example. The idea behind the new model makes sense to me. Simplify eligibility. Give student-athletes more certainty. Get rid of some of the complicated redshirt and waiver situations that have made eligibility difficult for athletes, coaches and administrators to understand. The NCAA itself has said the goal is a simpler and more predictable model. But when you change a rule that affects thousands of athletes at once, there will be consequences around the edges that nobody completely anticipated. We’re seeing some of those consequences right now.

And this won’t be the last domino. I think one of the next major areas we’ll have to wrestle with is the financial model of college athletics. The economics are being turned on their head at the same time we’re changing eligibility, roster construction, athlete compensation and the way departments operate. Schools are going to have to make decisions they haven’t had to make before. Some of those decisions will create outcomes we can anticipate today, and I’m confident others will surprise us.

That’s why I don’t think the answer is to look at one unusual eligibility situation and decide the entire system has gone too far. We’re in the middle of a correction that has been building for a long time, and corrections aren’t always clean. We should absolutely evaluate the unintended consequences and adjust when something isn’t working. But while we do that, we have to keep asking who college athletics is supposed to serve. Student-athletes need to remain at the center of that answer. The rules are going to continue changing, more dominoes are going to fall and some of the results are going to look different from anything we’ve seen before. Our responsibility as leaders in college sports is to navigate those changes without losing sight of the people we’re here to serve.