Sports · NCAA NIL · May 24, 2026

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A Private Association Told
Four State Legislatures Their Laws
Don’t Apply. Now Trump’s DOJ Is in the Fight.

On April 3, 2026, President Donald Trump (R) signed an executive order titled “Urgent National Action to Save College Sports,” directing the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to address what the order characterizes as an unsustainable, lawsuit-driven scramble in college athletics compensation. Among its instructions: examine whether state name-image-likeness statutes that bind only some schools but not others impermissibly burden interstate commerce — a Dormant Commerce Clause theory that, if accepted in federal court, would pre-empt the very state laws Republican governors signed to protect their own programs.

The federal escalation lands on top of an unresolved three-year standoff between the NCAA— a private association headquartered in Indianapolis — and four Republican-governed states whose legislatures have passed NIL laws the NCAA has explicitly said its rules will override. The original document at the center of that standoff is a June 27, 2023 memo from NCAA Executive Vice President for Regulatory Affairs Stan Wilcox instructing member schools that “schools must adhere to NCAA legislation when it conflicts with permissive state laws.” In plain English: a private association telling democratically elected state legislatures their statutes do not apply on the campuses inside their borders.

The states the NCAA picked the fight with are Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma. The governors who signed the laws the NCAA tried to override are Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR), the late Gov. Mike Parson (R-MO) (now succeeded by Gov. Mike Kehoe (R-MO)), Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX), and Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK)— with Stitt notably having his veto on a related NIL bill overridden by his own Republican legislature. The NCAA president leading the institutional resistance is Charlie Baker, himself a former Republican governor of Massachusetts (2015–2023). The whole conflict is, structurally, Republican elected officials against a Republican former governor running a private cartel — with a Republican president now throwing federal DOJ weight onto the side of preempting both.

• 4statesin direct, named, public conflict with NCAA NIL enforcement — Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma — all four signed by Republican governors and defended by Republican attorneys general
• ~$20.5Mper school / yearrevenue-share cap per Division I athletic department under the House v. NCAA settlement, explicitly authorized in Texas HB 126 (2025) and replicated in the other three state frameworks
• Apr 3 2026Trump EO“Urgent National Action to Save College Sports” — directs DOJ + FTC to address NIL chaos including potential Dormant Commerce Clause challenge to state-specific NIL frameworks
• 35-40state NIL lawsin force nationally as of mid-2026; MultiState’s 50-state survey (April 29, 2026) finds the great majority were enacted on bipartisan votes
• Jun 27 2023NCAA memoStan Wilcox guidance: “Schools must adhere to NCAA legislation when it conflicts with permissive state laws.” The document that started this fight; never formally retracted
• Jan 14 2026Baker addressNCAA President Charlie Baker — former R-MA Governor — State of College Sports speech: “I would prefer to get a solution that deals with state preemption for a lot of reasons.”

The April 3, 2026 executive order, “Urgent National Action to Save College Sports,” is the federal-level move in a fight that had been confined to state legislatures and private-association rulebooks for three years. The text directs the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Education, and the Secretary of Labor to address college athletics in a coordinated posture. The order frames the current NIL environment as a “state-by-state patchwork that is in chaos” and threatens federal-funding consequences for non-compliant schools after the August 1, 2026 implementation deadline.

The provision that matters for this story is the DOJ instruction. The Trump administration’s legal theory — spelled out in the firm-analysis pieces from Baker Donelson, Seyfarth Shaw, and Ropes & Gray published in the days following the EO — is that state NIL statutes which apply to in-state schools but bind out-of-state competitors only through NCAA membership create an impermissible burden on interstate commerce. If that theory wins in federal court, the practical effect is identical to the position the NCAA staked out in its 2023 memo: state NIL laws do not control. The political effect, however, is the opposite of what those state laws were passed to do.

The document at the center of this story is dated June 27, 2023. It was sent to all NCAA member schools by Stan Wilcox, the NCAA’s Executive Vice President for Regulatory Affairs and reporting directly to then-new NCAA President Charlie Baker. The memo laid out a series of NIL guidelines — bans on institutional involvement in deals, restrictions on collective activity, limits on what schools could communicate to recruits — that conflicted directly with NIL laws Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma had on the books or were about to pass. The operative sentence, reported across On3, ESPN, and Lewis Brisbois’s sports-law desk:

“Schools must adhere to NCAA legislation when it conflicts with permissive state laws.”

Stan Wilcox · NCAA Executive VP, Regulatory Affairs · memo to all member institutions · June 27, 2023

That sentence is the entire fight in one line. The NCAA is a private association — an unincorporated nonprofit confederation of member schools, governed by its own constitution and bylaws. The state legislatures of Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma are democratically elected sovereign bodies. The ordinary rule of American law — cited in the Lewis Brisbois analysis — is that a private association’s rules must comply with applicable state law, not the other way around. The Wilcox memo inverted that. Sports attorney Dan Lust said the quiet part out loud in the wake of the memo’s release:

“The NCAA is telling them they are above the law of our country.”

Dan Lust · sports attorney · responding to the Wilcox memo · 2023

Sports attorney Darren Heitner put the legal posture more precisely:

“A private association's rules generally must comply with state laws and cannot override them.”

Darren Heitner · sports attorney · on NCAA NIL guidance — quoted across On3 and ESPN reporting

The original On3 reporting identified four states whose statutes sat in direct conflict with the Wilcox memo: Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma. Two years on, the laws have evolved — Arkansas tightened its framework with SB 535 in 2025, Texas amended its NIL statute with HB 126, Oklahoma’s SB 840 survived a gubernatorial veto on supermajority overrides, and Missouri’s 2023 HB 417 remains the baseline framing — but the structural conflict the NCAA created has not gone away. All four laws are still in force; all four conflict with at least some 2023 NCAA guidance the NCAA has not formally retracted.

The Arkansas case is the cleanest example of the federalism posture. Sen. Bart Hester (R-Cave Springs)sponsored SB 535 in the 2025 regular session. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) signed it. It passed the Senate 19-12 and the House 92-3. AG Tim Griffin (R-AR) is on record defending the statute. The Arkansas approach makes the conflict explicit: state law authorizes conduct the NCAA prohibits, and bars NCAA enforcement actions against Arkansas schools complying with state law.

The Oklahoma case is the political signal. Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) vetoed SB 840 in May 2025 — and his own Republican legislature overrode the veto on a Senate vote of 37-8 and a House vote of 83-7. Stitt then turned around and signed a January 2025 executive order directing Oklahoma state agencies to support the student-athlete framework the state had just put in statute. AG Gentner Drummond (R-OK) is the state attorney general defending the framework.

Charlie Bakerbecame NCAA President in March 2023, three months before the Wilcox memo. Before Indianapolis, Baker had served two terms as the Republican Governor of Massachusetts (2015–2023), where he left office with one of the highest approval ratings of any governor in the country. Baker arrived at the NCAA having spent eight years dealing with exactly the kind of federalism question now defining his job: how does a multi-jurisdictional rulemaker reconcile diverging state statutes?

His public answer, increasingly explicit since 2024, has been to ask Congress for federal preemption. In an extended Boston Globe interview in June 2025, and again in his January 14, 2026 State of College Sports address, Baker laid out the position unambiguously:

“I would prefer to get a solution that deals with state preemption for a lot of reasons.”

Charlie Baker · NCAA President · former R-MA Governor · cited in Boston Globe (June 2025) and elsewhere · recurring theme through January 14, 2026 State of College Sports address

Baker’s call for federal preemption is, in effect, an admission that the 2023 Wilcox memo position is unsustainable. The NCAA cannot, as a private association, override state law on its own authority — the Tennessee antitrust litigation (covered in source 16) effectively settled that question by 2024, when the NCAA backed off active NIL recruiting enforcement to avoid losing a federal-court ruling that would have stripped its remaining authority. What the NCAA wants now is Congress to write a federal law that preempts the state frameworks. What it got in April 2026 was a Trump EO that directs DOJ to seek the same outcome through litigation rather than legislation.

The Republican-governor-vs-Republican-former-governor framing obscures what the state laws were actually built to do. They were not, primarily, ideological federalism arguments. They were competitive economic policy. The first state NIL laws in the 2021 wave were passed precisely because if state X allowed something state Y did not, recruits would commit to state X’s flagship university. Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma legislators were not making philosophical arguments about private associations and state sovereignty — they were trying to keep recruits in-state and revenue in-state for their flagship programs.

The Front Office Sports framing — “state legislatures are in attack mode against the NCAA’s NIL rules” — gets the dynamic exactly right. Each state legislative session beginning in 2021 became a race-to-the-most-permissive, because the program that benefits is the one whose state law permits conduct the NCAA prohibits. By the time of the Wilcox memo in June 2023, the NCAA was looking at a 35-40 state patchwork — with no two state laws identical, with new amendments arriving every legislative session, and with no congressional preemption in sight.

The dollar figure to remember is roughly $20.5 million per school per year. That is the revenue-share cap established in the House v. NCAAsettlement (approved 2024-2025) under which Division I athletic departments can directly pay their athletes a share of broadcast and licensing revenue. Texas HB 126 wrote that cap into Texas state law — meaning Texas schools have a statutory authorization for the conduct, separate from NCAA permission. The other three state frameworks operate on similar logic: state law authorizes the spending, and the state tells the NCAA it cannot penalize the school for following state law.

That number is also why Paul Finebaum’s analysis matters. Finebaum’s point, captured in his “NCAA is worthless” ESPN segment and across his radio and Globe commentary in 2025-2026, is that the $20.5M ceiling at the top schools, combined with collective spending on top of that, creates a competitive split that swallows the lower-resource schools. His political prescription is federal action:

“There's only one fix for college football, and that is to lean on Washington to solve the problems that you were unable to solve yourself. [Federal intervention is] the one thing that can fix college football.”

Paul Finebaum · ESPN · commentary across 2025-2026 cycle on the House settlement era

The state attorneys general defending the NIL frameworks — Tim Griffin (R-AR), Andrew Bailey (R-MO), Ken Paxton (R-TX), Gentner Drummond (R-OK) — have not, as of publication, announced a coordinated federal-court response to the Trump EO, in part because no DOJ enforcement action has yet been filed under it. What is on the record is the substantive position each has staked out separately: a state legislature passes a law, a governor signs it, and a private association does not get to tell that state’s public universities to ignore it.

The August 1, 2026 EO implementation deadline is ten weeks out as of publication. Between now and then a defined set of questions will be answered, and the public record is sparse on each:

• Does DOJ actually file?The EO directs the Department to act, but the order itself does not name a defendant or a specific state-law target. Whether the Antitrust Division or the Civil Division opens an action under the Dormant Commerce Clause — and which state law it picks as the lead case — will define the next phase.
• Do the state AGs coordinate? A multi-state defense by AG Griffin (R-AR), AG Bailey (R-MO), AG Paxton (R-TX), and AG Drummond (R-OK) of their own statutes against a Republican DOJ would be a singular constitutional posture: red states defending state sovereignty against a Republican administration. Each AG has historical comfort with that posture from prior contexts.
• Does Congress preempt before the courts do?Sen. Bart Hester’s state-level work in Arkansas is a model some federal-NIL bill drafters have looked at. If Congress passes a federal NIL framework before any federal court rules on a Dormant Commerce Clause challenge, the EO litigation track becomes moot.
• Does the NCAA itself stand down?Charlie Baker’s public preference for federal preemption — combined with the operational reality that the NCAA has not meaningfully enforced the 2023 Wilcox memo position against any of the four states — suggests the NCAA may treat the EO as accomplishing what it could not accomplish on its own authority, and quietly retire the Wilcox guidance.
• What happens to high-school NIL?Texas HB 126 explicitly authorized high-school NIL deals. The Trump EO is silent on K-12. State laws on high-school NIL that multiply in 2026 are not, by their own terms, subject to NCAA jurisdiction at all — but they will be subject to any federal NIL statute Congress eventually passes.
• Where do the women’s and Olympic-sports programs land?The EO and the House settlement both speak to protecting women’s and Olympic sports from the revenue-share concentration toward football and men’s basketball. None of the four state laws on this page contains a binding protection for those programs; the federal layer is where that fight gets resolved if it gets resolved.

The cleanest summary of the editorial frame: this is a fight between two kinds of legitimacy — democratic legitimacy (state legislatures, governors, statutes) and institutional legitimacy (a private association whose member schools agreed to its rules). The 2023 Wilcox memo treated institutional legitimacy as superior. Three years on, federal courts under the Tennessee antitrust line of cases have effectively held that democratic legitimacy controls. The Trump EO opens a third channel: federal commerce authority, which is neither state sovereignty nor private-association rulemaking. This page will be updated as the August 1, 2026 implementation deadline brings further material into the public record.