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When I attended the 1997 NCAA national convention in Nashville a vote was taken to pay players stipends. It only took 28 years to implement, and then only after the U.S. Supreme Court forced the NCAA’s hand.

Now, the Wild West of college sports stands at a defining crossroads. Once, the NCAA was synonymous with collegiate athletics, wielding unquestioned authority over everything from championships to player transfers and eligibility rules.

But the tides have shifted: today the Power 4 conferences — Big Ten, Southeastern Conference (SEC), Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), and Big 12 — form the economic and competitive core of major college sports. Their resources, influence, and challenges have outgrown the outdated, one-size-fits-all NCAA governance model. The time has come for these leagues to take charge of their own future.

The University of Colorado and the other 67 college Power 4 athletic conferences should divorce themselves from the outdated National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

Amateurism, once the hallmark of the NCAA since its formation in 1906, officially died on July 1 of this year. College athletes can now “officially” make money in three ways: scholarships, third-party endorsement contracts, and direct payments from their schools (pay-for-play) with a salary cap of $20.5 million for the academic year 2025-2026.

The NCAA’s bureaucratic structure remains rooted in principles from a different era. Originally formed to oversee amateur athletics and promote student welfare, the NCAA built a rulebook for a world before billion-dollar television deals, player contracts, and the transfer portal. Its governance still attempts to treat Ohio State with a yearly athletic budget of over $250 million as equals to small schools in the BigSky conference like Idaho State with a budget of $15 million, despite vast chasms in budgets, facilities, and visibility.

Modern college athletics have become a high-stakes business. Yet the NCAA’s byzantine committee system ensures critical decisions move at the speed of its slowest members, not its most progressive. The result is gridlock: reforms are watered down or delayed, and the needs of major conferences are subordinated to the lowest common denominator.

The major conferences now command unparalleled resources and attention. According to industry estimates, their media rights alone dwarf most of the NCAA’s aggregate revenues. The Big Ten’s current television contract exceeds $1 billion a year, aligning it more with professional sports leagues than with smaller collegiate conferences.

These conferences fill gigantic stadiums, negotiate national endorsement deals, and make decisions on athlete welfare that have ripple effects across the sports landscape. The profiles and pressures facing these conferences cannot be compared to those in the remainder of the NCAA, which governs hundreds of other schools with dramatically different realities.

The disconnect between NCAA rules and modern reality is most evident in legal battles and compliance chaos. The NCAA fought a losing battle to preserve its definition of amateurism, culminating in the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in NCAA vs. Alston, and later House vs. NCAA which finally opened the door for athlete compensation.

The ensuing NIL (name, image and likeness) marketplace for endorsements has outpaced NCAA regulations, leaving athletes, boosters, and institutions to navigate a landscape with minimal oversight and maximum confusion. There still is no equity with third-party endorsements.

Moreover, the NCAA’s compliance machinery has failed to evolve. Inconsistent rulings, drawn-out investigations, and rules that lag years behind current trends leave both universities and athletes vulnerable. As multi-million-dollar lawsuits pile up and courts increasingly side with athletes’ rights, the Power 4 conferences are left exposed by an organization too big and slow to protect their interests.

NCAA rules, designed for a 1950s version of college sports, can’t handle these new realities. Medical insurance that includes long-term coverage for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), mental health support, Title IX compliance, and even post-career transition programs are emerging as major priorities. Yet NCAA resource-sharing models mean Power 4 schools are often limited in how creatively or aggressively they can invest to meet these needs.

Professional sports leagues like the NFL and NBA show the value of governing bodies tailored to their organizations’ unique needs. Professional leagues set their own revenue models, compliance regulations, and discipline regimes — and adapt quickly when circumstances change. The Power 4 could emulate these models, building something suited to the 21st-century demands of college athletics.

The Power 4’s influence will only grow. Their schools, athletes, alumni, and fans already define the public image of college sports. Clinging to a single governance model that no longer fits undermines athlete welfare, innovation, and the competitive spectacle that makes college sports so beloved.

The NCAA is like the Titanic, a massive, once seemingly unsinkable institution that has long dominated college sports, steering it through decades of tradition and profit. Its rigid structure — built on amateurism and centralized control — mirrors the ship’s outdated design, ill-equipped for modern challenges.

Just as the Titanic’s crew underestimated the iceberg, the NCAA downplayed legal and cultural shifts.

The new NCAA controlled College Sports Commission (CSC) is taking over key functions like revenue-sharing enforcement while also giving large power schools 65% of voting rights.

Now sinking, the NCAA is offloading responsibilities to lifeboats. The athletes, once confined to the bottom deck, are finally getting a seat at the captain’s table, but it’s about to be submerged.

A new self-governing body isn’t just logical — it’s inevitable. The Power 4 conference can unlock creativity, ensure fair competition at the highest level, create equality and drive college athletics into the future.

It’s time for these conferences to take charge, leave the outdated NCAA behind, and acknowledge that college sports are unequivocally a business today that must float on its own.

Jim Martin was an adjunct law professor who taught Sports Law at CU and DU-chaired the University of Colorado committee on athletics for many years and has a passion for public speaking engagements. He can be reached atjimmartinesq@gmail.com.

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You might not believe it if you’ve experienced one of the flash floods hammering the planet from Texas to Vietnam this summer, but the Earth is becoming drier — at least the parts where most people live. Given how this can affect every aspect of human existence, from farming to geopolitics, it’s past time we started treating this like the emergency it is.

Measurements from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites suggest the continents have been losing fresh water at an alarming rate since 2002, according to a recent study in the journal Science Advances.

Some parts of the planet are becoming wetter, especially in the tropics, but the drying parts are drying more quickly than the increasingly wet parts are getting wet. The drying parts are also spreading, gaining roughly two Californias’ worth of land every year and recently merging into “mega-drying” regions sprawling across vast stretches of continents.

One of these mega-drying regions starts in Alaska and covers much of Canada, from British Columbia to Manitoba. Another encompasses the U.S. Southwest and Central America. The largest covers three continents, from the British Isles, Europe and North Africa in the west all the way to China and Malaysia in the east. Three-quarters of the global population, or about 6 billion people, live in areas where fresh water has dwindled since 2002.

“Fresh water is finite, and we’re losing it,” Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, a research scientist with Arizona State University and the paper’s lead author, told me. Much of the water ends up in the salty oceans, contributing more to sea-level rise than the melting of ice in Antarctica or Greenland.

Alarmingly, this trend accelerated after the 2014 El Niño event, the strongest on record, drove global temperatures higher by warming the water in the eastern Pacific. Since then, the global surface area experiencing drying extremes at any given moment has grown by about six Californias per year — despite the Earth spending most of that time in La Niña conditions, when water in the eastern Pacific is cooler. That suggests 2014 may have been a tipping point beyond which returning to normal wet-dry cycles may be impossible on human timescales.

That’s partly because most of the Earth’s drying places are historically arid anyway, Chandanpurkar explained. When they suffer extremes of drought, they tap already precious groundwater, which can take millennia to refill.

The American Southwest, in the throes of a decades-long megadrought, is a prime example. GRACE satellite data show the lower Colorado River basin — which includes parts of Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico — has lost one Lake Mead’s worth of water, or about 28 million acre-feet, since 2003, according to a separate study earlier this year to which Chandanpurkar contributed. (An acre-foot is how much it takes to fill an acre with a foot of water.)

Climate change plays a big role here by making droughts longer and more severe and by sucking the water out of the ground through evaporation. But as with most other climate-related catastrophes, human behavior makes everything worse. In fact, the biggest factor in continental drying is groundwater loss, the study found — the primary driver of which is our own mismanagement.

That Lake Mead’s worth of water that has disappeared from beneath the lower Colorado basin has gone largely to irrigating alfalfa and other food for cows, much of which is exported. The Southwest is also the site of many planned data centers, an industry that might guzzle 74 billion gallons of water per year in the U.S. by 2028, according to a December study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. About two-thirds of all the data centers built or planned in the U.S. since 2022 are in areas of high water stress, according to the nonprofit World Resources Institute.

This isn’t just a U.S. problem: Groundwater depletion is rampant in North Africa, the Middle East, the Tibetan Plateau and northern China, the study points out. One possible reason groundwater loss doesn’t dominate headlines the way climate change does is that too many people see it as a regional issue. Given that it now affects most of the Earth’s population and is making all the seas rise, it’s clearly a global issue.

And it’s a disaster with compounding effects. Lack of water affects agriculture, as in much of southern Africa, where a drought parched crops and livestock and put 90 million people in danger of acute hunger, according to a United Nations report last month. It affects commerce, as in the Panama Canal, where in late 2023 the water fell to levels too low to accommodate big ships. Droughts in Thailand and India boosted global sugar prices, while parched Spanish olive groves led to two years of soaring olive-oil prices. Loss of water and food sparks mass migration and violent conflicts.

Water shortages also lead to energy shortages. Hydroelectric power generates nearly a third of electricity on the U.S. West Coast, a figure in slow decline over much of the past decade. Failing hydro power in Zambia last year led to 21-hour blackouts.

The good news is that this crisis has solutions. We could start by curbing the fossil-fuel use heating up the planet. We could also eat less of that thirsty beef. Sure, those are probably the hardest things, but everything we do will take political will and foresight. We can grow drought-resistant crops and make data centers and other industries less water-intensive. We can rebuild water-collecting wetlands and improve our ability to capture the rain that will keep falling in those torrential downpours.

The first step, and maybe the easiest but most critical of all, is to stop thinking of fresh water as an infinitely replaceable resource.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. This was written with assistance from Bloomberg columnist Liam Denning.

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An estimated 34,000 LGBTQ+ youth ages 13 to 17 live in Colorado, according to data from a federal survey on teen health. For many of these young Coloradoans, school is not a safe place.

According to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s 2021 School Climate Survey, 80% of U.S. LGBTQ+ youth feel unsafe at school. Experiences of harassment and violence are common for these students.

In a single school year, 76% of LGBTQ students experienced in-person verbal harassment, 49% were bullied, 23% were physically harmed or threatened, and 53.7% were sexually harassed, according to GLSEN’s survey and a 2024 survey by the Trevor Project. In Colorado, the Healthy Kids survey tells us that less than half of LGBTQ+ students feel they belong at their school.

As a Colorado resident for more than 20 years, I have seen the progress we have made in protecting our most vulnerable. When I graduated from a Colorado Springs high school in 2008, I could not have named a single classmate who was publicly “out” and I had never heard of a Gay-Straight Alliance, what is today called Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network (GSA). Since then, Colorado has enacted relatively robust legal protections for LGBTQ+ youth. We should be proud of what we have accomplished together. But there is still work to do.

Rates of anxiety and depression among LGBTQ youth are alarmingly high with 66% reporting recent symptoms of anxiety and 53% reporting recent symptoms of depression. According to the Trevor Project, almost 40% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously contemplated attempting suicide in the last year. Among transgender and nonbinary youth, this number rose to 46%. Rates were highest for students of color and 12% of all LGBTQ+ students had attempted suicide in the last year.

The link between these outcomes and school experiences are clear. LGBTQ students who experienced higher levels of in-person victimization were almost three times as likely as other LGBTQ students to have missed school in the past month. Their academic performance was lower, as was their self-esteem. Their rate of depression was elevated, and they were twice as likely to report that they did not plan to pursue any type of post-secondary education. Suicide attempt rates tripled among LGBTQ students who had been bullied in the past year.

While this data is sobering, it also offers potential solutions. GSA’s are student-led organizations that bring LGBTQ+ students and allies together. They provide a safe space for LGBTQ+ students, build community, and support advocacy efforts.

One-third of LGBTQ students have an active GSA or similar group at their school. Students who do are less likely to hear homophobic remarks and more likely to report staff intervening when they do. They are less likely to feel unsafe in school and less likely to have missed school. These students report better psychological well-being, lower depression levels and a lower likelihood of seriously contemplating or attempting suicide.

Every student deserves to feel safe and to know that they belong at school. Without costing taxpayers anything, GSA’s improve outcomes for future Coloradans. These organizations increase student safety, lower suicide rates, and improve school outcomes.

If you are a student or educator interested in starting a GSA at your school, GLSEN offers an online guide..

Rachel Ray is a new school counselor and soon-to-be graduate of the University of Denver’s school counseling program. She is a parent to two elementary students and has worked in Colorado public schools for four years.

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In December, Teton County, Wyoming, residents learned they were the wealthiest people in the country, making an average of $471,751 a year. That’s almost a half a million dollars a year for “every person living in Teton County in 2023 — regardless of age, health, employment status.”

At the county seat in Jackson, town council member and economic consultant Jonathan Schechter made the “wealthiest” calculation in his “cothrive” newsletter. He’d crunched the latest U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates from 3,244 counties, parishes, and boroughs nationwide.

Schechter’s analysis made a small group of us — social critics with more than 100 collective years of Jackson Hole living — consider our new status in what Schechter called “the wealthiest county in the wealthiest country in the history of the world.” Our group of aging ski-bum, bicycle-riding gadflies wondered how the other 99.7% of America lived.

We needed to find out. We would start down the social ladder at a community that struggles to flop into second place. It’s Pitkin County, Colorado, site of the town of Aspen, a village about which we had only vague notions.

We would visit by bicycle over six days, observing Aspenites who would, we thought, represent more of the nation’s hoi polloi. Off we pedaled to cross the Income Gulf of America.

As we cycled up Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley toward Aspen, we ran into the first of the locals. He was a 70-year-old impresario with all the bona fides of a longtime resident — greying braided ponytail, tank top, beater rig and a long resume as a roadie with the Grateful Dead.

He elaborated on his curriculum vitae, which included pre-concert street deals. “Detroit was easy,” he said. “They used to give me $500. That was a lot of money in those days.”

We parried. “We’re from the wealthiest community in the country.”

“Aspen is the most expensive,” he replied.

Pitkin’s annual per-capita income is $255,839, we riposted, as we headed up-valley. How spendy could this place be, we wondered, if it names a top hotel after a Nabisco cracker?

We were somewhere around Basalt on the edge of Aspen when the prices started to kick up. Numbers on the tap-insert-swipe thingies increased alarmingly. Finally arriving in Aspen, we rattled to a stop at a downtown bar, where beer came in $9 pints.

“Martini?” the menu suggested. Coming from the wealthiest county, we were practiced.

“I’ll take two.” Federal data said we could afford it. “And a burger.”

Twenty-five bucks for a Bombay Sapphire gin cocktail. Thirty bucks for a dead-cow patty so tall a mule would have to stretch its lips to take a bite of the towering brioche bun.

Perhaps we missed some of Schechter’s small print. A few billionaires must have skewed our lofty per-capita income figure. In fact, the median annual Teton County income is just $141,500, but still more than anyone in our peloton was making. And second-hand Ralph Lauren button-downs at Jackson’s Browse ’n’ Buy are up to $7.

We read local papers to dig deeper into the customs and culture of our Colorado subject. The papers said the sheriff was taking a trespasser to court who’d lived in a tree for 10 years. A humanitarian nonprofit was running out of money. The Chamber of Commerce was bragging about the coming tourist season.

The ads in glossy local magazines showed a population of the young, tan, fit and wealthy. Aspenites are polyglots, we realized, naming their stores in Italian — Gucci and Prada. In Jackson Hole we are glad to have Shirt off my Back and Lee’s Tees.

In Aspen, Louis Vuitton, which we deduced was French for “handbag,” offered the Aspen Platform Clog for $1,690. “We’ll take two!” we dreamed.

We went to a liquor store. A sharpie had marked $1,000 on one bottle of wine. We passed that up for a six pack — about what four dirtbags who fell out of the back pages of a 1980s Patagonia catalog could afford.

A ragged sign taped to the counter at the tap-insert-swipe thingie suggested that our communities were much more similar than we thought. We learned the sign had been there a year and a half but was still relevant.

“Jason needs a place to live,” it read.

Angus M. Thuermer Jr. is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a reporter who has lived and worked as a journalist in Jackson, Wyoming for more than four decades.

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