What's stopping schools from leaving the NCAA? How does the NCAA still have a grip on college sports?

Addressing the bigger picture and not D3:

1) Well the money from the NCAA D1 basketball tournament is pretty significant (although D3 ain't seeing a ton of it). The TV contracts and level of competition are higher than NAIA.

2) The NCAA is made up of member schools who set the rules; the enforcement folks are then charged with enforcing them. The schools banded together and agreed on these rules to provide at least some semblance of a leveling playing field. Yes, the rules often seem strange, but these schools all voted on the rules and could at any time say "Letting a coach loan a player a car is okay". Then the screams will be that an Alabama coach loaned the star QB his car for a year (a car that the coach gets free from the local dealership). Or that the Alabama coach loaned the player a nicer car than the coach at Auburn loaned his player.

3) Someone has to enforce the rules that these members all agreed to abide by. What makes you think a different organization would make different rules? Let's say the NCAA ended tomorrow and all the current schools started a new organization. All the members stayed the same, what makes you think the rules would be different?

In theory all the California schools could break away so that the players can sign NIL rights. Would a league of just CA schools command the TV contract it has now? Based on TV ratings for PAC12 football, I am not sure. Now they might get other schools to join say the non-CA PAC12 schools. Some athletes might choose them over another school in hopes of getting NIL $$$. They would just play each other. Also, they would form a group to enforce rules and likely would have the same rule against coaches loaning a car to a player.

People seem to think the NCAA is some independent entity or a governmental agency that oversees collegiate sports.

Nothing stops any school from leaving the NCAA. But there's no way revenue sports would be remotely as lucrative for D1 schools outside the NCAA. And even non revenue sports get money from the NCAA. A school would not be eligible for NCAA championships which mean a lot more than NAIA ones do.

PS

Why do you think enforcing a rule "screws over" a school?

If D1 football and Men's D1 basketball left the NCAA and formed their own league, conferences, etc. it would probably crush the NCAA collegiate sports as we know it. Those big TV contracts would shrivel away due to the decreased ad revenue. Their leagues would become more like a farm system for the NFL and NBA. That is, more than they already are. Perhaps more like how baseball has their farm systems of AAA, AA, and A baseball.

HRE wrote:

PS

Why do you think enforcing a rule "screws over" a school?

Because rules are “enforced” unequally.

See UNC academic scandal a few years back. While PJ Hairston issue. Now there’s a new one at UNC of over-classifying of athlete’s with LD so they can get special ed assistance and drugs.

Nothing will come of this latest scandal, but somewhere some podunk school will get busted for serving cream cheese with bagels at a team meeting.

Its really hard to organize competition and championships. Most the time the ncaa's bulls rules don't effect athletes. The NAIA is great, NIRCA is great, but without the NCAA, we'd be like Britain but with more obese people. Athletes from all over the world come to american colleges because their countries don't have much in the way of organized sports for college students. Why don't they? Because that organization is very hard and time consuming.

So letting an athlete borrow your car is a big deal. What if they leased it from you for $5 a month or something?

This seems like bs. Transportation is hard to come by for college students. For runners at a lot of places, this could cause difficulty in training, assuming you didn't want to do one of the two runs you could do from your dorm whenever you didn't have practice, which could be 7 or 8 runs a week for runners at some schools. Then you get back to campus late after a meet and all the food places are closed. I didn't have a car freshman year and I remember some meals being pop tarts and gatorade - only thing I could get on campus after 6 pm on weekends.