Dae’Quan Wright was on the field warming up with the Cleveland Browns before their preseason game last weekend. Three days later, he cleared NFL waivers with plans to return to college and play for LSU.
Then the SEC essentially told him no.
The Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC all moved this week to prevent athletes who crossed into professional sports from returning to compete in their conferences. That makes perfect sense. The NFL should be the Rubicon.
Declare for the draft, sign an NFL contract and join an NFL roster, and your college career should be over.
That part is easy.
The harder question: What was Dae’Quan Wright before he became a professional?
What, exactly, is a college athlete in 2026?
Is conference-led enforcement the next step for college sports?
Ralph D. Russo
For generations, college athletes were amateurs. They weren’t paid, they weren’t represented by agents, they couldn’t profit from endorsements. They couldn’t freely shop their services to another school, and their universities certainly weren’t sharing millions of dollars in athletic revenue with them.
Those restrictions supposedly separated college sports from professional sports.
They were also fundamentally dishonest.
College athletes generated billions while coaches earned millions, conferences signed massive television contracts and athletic departments built facilities resembling five-star resorts. Everyone surrounding the enterprise could maximize their economic value except the athletes creating the product. That system deserved to die.
College athletes can now earn NIL money, retain representation and transfer in search of better opportunities. Under the House v. NCAA settlement, schools can pay athletes directly through a new revenue-sharing system.
We have professionalized almost every economic component of major college sports. We just don’t call the athletes professional.
More importantly, universities don’t necessarily want to call them employees.
Calling athletes employees isn’t merely changing a noun. It potentially changes the balance of power. Employees may have rights under wage-and-hour laws and, depending on the applicable labor law, avenues to organize and collectively bargain over compensation and working conditions.
College sports have already conceded millions of dollars.
What it doesn’t want to concede is control.
In Johnson v. NCAA, a group of Division I athletes sued seeking minimum-wage compensation for the time they spent participating in their sports. The NCAA argued, in part, that college athletes were amateurs and therefore could not be employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
A federal appeals court rejected that premise.
The Third Circuit did not rule that every college athlete is an employee. It ruled that athletes can be employees depending on the actual economic relationship. It also stated that courts should examine whether an athlete performs services primarily for another party’s benefit, under that party’s control, in exchange for compensation or other benefits.
In other words, don’t tell us what you call them; show us what they actually do. The case isn’t finished. The appeals court merely ruled that college athletes could be employees and sent the case back to the trial court to determine whether they actually are.
So what is a college athlete? It’s quite literally a question a federal court still has to answer.
That’s what makes Wright’s bizarre trip from college to Cleveland and potentially back again so fascinating.
Everyone knew Wright became a professional when he signed an NFL contract.
What was he the day before?
He wasn’t an amateur in any traditional sense. He could be compensated. He could have representation. His economic value mattered.
Yet a system built around the revenue his athletic performance helps produce also stops short of calling him an employee.
As recently as January 2025, NCAA president Charlie Baker listed federal legislation affirming that college athletes are not employees among the NCAA’s three priorities in Congress.
That tells you how important the distinction is.
Trinidad Chambliss, left, and Dae’Quan Wright celebrate a touchdown during a game against Washington State last season in Oxford, Mississippi. (Justin Ford / Getty Images)
College sports spent a century insisting there were two categories — amateur and professional.
Then courts, athletes and basic economic fairness helped destroy the first category without universities being willing to fully embrace the second.
So what’s emerged in between?
Something college sports is still trying to define.
A college athlete can increasingly be compensated like a professional, represented like a professional and make economic decisions like a professional while participating in a system that insists none of those things necessarily makes him an employee.
Maybe they don’t.
But then what exactly is the relationship?
Wright’s specific eligibility dispute won’t answer that question. His case is unusual because he and other athletes from the high school Class of 2022 were told their college eligibility was exhausted, pursued professional opportunities and then won temporary relief from courts that reopened the possibility of another college season. That problem will eventually disappear.
The Class of 2022 will cycle through. New eligibility rules will solidify. The Power 4 conferences have made clear that athletes who cross into professional sports can’t simply return, so there won’t be a parade of second-year NFL players transferring back to Alabama or Ohio State.
But the larger question Wright exposed isn’t going anywhere.
What exactly are universities paying athletes for now?
If schools are sharing millions of dollars with athletes in a system created from athletic revenue, what is the nature of that payment? If the athlete isn’t an employee, what exactly is his relationship with the institution paying him?
And if he is performing a service that produces enormous value while operating under extensive rules governing where, when and how he performs it, at what point does the label “student-athlete” stop answering the economic question?
That’s why the wording matters.
For decades, “college athlete” meant amateur. That word no longer works.
Calling athletes professionals creates a distinction college sports desperately wants to preserve between Saturdays at LSU and Sundays with the Browns.
Calling them employees creates legal rights, obligations and bargaining power universities have spent years trying to avoid.
So college sports has created something in between.
Last Saturday, there was no ambiguity about Wright. He put on a Cleveland Browns uniform, and everyone agreed he was a professional football player.
The more revealing question is what everyone would have called him before that.
Amateur no longer fits, and professional apparently goes too far. “Employee” remains an ongoing legal fight.
College sports have changed almost everything about what its athletes can earn and how they can operate.
It still hasn’t figured out what, exactly, to call the people doing the work.
