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cfb could be changed as we know it. i won't pretend to know how this will or even might play out, but it is sure to have major consequences.

doesn't go into effect until 2023, though.

and they're posturing for a fight.

"I just want to say, 'NCAA, don't threaten California. Don't threaten us'," Kamlager-Dove said. "Because we have formidable schools. We have formidable alumni. And we have formidable viewership. And we can leverage those things until 2023, when this bill takes effect. I'm sick of being leveraged by the NCAA on the backs of athletes who have the right to their own name and image."

Very nice - where the schools fail the players, the government should step in.  Shameful it got this far.

they are formidable

I think it's likely this will end up as a way for boosters to funnel money to prospects and active players.  I won't make any judgment on whether that's a good or a bad thing, but I do think it's likely it will happen.

Given that, schools in states that pass laws like this, will have a competitive advantage over schools in states that do not.  So it's likely that many other states will follow suit.  That's going to put the schools at odds with the NCAA, and the conferences will be stuck somewhere in the middle, since most of them straddle multiple states.  Managing the heterogeneous laws applying to various state and private institutions within their conference dominion is going to be very challenging.  This might be the straw that ultimately breaks some or all major conferences from the umbrella of the NCAA.

So the California legislature basically just wrote a bill preventing their colleges from enforcing NCAA amateurism requirements. They can't affect NCAA requirements directly, so it's basically daring the NCAA to sanction them.

I imagine this will end well...

Exactly.  Hence the threatening language about having formidable schools and alumni, etc.

I would guess the first challenge will come from schools within the PAC but outside of California.  They're a little closer to the workings of their own conference, and more likely to get the wheels turning faster than relying on the NCAA to do it.  I could see calls for the PAC itself to sanction the California schools that decide to go along with the law.

But, because this is also a pretty easy and convenient vehicle to funnel funds to recruits and players, and therefore a pretty direct way to gain significant competitive advantage over any non-California schools, the protests from schools all over the country are going to become quite vocal as well.  I could see schools threatening to back out of scheduling agreements with California schools, I could see conferences threatening to back out of scheduling agreements with the PAC, there's all sorts of fallout that could occur.

Not sure if this would pass in Arizona.


And then the Big 12 could be the Big 12 again.

The most obvious next step is for the NCAA to state that California schools will be ineligible to compete in the NCAA, but that's a big deal because there are a lot of highly competitive NCAA programs in California (there's a reason Stanford wins the Directors Cup every year), not just in football and basketball. That said, the NCAA could probably carry on without them--but at a great cost to the Pac-12, which would hurt.

To put some data behind this, the top three schools for total Div I team championships are Stanford, UCLA, and USC, with Cal at #10. For team and individual championships, it's Stanford, USC, Texas, UCLA, and Cal is 8th.