Dae’Quan Wright, a former Cleveland Browns tight end, may be on the verge of making history. His professional football stint is ending after the Browns waived him, but that may not be the last time he puts on a uniform: he is expected to return to college football at LSU this year.

Wright, a former Ole Miss tight end who went undrafted in the 2026 NFL Draft, signed with the Philadelphia Eagles before joining the Cleveland Browns. After receiving a temporary restraining order in a lawsuit challenging the NCAA’s eligibility rules, he entered the transfer portal and reached an agreement to return to college, reuniting with his former coach Lane Kiffin. The 22-year-old’s push to rejoin America’s favorite amateur sport underscores just how big college football has become.

Such a move would have been nearly unthinkable under the traditional conception of college sports. Professional athletes have joked about it—NBA great LeBron James once teased at a college sports stint after retirement, though it read more as a joke than a plan. But the legal and financial upheaval that has reshaped college athletics in recent years has made the “amateur” versus “professional” distinction increasingly hard to maintain. Since the NCAA began allowing athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness in 2021, following the Supreme Court’s decision in NCAA v. Alston that opened the door to education-related compensation, athletes have gained steadily more rights over where they play and how they are paid. The NCAA is now fighting to preserve that distinction even as college athletes receive unprecedented compensation, and Wright’s case has become a flashpoint in exposing the divide.

The eligibility fight escalates

Since Wright’s arrangement with LSU became public, the battle over his eligibility has escalated quickly. The SEC, Big Ten, and other major conferences adopted rules this week barring athletes who have signed professional contracts from returning to college rosters—a policy aimed squarely at players like Wright. A Dallas judge has since blocked the SEC from enforcing that ban against a group of athletes that includes Wright, though the NCAA won reversals of similar restraining orders in other cases during the same week. The legal fight remains unresolved, and conflicting rulings across jurisdictions suggest the question may ultimately be settled by Congress or a higher court rather than by individual judges.

“Courts across the country granting relief to ineligible athletes who already had every opportunity to compete in college—sometimes without even having a hearing—are failing to appreciate the destabilizing effect their rulings are having on college sports,” the NCAA told Fortune in a statement.

The association said Congress could address the issue by passing the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act, which it said would provide student-athletes with “a level playing field with rules that apply fairly to everyone.”

That legislation has advanced in Congress: the Senate Commerce Committee approved the bill in June with bipartisan support, and it would establish a federal framework for NIL agreements while addressing eligibility, transfers, and other parts of the college sports ecosystem. A federal framework would preempt the patchwork of state NIL laws that took effect after 2021 and that currently govern athlete compensation in different states.

“The lawyers bringing these cases seemingly won’t be satisfied until every professional athlete can treat college sports as a fallback option,” the NCAA said.

But Wright’s case also illustrates why the NCAA’s amateurism argument is increasingly difficult to square with the economics of the modern college sports engine.

Is college football really an “amateur” sport?

Professor Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and co-director of the Great Game Lab at Arizona State University, said the NCAA’s framing of college sports as a “fallback” misses the larger point of the industry.

“I think that’s among the most important questions,” Jackson told Fortune, referring to whether athletes have adequate protections as they navigate the commercialized college sports system. “Taking a step back and thinking about the kind of unique position of college sports is useful.”

Jackson said college sports are now part of a global economy in which elite athletes routinely move between developmental and professional systems. In that context, college sports are not necessarily a lesser alternative to professional competition.

“These are not fallbacks—it’s that they are good places, full stop,” she said. “The competitiveness of college sports is at the top of the world. But now also the compensation opportunities are among the most competitive in the world.”

For some athletes, Jackson explained, playing in the NCAA could potentially be more lucrative than playing professionally in another country or league. Wright, for example, signed a three-year, $3,125,000 contract with the Eagles before being acquired by the Browns—giving the undrafted Gen Z player an average salary of $1,041,667. Meanwhile, the House v. NCAA settlement from 2025 now allows schools to participate in revenue-sharing, letting colleges directly pay athletes a share of up to 22% of the “average shared revenue” generated by power conference revenue. Louisiana State University—the program Wright is expected to join—is one of the schools enrolled in revenue-sharing, and the expected cap for the 2026-27 season is $21.3 million.

LSU declined a request for comment from Fortune regarding Wright’s return.

“Depending on what kind of package you can get for yourself,” Jackson said, “it might be more lucrative for someone to play in the college space as long as they can, or even try to return to it, than it would be to play professionally.”

In other words, college athletes are no longer limited to scholarships while barred from monetizing their fame. At the largest programs, athletes can now receive a package combining scholarships, NIL opportunities, and direct revenue-sharing payments. Jackson argues the compensation itself is not a new development.

“The scholarship is just part of the compensation package now because there is direct pay to some of these athletes,” she said.

A scholastic distinction

If college sports remain fundamentally educational programs, there is a case for treating them differently from professional leagues, as the NCAA stipulates. But if athletes are receiving direct revenue-sharing payments, negotiating NIL contracts, and competing for increasingly valuable roster spots in a multi-billion-dollar sports industry, “amateurism” becomes harder to use as the dividing line. Jackson suggests a better distinction might be between “scholastic” and professional sports.

“It’s a conflation of scholastic and amateur,” she said. “The fact it’s taking place within a school setting—is that enough to say that it’s different from professional sports? I’m not so sure at this point.”

Jackson also noted that in many countries, elite athletes develop through professional club systems rather than college programs, competing alongside professionals while receiving protections designed for minors. In soccer, for instance, professional clubs operate academies that develop players before and during their professional careers.

“There is no such thing as amateurism,” the professor said of the international sports system. “You play sports and you earn money because you need to pay for the training and travel and competition to stay in that sport.”

American college sports, by contrast, have historically served as the major development system for professional football. The NFL has benefited from colleges effectively bearing much of the cost of developing players, while college programs have used the NFL as the ultimate destination for their best athletes, according to Jackson.

Other sports already show athletes moving between professional and college systems without the same alarm. Jackson pointed to baseball and hockey, where players can be drafted or develop through professional pathways while retaining or returning to college opportunities under certain circumstances. That flexibility, she argued, could offer a blueprint for football rather than forcing every sport into the same eligibility code.

Football, however, remains the economic center of college sports. The sport generates enormous media and sponsorship revenues, drives conference realignment, and finances many of the other sports universities operate—making it harder to separate football from the rest of college athletics. A possible solution, according to Jackson, would be to “spin off football and professionalize it” while maintaining university branding and using football revenue to subsidize other sports.

What happens next in Wright’s case—and in the broader wave of litigation over eligibility—will likely shape how the pending congressional legislation and any future NCAA rules treat athletes who cross the professional divide. Dae’Quan Wright and his agents did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.