Somewhere in the last eighteen months, you've sat in a meeting where a decision came up and nobody in the room could explain who actually made it.
Not who announced it. Not who implemented it. Who authorized it.
The room moves on. The decision stands. And a few weeks later it comes back — reopened by a donor, questioned by a trustee, escalated to the AD's desk because something is breaking and nobody quite knows where the original sign-off lived.
This is not unique to your program. It is the dominant pattern in college athletics in 2026. It has a name.
It's called Authority Drift — the gradual, untracked erosion of decision rights inside an organization that was never architecturally designed to handle the disruptions now landing on it.
Athletic departments built around a 1990s governance structure are now expected to govern NIL collectives that didn't exist five years ago, revenue-sharing distributions that didn't exist last year, a federal enforcement layer that didn't exist last month, and a transfer-portal calendar that compresses major roster decisions into seventy-two-hour windows.
The architecture didn't get rebuilt. Decisions started landing in the seams. Some got owned by the loudest stakeholder; others didn't get owned at all.
That's the drift.
And here's how it shows up.
A head coach commits a roster spot to a transfer who hasn't yet signed an NIL deal with the collective. The collective doesn't sign. The athlete enrolls anyway. Six weeks in, somebody — the AD, the GC, a trustee — asks who promised the NIL money and who's now obligated to deliver it.
The coach says: "The collective said they'd handle it." The collective says: "We never said yes to this athlete." The athlete says: "I was told."
Nobody in this story is lying. They each made a defensible decision inside their own authority. The problem is that the connection between their authorities — the NIL-commitment decision rights at the coach/collective boundary — was never explicitly named.
That's one of six structural indicators of authority drift. We call it a Mandate Vacuum: a decision that nobody explicitly owns. The other five — Escalation Compression, Mandate Overlap, Donor Influence Leak, Decision Re-Litigation, and AD Authority Absorption — are no less common, and most athletic departments are running several at once without naming any of them.
Every other Tuesday, this newsletter will take one story — usually from the week's news — and walk it through the same lens:
Which of the ten power centers in your athletic department actually owns the decision in question?
Which one thinks it owns the decision?
Which of the six structural indicators of authority drift is this an instance of?
And what's the question an AD or board chair should be asking on Monday morning to surface the next instance of it inside their own program?
The point isn't to assign blame to the people in the news. They're operating inside structures none of them designed. The point is to give you a framework for spotting the same pattern inside your own department, before it shows up as a headline.
If you're an AD, deputy AD, board chair, or analytics lead in college athletics — settle in. There are more issues coming this year.
If you've already seen the pattern at your program and want to push back on the framing — reply. The newsletter gets sharper when readers argue with it.
— Krista
P.S. The first six issues introduce one drift indicator each. Next time: Escalation Compression — why so many decisions are landing on the AD's desk that shouldn't be, and what it costs when they do.
Krista Reinking writes Authority Drift, a biweekly newsletter on decision-rights and governance in college athletics. She is the founder of North Signal Athletics, a decision advisory practice working with Power 4 athletic directors, presidents, and boards. northsignalco.com