The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) governs athletics at colleges and universities in the United States. Economists commonly view the NCAA as a cartel. We empirically reexamine evidence from the 1984 Supreme Court decision on football telecasts and find support for cartel behavior and evidence that this model does not fully explain. Our analysis indicates that the NCAA central organization may have behaved opportunistically by overregulating relative to what would maximize cartel net benefits. We provide a theoretical rationale and show that our empirical estimates are consistent with this behavior that occurs within the cartel framework.