Intellectual property regarding a college athlete

I'm not sure I agree with the premise of the question. If a employee develops an invention (discoveries cannot be 'owned', unless we are talking about the company maintaining the discovery as a trade secret), the invention is owned by the employee absent a contract. The company can get shop rights without special contract, but not ownership. A trade secret on a discovery would also require a special contract. The intellectual property of a college athlete is a different beast. These can include rights of publicity, copyrights, and other performance rights, but have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever included discoveries/inventions. The law treats different types of intellectual property differently. If you want to use this analogy to try to think through the recent legal ruling that college athletes are employees, focus on the entertainment industry. To the extent college sports is an entertainment business (and only a small portion of college sports are revenue generating) and athletes entertainers, their intellectual property is comparable to actors, singers, dancers, and other performers.