“If you know your history, then you would know where you’re coming from.” –Bob Marley, “Buffalo Soldier”
As big-time college football enters its biggest month at a time of massive change, it seems a good time to look at some history to understand where we’re coming from and where we’re headed.
And sticking with the word “Buffalo” from the title of that Bob Marley song, we’ll start in Colorado. In 1974, James Michener published a Colorado historical fiction book “Centennial.” In the book, Michener wrote about University of Colorado football in the golden age of the Big Eight Conference:
“If the most superior intellect on Mars had landed in the United States to study its educational system for a year, that brain could not have understood the accidental development whereby America’s state universities had become operators of professional football teams. The universities were judged not on their libraries or research centers or their courses in philosophy, but only on their capacity to buy a football team…
“Often they were not even true students connected to the university; they were young men dedicated principally to the job of landing contracts with acknowledged professional teams after their so-called graduations from the institutions of which they had never been a real part. It’s the craziest pattern ever devised.
“And for one Saturday afternoon in November the prestige of two states depends upon their performance. And the whole damned thing is done in the name of education!”
That passage is timeless because tension has always existed between the athletic and academic mission of universities. And there’s long been a naïve idealism of an amateur model amid the reality of a sporting spectacle generating money at institutions whose reason for existence is to educate people, not entertain them.
Almost a half century earlier, in his 1927 book “Touchdown,” legendary Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg wrote about the money being generated:
“The sound of 80,000 or more spectators paying $500,000 or more to see twenty-two college boys play a game for an hour was frightening to some minds.
“Such figures are without precedent, therefore they must be somehow dangerous.”
Note that given the rate of inflation, those $500,000 in 1927 are worth about $8.8 million. Big money has long been part of the game. That was decades before Michener wrote about the seemingly inexplicable reason for this model’s existence.
From the dawn of college football history, schools had to balance the lure of winning with the institutions’ integrity. Boosters brought in and paid men — many weren’t even students — to play the game. Some of them were just hired mercenaries jumping from school to school. Author and Princeton fan F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about rumors that prominent Harvard alumnus Henry Lee Higginson paid Crimson players under the table as far back as the late 1800s.
And once pro football came around players’ loyalty to the school and their pro aspirations became a potential conflict for both the players and their schools. Stagg wrote about the growth of pro football in 1927:
“The day boys play with one eye on the university and the other on professional futures, the sport will become a moral liability to the colleges.”
To mitigate that potential moral liability, the governing powers created an evolving system of rules to create stability. But in recent years, under the failed leadership of NCAA President Mark Emmert, the system did not evolve. And it is clear now that the days of the courts and federal government allowing that system’s “status quo” are over.
Let’s stop kidding ourselves about what we are and what the game has become. We’re operating a sports entertainment enterprise. And being honest means facing reality; paying players is already here.
Nationally, organizations of boosters posing as charities openly panhandle on social media to create “NIL opportunities.” Many are nothing more than pay-for-play schemes. Athletes spend minimal time to make more money than adjunct professors teaching several sections of freshman English. Many NIL payments are not linked in a meaningful way to actual market value. These are what were once called a MUTT scholarships; MUTT being an acronym for Money Under The Table.
This is not written to judge, but rather to acknowledge that the delicate balance of the academic side and the athletic side is currently skewed toward athletics. Academic units and research endeavors generating billions of dollars face budget cuts, hiring freezes, tuition increases and tough decisions. Big-time football and basketball operations expand staff and are spending borrowed money backed by the school’s credit to build lavish facilities. And they generate just a fraction of the money that the academic and research side does.
Amid the current reality of NIL and roster instability, an even newer era is coming: revenue sharing and collective bargaining for the players. The sooner schools accept and adapt, the more input they’ll have on the new future. And that may be the only way to re-regulate big-time college sports.
Ideally, revenue sharing and paying players don’t belong on a college campus. But we’ve long since passed idealism. History will show that 2020 changed everything. As the pandemic shut down campuses, college football players made major sacrifices to play games so that the conferences could keep getting their TV checks. That’s when players and their families understood their true value in this system. Players saw, and still see, everyone else raking in big dollars on long-term contracts. And they saw the hypocrisy of a system where they shoulder the risk.
From that day forward, we’ve seen a lightning-fast evolution driven by billion-dollar TV contracts, decisions in federal courts and a media that has consistently taken the side of the players in every discussion.
None of what we’re seeing now is new. We know where we’re coming from. The key is for smart leadership to rebuild a stable system that restores some future balance on our campuses in a way that is open, transparent and sustainable.
