As the federal court system continues its ongoing assault of the amateur model of college sports, the pace of change is staggering. One can’t help but know that a day of reckoning is coming.
The core conflict in all of this comes from big-time college football. A proxy war has broken out to set the direction of college football and win the money battle. That war threatens the rest of college athletics as we know it.
On one side, ESPN and the SEC are squaring off against FOX and the Big Ten. The Big Ten has some allies in its fold with CBS and NBC also having signed up to broadcast games on their main networks and their streaming platforms. All in the pursuit of the biggest payouts for conference teams to increase their competitive advantage.
And therein lies the problem. It is not about what is good for the game, and it is not about what is good for college athletics. And is certainly not about the academic pursuits of student-athletes. That’s one thing you never hear discussed in all this, the academics.
FOX and the Big Ten have chosen a model to build an NFL-style national football conference with little regard for so many other sports that are played by some of the most iconic universities.
The SEC has kept their league more regionally based by constantly adding schools in neighboring states — the latest round being the addition of Oklahoma and Texas, a geographic and cultural fit.
The vultures in both leagues are circling, waiting to see if any worthy teams escape the ACC. Florida State and Clemson may make it out, but would the SEC run in and grab them? Would the Big Ten add them? Some reports have stated that the two teams most coveted by the SEC are Notre Dame and North Carolina.
But if the ACC falls, what happens to a school like Virginia? The football has never gotten back to the level they reached under George Welsh. But UVA boasts elite programs from lacrosse to basketball to swimming, tennis and baseball, which have all won national championships.
But do those sports even matter to the powers that be? No, because there is no big paycheck there.
The time has come for universities to decide the role of college football at their schools. Big-time college football played by amateur student-athletes is an idea whose time has passed. At some point, presidents. administrators and other university leaders have to look themselves in the mirror and admit that none of us are clean in this anymore.
The sport is still exciting. It is great theater, but it is professional sports entertainment. It is content for gambling companies and television networks for people in faraway corporate boardrooms to make millions of dollars.
And in its current form, college football is an ethical threat to the academic mission of universities around the country.
Grad transfers are essentially trade-deadline rental players like in Major League Baseball. Academic advisors are pushing for players to be in all online classes. Many players jump around from school to school to maximize their NIL money, and their playing time to get to the NFL.
The transfer portal is NFL free agency on steroids, with no salary caps and no restrictions. And schools have empowered pay-for-play NIL collectives to raise money from donors who could be funding scholarships and endowments.
For the biggest power 4 schools, there is an easy solution. If you want big-time football, just own it. Take your football programs and divorce it from the academic side of the university. Pay the players and forget the school part of it. Go to the NFL and ask them for subsidies to support what has been a free farm system for them for decades.
Truly make these programs run on their own. The myth in college sports is the “self-sufficiency” of athletic programs. Sure, accountants can make the numbers fit. But true self-sufficiency would require athletic departments to go to the bond markets to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars without the backing of the university, a backing made possible by balance sheets buoyed by tuition dollars and taxpayer money.
Many universities have already taken their medical systems and made them go to the bond market on their own, so it won’t impact the university’s risk and bond market ratings. Why not do the same for college athletics?
It’s a new world. And for an old-school guy it is a strange world. But we must be honest with what we have become.
Lest anyone call me a heretic, just understand that I say all of this not because it is the ideal for what I think should happen. It is merely an acknowledgement of the current reality in the college sports world, an era of excess.
And throughout human history, every era of excess has ended with a reckoning to restore balance in the natural order of things. The day is coming…
