You say hello, and I say goodbye

College football is back, which has fans everywhere saying hello to another season. So why am I saying goodbye?

If you watch any football game this year, you might notice something different about the uniforms: college teams have a patch celebrating 150 years of college football, while the NFL sports patches memorializing 100 years of the professional sport.

That’s not a typo: the amateur game preceded the pro one. In fact, college football was the second most popular sport in America in the 1920s (behind the national pastime, baseball, and just barely above boxing). Pro football at the time was a novelty, a sport with young men who should be working full time but instead continued to play football while holding down odd jobs. Pro football didn’t become the popular juggernaut it is today until well into the 1960s: the first four Super Bowls weren’t even officially called that!

The college game’s popularity transcended its elite beginnings as a sport mainly played by the well-known Eastern universities. How? Partly because even if the vast majority of people did not go to college, every family was proud of some relative who did, and adopted a university as a result. Additionally, colleges presented the sport as a manly ideal, where otherwise regular students demonstrated their masculine qualities on the “field of strife.” This was appealing because it presented the students as selfless teammates contrasted with the mercenary professional players. Finally, the sport prospered on regional and ethnic rivalries, so anybody could join in by taking sides and rooting for the (good) local squad and against the (evil) hated rival.

To maintain the distinction between the professional and amateur versions of the game (and to protect the latter’s popularity) the colleges developed rules for eligibility. The players had to be students, but could not have tuition paid by the school: the very idea of an athletic scholarship was forbidden as a contradiction in terms. Rather, schools were allowed to arrange work-study and other reimbursement programs to pay for the athlete’s tuition. However, players caught moonlighting for local professional/semi-professional teams could be disqualified, as it muddied the distinction between the sports.

Predictably, this approach led to elaborate cheating scandals: everything from make-work “jobs” at the university to state schools putting the entire team on the state payroll for essentially no work. This led the colleges to flip the paradigm, prohibiting any outside payment, but permitting the concept of athletic scholarships and promoting the notion of student-athletes. Once on scholarship, “student-athletes” quickly learned how to avoid taking classes, which led to more rules on minimum GPAs, semester loads, and graduation criteria.

There was always some level of rules-avoidance (nay, cheating), but the system held together in the main. College football remained a very unique and distinct sports phenomenon. But then a ton of money got involved. Where did the money come from? Ticket sales (80,000 fans x $200 tickets x 7 home games = $56 million a year), television rights, and merchandising. Once upon a time, the colleges regulated how many games were televised and how often teams were on “national” television, with an eye to preventing an unfair advantage in publicity. With the advent of 24 hour programming, ESPN and other networks made offers the schools couldn’t refuse, sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the institutions and making virtually every game available to fans on television.

Where did all the money go? College football became big business. Very big business. How big? The highest paid state employee in 31 states is the head football coach at one of the state universities (in eight more it’s the basketball coach!). Athletic departments expanded staff, facilities and amenities in a continuing competition to have the best. Currently, the reigning NCAA Champion Clemson Tigers have the best football-only facility (cost: $55 million dollars), which includes multiple pools, a nap room, mini-golf, and video games for the players.

Overall football scholarships actually declined from 105 (1973) down to 85 today due to the necessities of Title IX compliance, but rosters remained around 125 players: enough players to fill out 6 complete squads. The players went from seasonal performers to a year-round regimen: summer school to keep eligible along with unofficial summer work-outs (sometimes supervised by coaches), specialty clinics and expert training, then Fall camps, the regular season, finally post-season bowls and play-offs, then Spring football and more class work before starting the cycle again.

The players got tuition, and eventually a stipend, and some freebies, but no pay; they were instead given the opportunity for a quality education. But just the opportunity. Given the demanding athletic schedule I outlined, serious academics were a luxury. Some schools shepherded student athletes into “gut” programs which kept them eligible but didn’t result in an education or a useful degree. Every school could trot out a star player who was also an Eagle Scout with a 4.0 GPA in Electrical Engineering: with 125 football players, you’re likely to have at least one. Meanwhile, many other players were only graduating in name, and others proved to be illiterate despite their degrees!

Meanwhile, the universities were reaping huge payouts . . . sort of. While some of the math (like the ticket example above) is pretty simple, there is no universal standard for reporting revenues and costs. Schools build ever-larger stadiums and keep the costs off the athletic department books or add in classrooms as a cover. Private schools can remain mostly mum. Even state schools can do things like reporting every athlete as “costing” a full scholarship at full tuition (sometimes out of state) when in fact, they “cost” nothing. Other schools move most of the athletic department into a privately-held association, avoiding both financial scrutiny and skirting the transparency requirements of any state “sunshine laws.” Large, successful programs make a lot of money, while smaller and less successful ones play along and hope for a windfall season.

The players have taken the NCAA and the universities to court for the right to make money off the merchandise bearing their name and likeness or to just be compensated as employees. The results are mixed, but the cases and appeals are heading in the direction of allowing pay and benefits. The NCAA has preemptively increased direct stipends and allowable benefits in an attempt to avoid the inevitable. But the path forward is clear: since the academic institutions have treated college football (oh, and basketball, too) as a business, eventually the courts will insist student-athletes get their share.

So what? Back in the day, players walked off the field and got “golden handshakes” when wealthy alumni shook hands and palmed a fifty or a hundred over to star players. But the advent of a full pay-for-play era will tear up the existing system. It is a change in type, not in extent.

First off, some schools have ruled out paying players. My Notre Dame, Northwestern, Stanford, Duke, Wake Forest, Vanderbilt, the Service Academies, Boston College and the “Big 10″conference so hold, so they say they will not compete in an association (the NCAA) which does. In the era of paying players, small schools who don’t make much money may want to pay, but will probably have to drop out of the arms race (remember, their costs just went up). But this won’t stop the biggest schools and football factories: they will revel in the newfound freedom to emphasize the sports. What they don’t understand is the amateur nature of college football–even if it is a charade at times–is essential to its log term success.

The current useful fiction retains the patina of “student-athlete” from the past, so there are rules (even if fudged). Once the student athletes are employee-athletes, the university can’t make arbitrary rules about school attendance a condition of their football (work) performance. As one athlete already noted,

For the pay-as-you-go teams, they won’t immediately drop all pretense of student-athletes. They will probably start with limits on how much athletes get paid. But the amounts of money involved are large, and therefor largely corrupting. And if it’s a business, business rules (e.g., labor rights, antitrust laws) apply. Eventually, they must allow for the possibility of non-student athletes, but perhaps limit the numbers. Schools will avoid some limits by having teams associated with the university (The Gators associated with the University of Florida?). How will they limit how much a school can offer a high school recruit? How about an overall salary cap? Players will be free agents, changing teams/schools for better pay or more playing time: you can see the beginnings of that in today’s transfer portal.

College football will still be popular, and it will still make money. It will avoid the fake-student scandals of the past, although it will doubtlessly invoke new ones (look at college basketball, which skips the pretense of student athletes but must deal with many other problematic behaviors). Instead, college football will be what some already charge it is: simply a minor league for the NFL, only one with some odd attachment to places called “institutions of higher learning.” That will be a loss for the fans, the students, and the sport.