Astute friends will note we’re several weeks into the college football season and I have yet to write my annual paean to my favorite obsession. Never fear, it’s here. But this year is different.
This year, my favorite team (Notre Dame), has Marcus Freeman returning as head coach. Last year was a roller-coaster ride of emotions ending well with a bowl game victory and a 9-4 record. That record included a pantsing (it’s a sports term, look it up) of Clemson and a comeback victory over South Carolina. Something bad happened at Southern Cal (often does), something inexplicable happened against Marshall, and something insufferable happened against Stanford. As I said, a mixed bag.
But the coach seems to be an upright dude, is growing into the role (4-0 this year as I write this), and says all the right things. He is a credit to the university, which is refreshing after he replaced the insufferable prick who preceded him. I railed on about the former coach for ten years, only to have him prove all my charges against his character with his later behavior. I’m sorry to the LSU Tigers and their fans, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
But why the sad title, if things are going so well for my team? The sport that is college football is dying before our eyes, and it–as we know it–will be gone in under five years. Money killed it, as is so often the case. To use a Clue metaphor, it was ESPN on the Gridiron with a roll of Benjamins.
Most people don’t know this, but once upon a time, there was no NFL. Oh, there was a professional football league, but it had all the glamour and cachet of women’s field hockey. Back in the 1920’s & 1930’s, American baseball reigned supreme, with boxing (!) and college football vying for number two. College football won out, and continued to gain in popularity. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world: universities, centers of education, field teams of student-athletes (properly pronounced ATH-UH-LEATS). Why? Back in those days, colleges were overwhelmingly- or all-male, and sports provided an outlet for all that testosterone. Obscure traditions developed, rivalries over imagined slights or for ridiculous trophies were born. It was local, silly, but intensely passionate.
Something about the “ideal” of an amateur going all out for his school on Saturday was seen by the masses as good and wholesome, while the men who played professionally on Sunday were seen as failures who didn’t have real jobs. In fact most did, as they made practically nothing from football. This dichotomy, that amateurism was good and professionalism bad, was key to the sport’s success. It used to be the same with the Olympics, too, once-upon-a-time.
I put those quotation marks around “ideal” because some cynic out there (I’m looking at you!) will point out the many exceptions: college players who got paid with “golden handshakes” after the game, boosters who gave mom & dad jobs if sonny went to Enormous State U, and the like. And there were cheating scandals, gambling scandals, gut-courses, and plenty of young male bad behavior, up to and including the criminal. But there were also thousands of players playing the game, so the vast majority never got paid, never acted the boor, usually attended class, and sometimes even graduated. The deal was free tuition, which amounted to something, even for an ATH-UH-LEAT.
But its popularity continued to grow, and with television, so did revenue. The NCAA, the governing body comprising all the schools, used to limit how often a team could play on television: in those more genteel days, it was considered to be an unfair advantage. But the rise of ESPN created an insatiable demand: every team is on TV every week, and the money rains down.
Being forward-thinking, the NCAA instituted a unique form of revenue sharing, putting money in accounts for players who could retrieve it upon graduation. It allowed schools to cover things like special diets, health insurance, and even pay the players a stipend since they spent so much time preparing for games that they couldn’t work jobs like other students. No, wait, that’s not what happened at all. The NCAA member schools kept all the money for themselves, and went on a spending spree that would have embarrassed Scrooge McDuck.
Behind the scenes at NCAA headquarters
Schools spent money on stadiums, coaches, luxury boxes, football dorms, coaches, football-only recreation centers, special training facilities, coaches, boondoggle trips, football administrative staffs, recruiting, and even coaches. Many schools spent more than they made, because winning football can be very expensive. But the orgy of spending went on. Players got some benefits, like those special dorm rooms and rec centers. But they got little or no direct money. Even when they wanted to market themselves, separate from the football team, they couldn’t do it. Regular students could make money using talents they had, but football players? Oh, no, they mustn’t. Coaches moved around, sometimes failing up. My favorite team hit a bad patch and “bought out” two coaches in a row, telling them to move along but agreeing to continue paying their contract salary as long as they went away. Three coaches on the payroll at once? Priceless.
Eventually the amounts of money got so large, and the imbalance so obvious, players began to take legal action. Cases have gone all the way to the Supreme Court, and it looks like the NCAA is a dead man walking in its ability to manage the sport. Nothing to mourn there, except for the problem that soon there will be no rules at all. Under the current interim situation, boosters can pay ATH-UH-LEATS using a fig-leaf called a Name, Image & Likeness (NIL for short) contract. There are verifiable cases of high school recruits offered millions of dollars in NIL money to attend Big Tech State. Rules on whether players could transfer–which deterred them from doing so–have been loosened. Now there is a “transfer portal” which includes over 8,000 players!
And of course with the imminent demise of the NCAA, the rules on whether the players need to actually be students have practically disappeared.
Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, the conferences and rivalries which were the heart of amateur athletics are also up for sale. You could cheer through losses all year for your pathetic alma mater, as long as you beat your in-state rival. Now, those rivalries are disappearing, as teams flee one conference for another with a bigger TV rights pay out. How crazy is it?
The Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives formed in the late 19th Century and its athletic league was called the Western Conference, as it represented the western edge of football civilization. It comprised mainly large State universities, with the exception of little private Northwestern and Chicago, which left when it became apparent sports (not academics) were king. You know it as the Big Ten. Or the B1G, where the G might be a 6, since it has grown to sixteen members and stretched all the way to the State University of New Jersey (SUNJ, which some call Rutgers). Oh, wait, it’s eighteen teams, and it goes coast-to-coast. Sure, the women’s volleyball team at Southern Cal will enjoy those red-eye flights to Piscataway. I call them the BIG-N, or The Integer for short, as it is less specific.
So you’re thinking, “Pat, stop yelling at the kids to get off your lawn and just sit back and enjoy the fifty or so games every weekend.” Well I will, only because the game still resembles its former self. But change is only beginning. The B1G and the $EC (the South East Conference, not to be confused with the smaller financial organization known as the Securities and Exchange Commission) will soon choose a third partner to negotiate with to replace the NCAA. That third partner will likely be some hybrid clone of one of the other conferences (the ACC, the BIG 12, the American, but of course not the PAC-12, which has only two members), which continue to change shape like John Carpenter’s version of The Thing:
What could go wrong? To get a glimpse of the future, join me on a quick trip to Boulder, Colorado, home of the University of Colorado Buffaloes. First off, let me note that Colorado has the best mascot in all college football, and the sight of that beast dragging its handlers around the field before a game is must-see TV. It’s a once very good football program which has fallen on very hard times (how hard, you ask? 1-11 last year). It left its historic perch in the Big-12 to chase TV revenue in the PAC-12, but like Rick in Casablanca, it was misinformed: no one cares enough about college football on the West Coast.
To resurrect the program as it returns to the Big-12 for more money (no really), Colorado hired away Deion Sanders, head coach of Jackson State University in Florida. You may know him as “Coach Prime” or before that, “Prime Time” as an NFL All-Pro with the Cowboys et al, while also playing Major League Baseball for the Atlanta Braves, or even “Neon Deion” as a star player with the Florida State Seminoles. He is at least the best athlete of his generation, the only man to have both Super Bowl and World Series rings. Beyond all that, he has proven to be a master motivator, an above-average coach, and a genius at self-promotion, perhaps only behind Steve Jobs in the modern era.
Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be the bad-news part? Sanders is succeeding beyond anyone’s expectations thus far, and his success will bring imitation. Yes, he’s great at recruiting ATH-UH-LEATS. Young men want to play for him, and he motivates them to play their best. His teams win, although not so much that anyone is calling him one of the best (maybe later this year, as most hype-meters have to go to 11 to even measure him). So what’s his secret? He treats the game as a professional would. He encourages wholesale transfers: He sent seventy-one players into the portal when he arrived, and picked up thirty-five. He appears to be genuinely concerned for his players as players, but as students, well, they come to win at football. He scoffs at the hypocrisy of the NCAA, which merits his disdain. But his approach, as entertaining as it is, is a hundred yard dash to the semi-professional model.
As others adopt it, the ATH-UH-LEATS will become employees. Can’t fire an employee for performance unrelated to their job, so how are you going to make them go to class? And if football players aren’t student-athletes anymore, then they don’t create a Title IX compliance nightmare either: eliminate eighty-five male football scholarships and SHAZAM, every university is suddenly fully compliant evermore. Of course, when you eliminate college football revenue, which will go off university books, most all non-revenue sports will suffer. The resulting semi-pro “college football” league will house about fifty or so programs, shedding those (regardless of whatever conference they were originally in) who don’t bring in revenue. We’ll have free agency starting senior year of high school (that will go well with programs like Miami of Florida, where “hookers and blow” was a locker room tradition).
I await the day Coach Prime’s team is behind at half time and simply has the opposing team’s quarterback switch sides during the game for an NIL envelope full of cash at midfield. Can’t happen, you say?
“Show Me the Money!”
So while we wait for the inevitable, I’ll enjoy what little college football is left. Kind of like RJ MacReady at the end of The Thing: