Once autumn begins to appear, for roughly four hours each Saturday, college football remains one of our favorite passions and pastimes.
For the other six days and 20 hours of the week, we see it for what it really is these days – an unregulated mess.
The downfall began over a decade ago, when the do-nothing NCAA stuck it’s collective head in the sand and tried to ride out the “pay the players” storm. Talk about disastrous decisions; their inactions made everything much worse. The ugly situation that exists today lands completely on that failure of leadership.
As a result, the courts got involved, and what used to be widely accepted rules got trashed. The “no guardrails” world of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) payments – many just flatly absurd – exploded, and the Transfer Portal was forced open like the Grand Canyon. Now, we’ve got players – including guys cut from NFL training camps – suing for more eligibility (and not so they can get their business degrees) and bloated conferences suing league members.
While all this happens, the NCAA is hoping that members of the “what’s in it for me” U.S. Congress will bail them out.
So yes, it could get even worse. But a couple of simple steps could be taken to make it better sooner.
There’s been a lot of talk about collective bargaining and a new-and-more-regulated “Super League,” forming, and honestly, that might be the best answer, since there’s no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. A whole new division of NCAA football – call it Division Five – could emerge. But that remains many years away.
Until something like that happens, there won’t be any collective bargaining. We’ve got to hope that somewhere along the line, the conferences themselves regain some level of control and some common sense enters in.
Perhaps an idea like this: Now that it’s been agreed upon that incoming players will now get five years of college to play five seasons, “redshirts” are over. So student athletes get five years of college paid for (and that’s a considerable amount of compensation; just ask the young adults carrying around student loan debt).
A five-year period should make it easier for high school recruits to sign actual contracts with schools instead of the old-fashioned and suddenly obsolete “Letter of Intent.” Sign on, and a player could actually be under contract with that school for the next five school years; no hopping around to five different programs over the same span of time.
Players can still get that free college education, which is worth far more than the players’ agents and “the poor, exploited players” crowd will ever acknowledge. These new contracts can include “outs” that allow a player the opportunity to transfer one time – provided he pays a contract buyout like coaches have – plus another additional transfer if the head coach who recruited him leaves for any reason.
What’s not fair about this?
These new contracts will pay a minimum “salary” (based on that school’s revenue-sharing formula) that rises with each season the player completes a season playing for that school. Other terms and incentives can be included. The player and his representatives would be free to work out legitimate endorsement deals for themselves, which is essentially what NIL is already. No one expects the left guard to make the same NIL endorsement money as the quarterback… but the lineman will still be getting paid by the school.
While formal collective bargaining could be beneficial – and ultimately will likely become part of whatever bigger entity eventually gets put into place – at the beginning, it will be up to all the parties involved to negotiate mutually fair terms on an individual basis.
Schools and programs now have general managers who should be able to handle all this. Coaches could go back to coaching and high school recruiting, and not have to live and die with the Transfer Portal.
What a refreshing change it would be to not have your favorite school/program being forced to field a roster made up mostly of new players from the season before! The quality of the game on the field would benefit, too.
This sort of common-sense stuff is going to be put into place when the Super League eventually, inevitably comes into existence. If each school adopts the idea now, perhaps the separation of the super-wealthy and the have-nots – one that’s currently in the process of breaking up college football as we knew it forever – won’t have to happen so quickly, and we can enjoy more football Saturdays… without having to endure the never-ending court battles and the rest of the weekday circus.
Strike 3: Common-sense steps to to fix what ails college football Mile High Sports.
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