At last, college football admits it is an unembarrassable money machine
There are furrowed brows as many people seriously ponder an unserious question: Can college football be saved? This question should be answered with a question: Saved from what?
Presumably, from itself. Its sudden convulsions this summer arerationalones, in the limited sense that they are driven by cold economic calculations. As a result, the college football industry must, at last, retire the three most important components of its tiresome, patently insincere, vocabulary: “amateurism,” “studentathletes” and “tradition.” This autumn, and ever after, college football will be played without the patina of romance that has been decreasingly successful at obscuring the absurdities that accompany grafting a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry onto institutions of higher education.
The “realignment” of the preeminent conferences, including the swift and ignominious collapse of one of them, serves common sense. Realism has displaced the fog of sanctimony and semantic obfuscations that suddenly are laughable and unnecessary. Big-time college football has shucked off the accumulated hypocrisies that have encrusted it and now stands before us with an agreeable lack of pretense: It is an unembarrassable money machine, nothing more. Football factories such as the universities of Alabama and Georgia more closely resemble Amazon and Google than the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and Rutgers teams that in 1869 played the first intercollegiate “football” game. (Rutgers won, 6-4, as about 100 spectators witnessed something resembling a cross between rugby and a rumble.)
The realignment carousel accelerated in 2021 when the universities of Texas and Oklahoma
announced they would defect from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference, where the annual per-team television payout is millions better. Who knew the nation’s Southeast extends to Norman, Okla.?
The Big Ten had 10 members, spanning 461 miles from Columbus, Ohio, to Iowa City until it added Penn State (1990) and Nebraska (2011). Then the Big Ten caught the television fever, adding Maryland and Rutgers in 2014 to reach the Washington and New York markets. The conference then extended 2,414 miles from Pasadena, Calif., to New Brunswick, N.J.
Last year, the Big Ten poached (to begin in 2024) USC and UCLA from the Pac-12, which is now the probably terminally ill Pac-4. This month, the universities of Washington and Oregon agreed to leave the Pac-12 for the soon-to-be 18-team Big Ten, sprawling 2,389 miles from New Brunswick to Seattle. (Look on the bright side: More transcontinental flights mean more uninterrupted time for the student-athletes to read Proust and organic chemistry.) Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado are joining the Big 12 from which Texas and Oklahoma departed.
By adopting the permissive transfer portal, the NCAA has allowed players to be somewhat migratory, although not as much so as their coaches pursuing eight-figure salaries. (We have left the age of innocence in which, the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay recalls, Alabama’s coach Bear Bryant stipulated in his contract that he had to make a dollar less than the university’s president.) Players can now earn money from NIL (name, image and likeness) deals. This scandalizes some college sports officials who praise (other peoples’) amateurism. Which, as Gay says, is like getting a lecture on vegetarianism from a rib-eye.
The NCAA, for which the adjective “vestigial” might have been coined, supposedly governs college athletics, but it has been a bystander during the Great Migration, as schools have gone where they pleased. The NCAA has hired as its president a politician (Charlie Baker, former Massachusetts governor), which suggests that it is looking to the federal government to restore order.
On cue, some senators are concocting legislation to standardize NIL policies to “stabilize” college sports. Otherwise capitalism’s creative destruction mightgo too far, discombobulating the money machine. Watch for price controls to prevent athletes in some states from being able to earn more from NIL than athletes in others, thereby disrupting recruiting.
The legislation would establish a trust fund to cover some costs of sports injuries, including - herewith three discouraging words best not even whispered on Saturday afternoons - chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is thecumulativeconsequence of many head hits, most below the level of concussion. It often results in cognitive and neurological problems as former players age. The New York Times reports that Boston University researchers have found CTE in 451 of 631 (71 percent) of the brains donated from former football players for study.
But enough of such gloomy talk. It casts a pall over the autumn beauty of venerable rivalries between distinguished institutions that insist that sport does not just build character; it reveals it. That has certainly been the case this summer.