The world of college sports as we know it? Just ended. Chaos will follow with the NCAA.
TINDIANAPOLIS — ake what you know about college athletics, stare at it for a moment, and shred it into mulch. Now dump it onto the ground, because what you know about college athletics is fertilizer. It's crap.
What happened on Wednesday had to happen. Make no mistake. But what happened on Wednesday has rendered college sports, as we know them, null and void. Sorry: NIL and void. It's the issue of name, image and likeness. The NCAA embraced it on Wednesday, sort of, embracing it like a snake handler embraces an Eastern diamondback: Carefully, knowing the thing can kill you.
The NCAA had no choice, or we wouldn't be here. California forced the NCAA's hand by passing a law in early 2019 allowing college athletes in its state to profit from their name, image and likeness. Perhaps the NCAA could have kicked the can down the road a few years, sending its schools in California a stern memo about the NCAA legality of such a thing, while hoping the rest of the country wrote off the movement in California as those radicals doing whatever it is they do.
But almost immediately, lawmakers in New York and South Carolina proposed similar laws, and a state representative in Florida announced he would be doing the same. And with that, the game was over.
Get ready for the new game.
Don't like it? Don't care
The only valid argument against college athletes earning money from endorsements is this one: It might ruin college sports. And it might. Pretty valid argument, as far as arguments go. Not valid arguments: We've never done it this way.
Athletes already get enough.
I don't like it. There are myriad arguments in favor of college athletes cashing in on their name, likeness and image, but here's the only one you need to know: It's the American way. Another way of saying that: It's the most basic form of capitalism. Another way of saying it: It's fair.
And another way: Why should coaches make all the damn money? Are you buying a ticket or turning on the TV to watch Nick Saban stand there in his khakis?
In the mid-1970s, Oklahoma had the most powerful football program in the country. The Sooners went undefeated in Barry Switzer's first season, in 1973, but were on probation and unable to win the national title. The Sooners then won national titles in 1974 and '75. Owen Field was sold out every game.
In my neighborhood, the kids would gather at this one house. It was a decent house, with a deck on the back, decidedly middle class. The attraction of that house was this armadillo that would appear from time to time on the deck. The kid who lived there, Greg, was nice. We liked him. We really didn't know his father, whose name was Barry. Barry Switzer. Back in the 1970s, back when the old scholarship system was the unquestioned way to compensate athletes for their time and talent, coaches like Barry Switzer, at places like Oklahoma, lived in neighborhoods like mine. My dad was a grunt in a Norman law firm, a lawyer, yes, but one just starting out. He was 29. We had a house with three bedrooms, two baths. Small yard. No pool. It's what he could afford.
Barry Switzer lived around the corner in a similar house. It's what he could afford, I guess.
Today, the coach at Oklahoma is Lincoln Riley. I can only imagine where he lives, but it's nowhere near 2620 S. Berry Road, I promise you that. Riley earns $6 million a year.
It's time for athletes at Oklahoma to receive more than a scholarship for their time and talent. It's time for athletes everywhere.
Chaos coming to town
The NCAA had the chance to get out in front of this issue years ago, to control the narrative and mute the loudest cries for college athletes to earn what the market will pay them. But the NCAA has never been able to do such a thing, because the NCAA is just too big.
It's not an office in Indianapolis, you understand. That's just roofs, walls and carpet, with some people inside answering phones and writing emails. The NCAA is a cooperative of more than 1,000 schools around the country, all of them with their own interests and agendas, many of them scared of — it not outright disgusted by — the biggest schools in the cooperative. And so when longtime NCAA executive director Walter Byers (195188) wrote in his 1995 book, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” that college athletes should have the same capitalistic rights as coaches, administrators and most other American citizens … well, he was ignored by his former membership.
In that book — full disclosure: I did not read it, but am getting my synopsis from a story earlier this year on ESPN. com — Byers wrote
43 of the most logical, chilling and ignored words on the topic:
“I earnestly hope that the membership does not take a righteous stand in favor of old-time amateur principles for the athlete, but modern-day commercial involvement for coaches and institutions, and somehow expect a relatively small NCAA enforcement crew to keep the situation clean.”
For decades the NCAA — the membership, not the suits at 700 W. Washington — took that righteous stand, and for decades the wall held. But former UCLA star Ed O'Bannon's lawsuit in 2009, when he spotted himself on an EA Sports video game and sued EA Sports and the NCAA, was the first big crack. EA Sports settled with O'Bannon's class action for $40 million, but the NCAA fought it and mostly lost. That was 2016.
Four years later, the walls are coming down.
What happens now, without those walls to prevent boosters from “legally” lining a college athlete's pocket? We're about to find out, but let's get back to those last 15 words written by Walter Byers:
“… and somehow expect a relatively small NCAA enforcement crew to keep the situation clean.”
A whole new plague of violations are about to occur — once the NCAA allows name, image and likeness income starting most likely with the 2021-22 school year — whether accidentally or not. The violations won't be all accidental, of course, but the chaos coming is bigger than unethical coaches and scummy boosters teaming up to lure (and retain) great athletes.
What disciplinary power will some coaches lose over certain wellcompensated athletes? What chemistry issues will arise when one 15-ppg scorer for Power Five U. picks up better endorsements than the team's other 15-ppg scorer? Those are just two obvious scenarios that come to mind. Imagine the scenarios we don't even know about yet, because college sports is about to enter a world nobody has seen before.
“Uncharted territory,” NCAA Board of Governors chairman Michael Drake, the president at Ohio State, called it in a release.
Chaos theory, as we learned in the movie “Jurassic Park,” is a proven mathematical concept that says small changes in complex systems can have large, volatile effects.
Allowing college athletes to be paid for their name, likeness and image is not a small change. But college athletics is a complex system. The effects will be large, and they will be volatile, and at times they will catch everybody by surprise. And not in a good way.
The world of college sports as we know it? Just ended. And the Tyrannosaurus Rex in our rear-view mirror is much closer than it appears.