Free from ‘amateurism’ George Will
The football coach was unclear when he said, “We’re not attempting to circumcise the rules,” but he might enjoy today’s college football industry. Suddenly, its rules are refreshingly almost nonexistent regarding the process of recruiting large post-adolescent males.
This is refreshing because the old regime’s nonsense—sentimentalism about “amateurism,” which is used to facilitate cupidity—has been replaced by rational nonsense: employing professional players for the greater glory of higher education. Warm pieties about amateurism have been jettisoned in favor of cold candor about the multibillion-dollar entertainment industry that operates in the shadow of universities.
Perhaps it is the other way around. SMU opened its first stadium 14 years before its first stand-alone library.
As Michigan’s and Washington’s “student-athletes” (the core locution in the liturgy of the Church of College Football) gird their loins for tonight’s national championship game, hear Matt Rhule, coach of Nebraska’s Cornhuskers. He says, “A good quarterback in the [transfer] portal costs $1 million to $1.5 million to $2 million right now.” And: “There are some teams that have $6-$7 million players playing for them.”
So, some players might endure pay cuts when they turn (officially) professional. But this anomaly has been erased: Until 2021, a music major could earn money with her clarinet, but a quarterback generating millions for his school could not monetize his talent by selling uses of his name, image and likeness. Now, NIL is an industry.
Schools’ athletic officials organize or exhort boosters to organize “collectives,” a Soviet-sounding name for a capitalist process: Capital is accumulated to meet the prices of a small supply of elite talent. Promises of NIL cash are wielded in the recruitment not just of high school pigskin prodigies but of established college stars who “enter” the transfer “portal.” Under new rules, most of them can become free agents without missing a season from competition.
The Washington Post’s Candace Buckner notes that the 2022 Heisman Trophy winner (college football’s premier award) promptly decamped with his coach from Oklahoma to Southern California. This year’s Heisman winner is the fifth of the last seven who played for his second school; two other 2023 Heisman finalists also were transfers.
Oregon State’s itinerant quarterback, a transfer from Clemson, is now heading for Florida State. Utah’s quarterback is, Buckner says, “returning for his seventh (!) year,” including one redshirt (not competing) year at Texas; another at Utah; the pandemic season did not count against players’ eligibility; then a medical noncompeting season at Utah.
Two backup Utah quarterbacks, weary of waiting, have entered the portal. Ten days after losing to Michigan, Ohio State’s quarterback assuaged his agony by entering the portal.
Multimillion-dollar-a-year coaches move when more lucrative opportunities beckon, so why not players? Besides, some coaches become rich beyond the dreams of avarice while being booted off the coaching carousel. Sports generate memorable numbers, but this season’s most gaudy one came off the gridiron: $76 million. That is the buyout coming to Texas A&M’s fired coach under the 10-year $95 million contract extension he signed in September 2021. Since then, he has 19 wins and 15 losses. The wages of mediocrity are not mediocre.
Until recently, the NCAA solemnly said it aimed to “retain a clear line of demarcation between intercollegiate athletes and professional sports.” This meant protecting (only) players from the taint of money.
The NCAA was a spectator when conferences re-arranged themselves over the past couple of years, unsentimentally sacrificing traditional regional rivalries on the altar of television revenue. Now, dog-paddling in the wake of events, the NCAA proposes a new subdivision (actually, a superdivision) of high-revenue schools. They would be obligated to pay, from a trust fund, at least half their athletes at least $30,000 a year.
Good luck squaring this with Title IX’s fuzzy stipulation of equal treatment of male and female athletes. Dana O’Neil of The Athletic writes: “If the gymnast gets $30,000, find some more zeros for the quarterback.”
The NCAA says it wants to “enhance” athletes’ financial opportunities, but what it probably wants is for Congress to write national player-compensation rules. This would squelch the competition that intensifies as different state laws and institutional practices bid up the dollar-value of the choices available to elite athletes.
The NCAA’s desire, down the decades, has been to minimize, to the extent possible, the money available to those most responsible for generating the money: players. Many supposedly sacred college football traditions have recently been shredded, but its traditional preoccupation, money, endures.