A dash of romance, a dose of reality and the end of an era in college sports

Nothing is as constant as change. And change is particularly constant in college sports. We are weeks away from the demise of the dominant college conference of the West Coast. Everybody except Oregon State and Washington State in what is now known as the Pac-12 is fleeing to a presumably more lucrative conference — and the last two standing had to sue to maintain the remaining assets of the collapsing conference, as the deserters were planning to loot it on their way out the door.

The Big Ten, once compactly rooted in the Midwest, will by fall have four teams on the Pacific Coast and two more on the Atlantic seaboard — and 12 others in flyover country. This coast-to-coast superconference is expected to prosper in football, but nobody has any idea how it’s going to work for sports that involve multiple games a week.

There is likewise no stability in rosters.

Even beyond the lure of professional leagues for the very elite players, the combination of NIL (name, image, likeness) money and the eradication of transfer restrictions mean that players bounce from school to school. Nebraska’s football coach says the price for a quarterback in the transfer portal now tops a million dollars.

The NCAA, struggling to maintain any relevancy in this sea of chaos, continues to cling to the nomenclature of the “student-athlete.” One recent story plays to the idealism of that rhetoric; another undercuts it.

A wave of injuries left the women’s basketball team at Texas Christian University with just six available players, too few to play. After two forfeits, the Horned Frogs held open tryouts and added four more players from the student body — one a varsity volleyball player, the others high school standouts who had left basketball behind to focus on their academics.

Those four will presumably get varsity letters — and will be able to brag for years to come of how they helped save TCU’S basketball season.

And then there’s the developing saga of the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team. Last week the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board officially declared the players to be “employees” — a ruling particularly distinctive because, as a member of the Ivy League, Dartmouth does not offer athletic scholarships. If uncompensated athletes are employees, those on scholarships certainly are too.

The ruling held that the college, even without the largess of free tuition or room and board, exerts such control over the players’ lives and academics that they qualify as employees. Dartmouth is appealing the ruling; meanwhile, a unionization vote has been scheduled.

TCU gives us a dash of romance. Dartmouth gives us a dose of realism.