Fear and Loathing in College Football
The new age of college football hit me rather quickly. As a Pitt fan, I watched a Biletnikoff winner jump ship to join Lincoln Riley and Caleb Williams at USC. Less than a year after NCAA vs Alston and the new Divison I transfer rules, we had now seen the first big domino of how college football (and major collegiate athletics as a whole) would now operate post-ruling. Anarchy and money have now become the true kings of the sport. On second thought, maybe they always have been. We have seen the absurdity of coaching changes with lucrative contracts, as well as recruiting stories that sound more like medieval bribery than a college choice. Despite all of the dialogue recently, the sins of lucrative college football have been several decades in the making.
When Woody Hayes first became the head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes in 1951, his salary was $12,000 per year which is around $128,000 adjusted for inflation in 2023. In just over 70 years, a premier coach’s salary had increased by a hundredfold. The average salary for a head coach in the Power 5 is over 5 million dollars a year. The sporting and football industry had exploded over that timeframe to allow coaching to become a much more lucrative profession. Even schools that were more known for their basketball programs such as Kentucky, now have a football coach (Mark Stoops) who has a higher base salary than their men’s basketball coach (John Calipari). By the market and boosters, football has become the dominant sport in the college landscape. Universities are willing to give up on historic rivalries, and regional sports, among others to ensure that their football teams are nationally competitive (see the newly defunct Pac-12). With all this chaos, it was only a matter of time before it trickled down somewhere it had never been before…the athletes themselves.
NCAA vs. Alston shifted the collegiate landscape into a collective anarchy that had yet to be seen. The Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA could not restrict individual compensations to athletes as it violated anti-trust laws. As Justice Kavanaugh concludes in the last line of his concurring opinion, “The NCAA is not above the law.”. Thus, the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) as we know it was born. This ruling came just a few months after the NCAA decided to allow a one-time (now a two-time) transfer opportunity for any student-athlete without penalty. In a little over two months, college sports as we know it had gone with the wind.
As spring practices had already finished by the time these decisions had occurred, the 2021 season was less affected than the few years to come. The NIL deals that players were inking happened to be more localized and less expensive than what would occur in the years to come. The first real big domino occurred in April of 2022 when Jordan Addison transferred out of Pitt to USC. The Biletnikoff winner was reported to receive around 3 million dollars to change his residence from Appalachia to Southern California. This transfer ushered in the new age of college football as the head coach of Pitt, Pat Narduzzi, began to accuse Lincoln Riley (head coach at USC) of tampering to persuade players to jump into the transfer portal. The initial domino of the new age of college football had fallen.
At a point not too long ago, famous collegiate athletes still felt like ordinary college students to a certain extent. They may have had their entire tuition paid for and a higher social status around campus but they were not (legal) millionaires. They lived in the area where the other college students lived, and not in their LA penthouse like Caleb Williams. They went to in-person classes with the other students, and not online like Angel Reese and TikTok famous gymnast Livvy Dunne at LSU. Reese and Dunne have an On3 Nil Valuation of 1.7 and 3.5 million respectively. We are unsure of how much money they have made in endorsements officially, but the valuation speaks for itself. Famous collegiate athletes are no longer a “college student” at this juncture and certainly not a “Narp” (non-athletic regular person). It is hard to look at a person your age worth over several million dollars in total NIL endorsements, debt-free from their school, with better career prospects, and think “I can relate to them”. Collegiate athletes are no longer amateur athletes and the use of that term has to be thrown out the window. We are watching semi-professional athletes with incredible wealth disparities between the players on each team.
Does a walk-on at Georgia feel as though he is on the same team as Carson Beck? Carson just bought a $300,000 Lamborghini, as the walk-on takes on $100,000 in debt. They both play football at the University of Georgia, but they do not play for the same team. Why doesn’t Carson have to forfeit an athletic scholarship? Why can’t the money be given to someone on the team who needs it? Why can’t that money be donated to a well-achieving student who doesn’t have the means to take on the debt burden that going to college can create? These questions and realities have soured me on the prospects of top-tier collegiate athletics moving forward. The athletes are treated and act like a Silicon Valley start-up with prospective buyers and investors.
Coaches and now athletes alike do not have any allegiance other than to the money and where it takes them next. Brian Kelly can jump ship from Notre Dame to LSU for around 100 million dollars. Jordan Addison can transfer from Pitt to USC for 3 million dollars (a massive difference but still both are incredibly wealthy by most standards). We have established this is the new era of college football and collegiate athletics as a whole, but where does it lead? As of now, it acts as an American counterpart to the various sports leagues based in Saudi Arabia. I have three ideas to solve the problems in modern collegiate sports.
- Any athlete making over $200,000 a year in NIL money has to forfeit their athletic scholarship
- No more “walk-ons”. Walk-ons will be assisted with the scholarship money forfeited by the athletes making over $200,000 a year.
- Banning of NIL “collectives”. The idea of a collective group of people throwing money at a collegiate hedge fund to ensure an athlete participates at the school of your choice is absurd. Donate to the program as a whole, not a slush fund.
As the NCAA inevitably falls, we need a new organization that rises from the ashes and creates something better than the mess we have now.
The anarchical nature of collegiate athletics has begun to rear its head in the coaching ranks recently. Many college football coaches have left for NFL positions simply because they want to coach football and not participate in the constant recruiting pandemonium. This trend will continue with different sports too if current trends prevail. As the donations grow and the money continues to rule, we have to sit down and understand how to keep some of the traditions and history of a major cultural component of American life. Or do we accept that it is futile to try and save something already dead?
