The NCAA cannot solve any of its problems because the people in charge of doing so are the NCAA. The same has been true of Congress throughout much of the three centuries it has existed, so it should give you a deep sense of dread that these two forces are currently in talks about how to change college football.
It’s been almost two years since name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights became a reality in college sports. NIL allows players to capitalize on their status and get money from outside entities—that’s the short version. The long version is that any semblance of rules was immediately and predictably bulldozed, and some top college football recruits have received anywhere from six figures to a few million dollars upon signing or staying with a certain program. The main NCAA stipulation on NIL is no “pay to play”—barring payment that’s contingent on an athlete playing for one school. The problem is that this has been roundly ignored and never really enforced, leading to markets that have developed at warp speed for top players.
In response to this, the NCAA has gone to Congress to try to develop a path forward. It has asked for broad federal NIL legislation that would preempt state laws and allow the NCAA to limit NIL and enforce its own rules (even the specifics of these rules are still a matter of debate). And while it’s at it, the NCAA is also inquiring about antitrust protections and language that would prevent athletes from becoming employees. In response, Congress has drawn up multiple wildly different bills, but none have ever faced a vote. And because of this lack of movement, college sports figures have descended upon D.C. this month to lobby hard. League commissioners, athletic directors, and coaches—no less than Nick Saban and Brian Kelly—have met with House leadership. NCAA head Charlie Baker, who has spearheaded this attempt since he took over in the spring, said the current status quo, with states having their own NIL laws, is a “mad race to the bottom.” University of Arizona president Bobby Robbins said at a Future of College Athletics summit that college sports are “in the ICU.”
This is, of course, not exactly true. Robbins is not talking about college sports writ large; he’s talking about the old era of college sports, and that’s not in the ICU—it’s gone. No one on Capitol Hill is bringing it back. Nothing is coming to end the NIL era. And no one will save the NCAA from the mess it made. College sports, long a cash grab for everyone but the players, is now a cash grab for them, too. Only one side is trying to change that.
The NIL era is never ending because we have always been in some version of it. There has never been a clean era of recruiting. I am still waiting for the thing that is supposed to change everything to change everything.
So far, the teams who were already getting the best players are still getting them—via high school recruiting or the transfer portal. Alabama this season is the first team to have over 90 percent of its roster in the “blue-chip ratio,” which means nine out of every 10 players are four- or five-star recruits. Rumblings out of Athens are that Georgia may secure the best recruiting class of all time in 2024. This is on the heels of a ludicrously top-heavy half decade for college football in which almost two-thirds of all five-star recruits committed to the same handful of schools in a five-year period ending in 2021. Four of those programs are among the top six favorites for the national title this year: Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, and LSU. The others are USC and Michigan. I guess I missed the paradigm shift.
Sure, between the portal and NIL, legitimate competitive issues have emerged—like smaller schools getting decimated in the transfer portal by Power Five schools (Western Michigan, UTEP, Kent State, UTSA, and Wyoming have all lost potential pros to bigger programs). In April, for the first time in 58 years, zero non–Power Five conference players were selected in the first round of the NFL draft, a product of this phenomenon. But Congress isn’t trying to solve those problems. College football now is just an exaggerated version of what college football has always been.
I’ll admit to being baffled by the fact that the executive suites of college sports are resistant enough to NIL that they’re begging for congressional intervention. I understand why the NCAA wants (very unlikely) antitrust protections—so it can swat away future legal challenges. But the hand-wringing over NIL has always been strange to me: There is a system in place in which players get paid and the schools don’t have to do much of anything about it. It has made coaches’ lives worse, but they are paid handsomely to problem-solve. If NFL players suddenly got their salaries crowdfunded, would Terry Pegula lobby to change it because it gave Sean McDermott more sleepless nights? Would Bayern Munich storm the European Union if its most devoted and wealthiest fans paid Kylian Mbappé’s transfer fee? They’d probably smile, nod, and keep giving each other raises.
The old college system was ludicrous, and while the new one is too, the people arguing to scrap it are currently benefiting from it. The next overhaul might include revenue sharing and far more athlete benefits. There’s a scenario in which the college sports powers that be would beg for this current system to come back. And it might happen soon. The biggest danger college sports face is not NIL or the portal—it’s the chance that the courts and politicians will notice what the hell is going on now. The existential threat increases the more the NCAA tries to stop it. Right now, there is reportedly a player in a school’s 2023 recruiting class who will receive $8 million in NIL funding by the end of his junior year, and the school won’t pay a dime of that. This is the system programs are trying to change.
College football has its own world order. I wish, frankly, that the people in charge of governing the sport were required to produce receipts showing their subscriptions to recruiting message boards. This is an ecosystem that’s nearly impossible to understand if you are not entrenched in it, if you’ve never read or created a message board post wondering whether your athletic director should “make Sean McVay say no” in December. Part of this runaway train of fury and obsession stems from the fact that we largely choose our own fates with college sports. If you are born in the north side of Chicago, you are almost guaranteed to be a Cubs fan. But at age 18, you are responsible for picking your team. You are the person who sent a confirmation letter saying you wanted to go to the school where Kirk Ferentz refuses to fire his son. You looked at hundreds of American universities and decided that the best place for you lost to Kansas. The heartbreak is not just in the losses, but in the fact that we opted into this. We authored our own demise. There’s a bottle of Johnnie Walker on your coffee table, and it’s getting consumed in its entirety on an October Saturday out of either joy or misery. College football, like death, is something you cannot do halfway.
I’d also argue that because of this, the NCAA faces an uphill battle: All politics is local, and this new third rail would harm a state’s college football program. Why, exactly, would a politician from Texas want to put guardrails on a system that seems to give the state’s two biggest schools an edge? Why would anyone in New Hampshire care at all? States like Florida have quickly changed their NIL laws to help their local schools, and others are currently passing legislation to help make NIL deals more private. For a senator or a House member, coming out against the local college football team is as toxic as anything you can do to your reelection hopes. Why would they wade into those waters? None of this plan makes any sense unless you’ve built your entire worldview around college football as it was played in 1990. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people with powerful jobs who have done just that.
Plus, any limit on NIL will simply send college football back to the cash duffel bag era. Even if the NCAA got everything it wanted out of legislation, the past two years have established a national Rolodex of extremely rich fans whose hobby is giving players hundreds of thousands of dollars. Do they just go away? Some of these people were handing out money or perks 10 years ago when they weren’t supposed to. College-town car dealers were still delivering Dodge Chargers on conveyor belts to four-star linebackers—they just couldn’t post it on Facebook. This, I think, is the heart of the matter: The people who run college sports don’t want to stop any of this—they can’t. Instead, they just want to stop people from talking about it.
Joel Klatt recently said that NIL has launched a “golden era” of college football and that other sports would kill for these types of “champagne problems.” NIL, he said, creates deeper rosters, a deeper sport, and great TV ratings at the top. And he’s right. Other sports are bleeding viewers and interest. But only college football—the clear no. 2 sport in the country—is lobbying Congress to overhaul something that’s thriving. Roster retention issues via the portal are a champagne problem. The vast majority of Power Five teams decimated by the portal—Michigan State this offseason, for example—have also used it to succeed. The portal giveth and taketh away.
The solutions proposed by Congress so far are not encouraging. A brand-new bipartisan bill—released last week and long talked about as a possible path forward—has a handful of clauses within it that make no sense. This includes waiting for an athlete to complete one semester of college before getting NIL deals, which would be done via a standard contract that must be reported to the school and the NCAA. It would also make long-term medical expenses available for players until age 28, but only if the player graduates. Things will get worse before they get better on these types of “solutions.” I will not insult you with the cliché that Congress has better things to do with its time than this, but if it can’t come up with something better, we’re in for a dreary few years. The NCAA has had almost four years since California first passed a bill saying athletes can make money off of NIL—a measure quickly adopted by other states. That even their pie-in-the-sky solutions are so uninspiring says plenty.
It also would help if the NCAA powers that be agreed on what the point of these negotiations is in the first place. Missouri athletic director Desiree Reed-Francois said at a recent conference, “If we’re left to our own devices right now, then we’re all going to be looking for that competitive edge.” (I’m now confused about the point of sports.) Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the problem is simple: “Young men and women are making decisions not to go to Major League Baseball or the WNBA or the NBA because they can make more money in college. Does that make any sense, that you can make more money by staying in college than you can by going and being a professional athlete?” Again, I’ll admit to missing the point here.
First of all, the scenario Yurachek laid out was supposed to be the point of NIL. Players beloved on campus, like North Carolina basketball star Armando Bacot or Kentucky’s Oscar Tshiebwe (who made $2.75 million last year, according to The Athletic), can stay in school an extra year because of endorsements. This isn’t inducement; this isn’t pay to play. This is what the system should be designed for—the so-called Olympic model. For some reason, the people in charge still have a problem with that. LSU star Angel Reese said she is making more while at LSU than she would in the WNBA. Seeing Reese in Baton Rouge for another season is compelling. If every notable athlete stays an extra year, that helps grow the game—and should be beneficial for the athletes. Do the people who run college athletics like the sports or not? Wait, don’t answer that.
I sometimes try to imagine what the NCAA thinks the average college football fan cares about. It’s not NIL. Pushing it to the forefront and making it the type of issue you talk about constantly—as Baker did on a March Madness broadcast this spring—is, frankly, boring to most people. Even die-hards barely care about NIL except from a big-picture standpoint: Is your school winning or losing because of it? Most people in my family would stay in a burning building to watch a two-minute Kirk Herbstreit segment on how Notre Dame is looking, and I’ve never heard them bring up NIL even once.
Yes, we are seeing a structural change in college football, but it’s mostly about where the money—which was already everywhere in football—is flowing. Part of the reason little will change competitively at the top of the sport is that the rich schools now were rich schools previously. The same schools that won the facilities arms race of the last decade will win the NIL arms race now. It is no great shock that popular programs with a lot of rich fans win. This was true in 1990, and it is true now. I’m skeptical that one or two boosters with deep pockets can change the destiny of a college football program.
Perhaps the biggest shift is that smaller donors now fund player payments and no longer spend that money on Putt-Putt courses in sports facilities. Maryland coach Mike Locksley, whose school recently saw massive facilities upgrades that it thought would help recruiting, gave the line of the offseason to The Athletic about the shifting priorities: “Unfortunately, we moved in at a time when facilities have been de-emphasized in a recruit’s mind. Because they’d get dressed in the trash can for $25,000.” Locksley is right, and so are the athletes who view it like this. A nice office is not a replacement for making a living.
Here are some examples of the new reality: A top quarterback prospect’s mom reluctantly signed his letter of intent after her son made a decision. She’d had gallbladder surgery with the understanding that it was free as long as he committed to a popular Midwestern Catholic school. When the quarterback went elsewhere, she received the bill. This, of course, is a horrifying look into the new reality of—ah wait, sorry. This was Joe Namath in 1961. Forget the new reality.
How about this one: An anonymous survey showed that nearly a third of professional football players accepted illicit payments from boosters or from illegal ticket sales during college. Totally off the books. Over half of the respondents said they didn’t see anything wrong with it. We need guardrails in place or else—ah man, this is from 1989.
All right, last shot: North Carolina’s Mack Brown said schools are tampering with his quarterback, Drake Maye. Can you believe it? Luckily, Maye stayed at UNC, but this does remind me of a pre-NIL story that Robert Griffin III told about getting tampered with on the field after a 2008 Texas-Baylor game by Texas’s then-coach, who asked if he wanted to transfer. Who was that coach again?
The point is that no matter what happens with these congressional negotiations, college football will be here. Beano Cook once said something similar: “No matter what happens, even if the world ends, somehow college football will be played the next year.” The folks that run college sports would be wise to remember that. It will all be fine. The system works.
