At least a better one
It’s a new era for college football. Change in the sport has mostly been a gigantic slow roll uphill over the past 100 years, but what we’ve seen over the past 10 years is nothing short of incredible. The four team playoff, transfer portal, conference realignment without any regard to geography and history, the twelve team playoff — and of course — paying college athletes and high school recruits.
These massive changes are almost all because of the way the NCAA dragged its feet and fought tooth and nail over it all. The NCAA offered no bend in their rules and were determined to keep everything as business as usual. The business model was a way to profit and exploit collegiate athletes under the banner of amateurism.
Once the NCAA lost the fight, they made matters worse by washing their hands of regulation of player movement and player acquisition draped in the term NIL (name, image, and likeness).
The combination of the transfer portal and NIL has basically meant full free agency at the end of every season. It’s chaotic, barbaric, and deeply American. It’s also something that appears to be unsustainable.
Again… this is almost entirely the NCAA’s fault.
So what’s the solution? What is a realistic adjustment to the system that might help calm things down while still allowing the players their rights and their ability to profit from their name, image, and likeness?
In the end, there might be just two viable solutions. The first one would involve a break away from the NCAA for a select number of schools to form a new governing body with the authority to implement a better set of rules in terms of payments, eligibility, and player rights. The second one involves the unionization of collegiate athletics.
For those of you that may scoff at the thought of a union becoming involved, you only need to check yesterday’s headlines about UNLV quarterback Matthew Sluka and his sudden departure from the team over an NIL dispute.
Regardless of any route that this might go, the Sluka incident clearly proves that a contract system of some type needs to become the new normal. Contracts provide equal protection to the players and to the universities. It won’t everyone happy all of the time, but it will definitely help calm the insane direction everything has been headed in terms of roster management and roster fulfillment.
There is no more room for any type of talk about, “getting things back to the way they used to be.” You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. We all need to move forward as school administrators, athletes, alumni, media, and fans. Another change to the system should be demanded, and a universal labor contract system might be the best way to handle the current situation.
We can’t put our heads in the sand and continue to allow unregulated money and movement. The money and the movement, however, is here to stay. We need honest conversations about how this system is really operating, and implement real change to save any bit of what makes college sports great.