Good things are happening in big time college sports. Once the wall of the mythical “student-athlete” finally cracked, it has come tumbling down fast. Players are finally getting some of their share of the billions of dollars they produce for others.
But when walls crash they leave a mess for a while. And that’s where we’re at now. College athletics went almost overnight from indentured servitude to a virtually unfettered free market. We can’t and shouldn’t go back to the old awful system, but we can’t stay where we’re at either. Luckily, there’s a ready-made and time-tested model to adopt — professional sports.
The latest glaring example of the need for this is Matthew Sluka. Sluka is a hot college quarterback who used the new easy transfer rules to go from Holy Cross, where he spent his first three years of eligibility, to UNLV for his final year. The Rebels are 3-0 with Sluka at the helm of their offense.
But after only three games Sluka opted to sit out the rest of the year because $100,000 in name, image and likeness (NIL) payments that an assistant coach had promised him never materialized.
The problem was that Sluka didn’t get it in writing. And there’s the rub. College athletes need contracts binding them to their team in exchange for compensation packages that come from sponsors of NIL deals plus direct payments from the schools’ athletic departments.
In addition to contracts, there will need to be some way of providing floors and ceilings for compensation. Every pro sports league has some system for that because without it a handful of teams, mostly in big markets, will dominate, Competition will dry up and the golden goose will be slain. So it’s in everybody’s best interests to temper the free market with a little socialism.
My guess is that some sponsor will come up with Sluka’s hundred grand and he’ll be back in uniform soon enough. Good for him. He deserves the money. But college sports can’t go on like this. They’ve taken a giant leap toward fairness by starting to pay the players and giving them freedom to move from school to school based on the best financial deal they can get. Now it’s time to regulate that system just as the pros have done so successfully.
And on another matter… Last week I wrote about polling that has me concerned about the outcome in November. On Saturday a new poll was released that continued the same theme: the bump Kamala Harris got after Joe Biden dropped out has all but vanished. This Times/Siena poll found that the small lead Harris had built up in the Midwest has vanished and this comes on the heels of earlier news that Trump had pretty much restored his leads in the swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
Here’s the question I’d like you to answer, Dave: does D1 college football and basketball actually further the mission of the educational institutions to which they are nominally linked?
For instance, if D1 football teams severed their relationships entirely with their universities and just became a lower tier of the NFL, would that be a good thing or a bad thing for higher education in this country?
The sports people always say that football and basketball are self-sustaining and do not take money from other parts of the university. But does any of the money they generate actually flow back into education? To fund faculty or research? To lower tuition?
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No, of course not. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, the University of Chicago… None of them are sports powerhouses, but they have decent academic reputations nonetheless. It’d be fine with me if the UW or Texas dropped big time sports altogether. I certainly don’t buy the argument that they contribute anything to the primary mission of a university and I don’t think I’ve ever tried to make that case. My only point is that as long as you’re going to have a multi-billion dollar industry the people who actually produce that income should be fairly compensated. And we’re just not going to put the genie back in the bottle. Big time college sports is a huge ATM machine. Nobody’s going to shut it down. Is it good for higher education? No, probably not. But will it ever go away? No, probably not.
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