Flash: College Football Not Destroyed!

Now that the college football season is over, let’s evaluate all the gloom and doom coming from those who said that paying the players and allowing them to transfer between programs would kill the sport. Here’s our official analysis: not.

Turns out television ratings were never higher. If NIL and the portal obliterated fan interest maybe they really just tuned in for those entertaining Fansville commercials.

And how about that great story that Indiana was? The Hoosiers became the first new team to win the national championship since 1996 when the Florida Gators did it. What was so great about Alabama-Clemson-LSU-Ohio State, wash, rinse and repeat?

The Hoosiers happened because of the magic of the NIL/portal combination. Now teams can be built fast as long as they have the cash to lure the players. Badger fans should keep that in mind as it appears that Luke Fickell has done well this January in using the portal to build a new team. And he was able to do that because, apparently, AD Chris McIntosh has finally thrown off his stubborn resistance to the new order and has allowed boosters to open their wallets even wider. It’s probably also the case that he allowed Fickell to break the stupid rules, like everybody else does, and communicate with the players he wanted before the NCAA busy bodies said it was okay.

The NIL/portal era is good for everybody. Players are finally getting some of the money they produce on the field for everybody else. And everybody else is making more of that money than ever. Fans are getting a better product on the field because the market works to get the best players off the bench.

Let’s dwell on that last point for a moment. Under the old indentured servitude system players seldom switched schools because they had to sit out for a season. With that rule gone, players are now free to transfer to the school that will give them the best chance to play — and the most money.

So, let’s take a hypothetical situation to illustrate. Let’s say there’s a four star high school quarterback who gets recruited to a stocked program, like Ohio State. Under the old system it’s possible that that kid would sit for his entire time of eligibility. If the players in front of him stayed healthy and productive he may never have gotten his shot.

But under the new system he can look around, notice there’s too much talent ahead of him with the Buckeyes and find a match with a team that needs his services and will let him step into the starting job right away. Repeat that story hundreds of times and the net result is that the best players are playing instead of being mothballed and locked up in deep programs. And that raises the quality of play all around.

The Badgers have done so poorly to this point precisely because they stubbornly clung to the old, discredited “student-athlete” model. Their active engagement with the portal this time suggests they’ve finally jettisoned that in practice, if not rhetorically.

Unfortunately, the last vestiges of that “student-athlete” silliness still hang on and are getting in the way of the necessary next steps, which are a players union and player contracts just like the NFL. The one legitimate gripe fans have is that they can’t get to know players and see them develop because of the Wild West nature of the portal.

The clear answer is contracts. Simply tie a player to a school for a set number of years in exchange for money. Just like the pros. So why hasn’t that happened yet? Because the powers that be won’t give up the “student-athlete” scam. Technically, players are not being paid to play football. No, they’re being paid to promote products through Name, Image and Likeness deals. It’s so ludicrous that the big schools have set up a College Sports Commission to monitor the deals. Any deal over $600 gets scrutinized — allegedly to make sure the compensation is actually for the commercials or whatever and not for what it really is, which is to play the game. This is even more rich when you consider that schools are absolutely free to blow millions on contract buyouts for failed coaches without so much as a question raised by the NCAA.

So, what needs to happen is that everybody just accepts what is clearly the reality. Players are just players, not “student-athletes.” They are employees of their schools. In all of these portal moves have you ever read once that some player is changing schools because he thinks that, I don’t know, the UW has a stronger computer science program than his current school? Have you heard of any cases where a player couldn’t transfer because he didn’t meet academic requirements? Of course not. It’s plain that players are transferring simply to get a chance to play and to make money. It has nothing whatsoever to do with academics. So let’s drop the insulting pretense. The fans aren’t that stupid.

College football is better than ever because it has gone halfway to recognizing reality and to treating the players fairly. When it goes the rest of the way things will get even better.