Re: How Did We Get Here?

OLCoach54 said:

Good Sunday morning,
I was in a spirited conversation with a friend of my youngest son about NIL, Transfer Portal, etc. yesterday. He had a totally different perspective about how the players should be calling all the shots in CFB because they are the product that fans are paying to see. He pointed out that Pro Sports are getting pretty much this way now with players demanding trades or they don’t play and that college players actually have it better than pro players.
When all this first began to gain traction, the NCAA, College ADs, and School Administrators all seemed to sit back to see what would happen thinking that it would die out. Now they are trying to put the genie back in the bottle. It frustrates me because things seem so out of control and people who have been hired/elected to handle things important to college athletics set back and did nothing.
Sorry for the rant this morning. Have a blessed day 🙏🏻

Classic case of terrible leadership. The money was flowing to coaches, ADs, Presidents and universities so no one was willing to look farther than their bank account. Conferences fought against and tried to destroy each other instead of joining something even bigger than the current model. Is still true today as they are totally reactive instead of being proactive as the leaders only care about their own power instead of the good of the games. The worst part is the fans are being bled dry

RememberTheDanny

Clemson Conqueror [11249]

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Feb 2, 2025, 1:32 PM

In the old old days, there was a less formalized version of the NIL that had more or less the same effect as the NIL.

In the old old days a select few colleges with big bucks sports-loving alumni paid the special players that the alumni thought would be especially important for their team’s success.

Between those old old days and the 1960’s, TV sports programming started airing a college game on Saturdays. The practice of paying players became more widespread, and the range of positions for which players got paid also increased.

Between the 1960’s and 1990’s, TV broadcasting of college FB grew rapidly. College FB programs started getting payments from the TV broadcasters; the importance of TV revenues grew in importance for the college FB programs; the importance of TV income for the broadcasters also rose quickly. To keep the good times rolling, the colleges got together and created and empowered what, in effect, was an organization through which collusion could enforce rules that applied to all schools, but that increasingly shifted the emphasis of the performers from ‘student-athlete’ to ‘athlete-student.’ To continue broadening TV ratings, the direct payment of players was forbidden by the ‘Collusion Organization’ aka the NCAA to improve the competitiveness of the sport (again, which had the objective of growing the national audience for viewers of TV sports programming.

At this point, paying of players became outlawed, and teams that broke the rules (and got caught) sometimes were severely punished.

Also at this point, the ‘Collusive Organizatiion’ aka NCAA started damaging the athlete-student; all members of the Collusive Organization had conspired to deny payment to any and all individual athlete-students.

Finally, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges could no longer collude to prevent payment to athlete-students. The NIL is just a shell game. Any other attempts to restrict payments to athlete-students that differ from how payments to non-athlete-students take place (I.e., colleges discriminating against athlete-students when compared to non-athlete students will get into a whole new form of trouble).

Ultimately, the problems that college FB face came about because of how college athletics got managed between ~ 1960 and ~ 1990. Business was so good (and, although in general beneficial to the athlete-students), that a socialistic model was allowed to burgeon. Americas is not a socialist experiment. Americas is all about individual people making individual decisions, and believing that overall society would be better this way.

There may be patches and temporary fixes to the NCAA and revenue sharing, NIL definitions, etc to keep the Titanic afloat. Eventually, it’s going to sink.

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How Did We Get Here?

The courts are a big reason we got here.***