Never in a million years would I have thought that I would be the old man who screams, “Get off my lawn!” Yet, the sport I love the most makes me feel like a 70-plus-year-old man instead of someone in their 30s.
It’s no secret that college football has changed drastically over the last few years. Players are now paid by both the fans and the school, and it’s not uncommon for a highly touted quarterback to make north of six million dollars.
On top of that, players can go wherever they want without having to sit out. Remember when a player had to sit out a year when they transferred to another school? Some players back then weren’t even allowed to transfer to a school in the same conference as their previous school. Those days are long gone. It’s like a 24/7 free agency period.
What we have today is pay-for-play; it’s as simple as that. The term student athlete is a thing of the past. Do you think anyone, when it comes to college football, is worried about how a player is doing in class? Or if they even go to class at all? Zero chance. The players are trying to get on the field and make as much money as they can, and fans just want that player to be great on the field for their team.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out this would happen eventually. Yet the NCAA and schools sat on their hands for years because they were making so much money that they didn’t even bother to think ahead.
The NCAA is pretty much powerless. Just think about who is running the current college football playoff system, for crying out loud. It’s the Big Ten and the SEC. NCAA president Charlie Baker is standing on the sidelines watching this unfold like the rest of us.
We are at the point where we are letting courts decide things. When a school or conference doesn’t like something, they sue and get what they want. Now, we even have President Donald Trump stepping in.
Trump is making plans to create a presidential commission on college athletics. The commission on college sports is expected to “deeply examine the unwieldy landscape of college sports, including the frequency of player movement in the transfer portal, the unregulated booster compensation paid to athletes, the debate of college athlete employment, the application of Title IX to school revenue-share payments and, even, conference membership makeup and conference television contracts,” according to Yahoo Sports.
On Wednesday, the news broke that former Alabama head coach Nick Saban, Texas Tech board chairman, and NIL collective founder Cody Campbell would be named co-chair of the commission on college athletics.
As much as I hope for some change and stability in the sport, I also realize that this isn’t 1995 or even 2005 anymore. It’s 2025, and Pandora’s Box was opened years ago. The toothpaste is out of the tube, and good luck putting it back in. Players are going to get paid and transfer where they want. At some point, we all have to accept that, whether we like it or not.
The sport has changed for the better or worse. While I hope for some guardrails to be put up on all this, I am also skeptical. No matter what the president and this commission do, people will fight it in court, and there will be more lawsuits on the horizon.
We are at the point in college football where we are letting politicians try to run college football. I never thought that day would come, but here we are. Politicians are now the ones who will try to fix college athletics.
I don’t know about you, but these are people who can’t even agree on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and now we have to trust them to help the sport we all love? I think we all have a reason to be worried.
