Last Friday night, the final bell rang on amateurism in college sports. After five years of antitrust litigation, Judge Claudia Wilken issued an order that will not just settle the House v. NCAA lawsuit but also ignite a name, image, and likeness arms race. The decision will bring a staggering shift to the game that will have vast national implications.
For years, shadowy NIL collectives, groups of influential donors with deep pockets, quietly perpetuated “pay for play” at the highest levels of the sport. Now, those who don’t, or can’t, pony up and follow suit will be left in the dust.
To the powers that be — namely, the Power 4 conferences of the SEC, Big 12, ACC, and Big Ten — this ruling is no imposition. It is an open invitation to strangle smaller leagues in the major sports, ensuring that the path to a title runs through a select few college campuses. There are even talks of entire conferences (SEC, I am looking at you) threatening to take a page out of Texas’s book and “secede” entirely, with Commissioner Greg Sankey seeming to think that their football product is worthy of watching in its own right.
If this last year of college sports taught us anything, it’s that the melodrama is well underway. Mainstream sports media groaned over how an expanded College Football Playoff yielded zero significant upsets and that March Madness was one of the most dull in years.
Is a top-heavy model what we, as fans, really want?
Here is the short of it: Sacrificing deeply rooted regional identity and forcing storied programs into a relentless game of catch-up is a catastrophic strategy for the long-term well-being of college sports.
With programs now shelling out $20 million a year to retain their star players, the gaps between the haves and have-nots will widen significantly. It is unreasonable to think that, in an era of hyper-spending, the Boise States of the world will be able to slay Longhorns, Bulldogs, and Wolverines alike. The cards will not just be heavily stacked against them, even more than they already are, but they will be betting against a hostile house.
For as long as I’ve called the South home, weekends have revolved around a simple mantra: “Faith, family, and football.” As a recent University of Florida alumnus, this means that my mood each week from August to November is determined by how my Gators perform. There’s immense pride in being one of 90,000 rabid fans in the Swamp, battling Wildcats, Volunteers, and Seminoles.
It would be a huge betrayal to leverage the hopes and dreams of millions of fans of local universities for mere revenue. Imagine the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party,” the storied annual showdown between the Gators and the Bulldogs, ceasing to be a cultural mainstay and, instead, amounting to just another fundraising battleground.
FEDERAL JUDGE PAVES THE WAY FOR ATHLETES TO MAKE MILLIONS
College football is one of our great American pastimes. It would be a tragedy to strip away its unique, regional magic for sheer profit. While the SEC and other power conferences won’t launch rockets to the moon, their billionaire donors will prepare to do everything else to ensure the sport’s most elite talent plays exclusively where “it just means more.”