Flock Talk: Money Was Always the Problem

 

College football did not suddenly lose its innocence when athletes started getting paid. The sport just became less comfortable when the money stopped being hidden.

The ongoing discussion about the future of college sports is interesting because there are a lot of people talking about how college athletics has been ruined in some fashion or another. Most of those thoughts, at least from my view, are rooted in the fact that people hate change.

That thing we grew up loving is different now.

New Year’s Day used to feel like an even better version of Super Bowl Sunday. It was a day with football from early in the morning until late at night, wrapped in the kind of tradition, pageantry and familiarity that helped so many of us fall in love with the sport in the first place. You knew the bowls. You knew the tie-ins. You knew the rhythm of the day. There was comfort in it.

You could wake up, turn on the television and feel like the sport had taken over the entire house. The Rose Bowl felt different. The Orange Bowl felt different. The Sugar Bowl felt different. Even the games that did not decide a national title felt like they mattered because they were part of the structure of the sport.

But that world is gone, or at least mostly gone, and the change has made people uncomfortable.

I understand that discomfort. I miss parts of the old sport, too. I miss the way the calendar felt. I miss some of the regional identity. I miss the simplicity of a Saturday when the Pac-10 felt like the Pac-10 and the Big Ten felt like the Big Ten and the Rose Bowl felt like the natural meeting place between two worlds.

But nostalgia is not a business model. It is not a legal framework. It is not a serious answer to the problems inside college athletics.

That is where the current conversation about college sports continues to miss the mark. The loudest voices proclaiming the need for a legal fix to the problem of college athletics often seem to be the people who benefited the most from the old structure. It is rarely framed that way, of course. It is usually framed as concern for Olympic sports, concern for competitive balance, concern for the fans or concern for the sanctity of education.

Some of those concerns may even be real.

But it is still striking how often the solution seems to begin and end with controlling what athletes can earn.

No one inside any meeting for a bill to create laws surrounding college athletics, no one inside any athletic department, no coaches or their families seem eager to talk about the other uncomfortable truth. The amount of money being spent on ever larger support staffs, head coach buyouts, long-term coaching contracts, recruiting departments, roster management departments, nutrition staffs, analysts, consultants and the continuing facilities arms race are just as big a problem as NIL spending.

Maybe bigger.

The sport did not suddenly become financially reckless when athletes were allowed to participate in the marketplace. The sport had been financially reckless for decades. It was just reckless in a way that mostly benefited everyone except the athletes.

That is the part of this conversation that should bother people more than it does.

When schools were building palaces for football players to walk through, that was called commitment. When coaches started earning salaries that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, that was called the market. When buyouts became the price of bad decisions, that was called business. When conferences chased television money across the map, that was called survival. When athletic departments hired more staffers than most fans could name, that was called keeping up.

But when players started getting paid in a way that was no longer hidden, suddenly college sports had lost its way.

That is a little too convenient.

The truth is that college football has always had a money problem. It just used to be better at hiding it.

The old system was never as pure as people want to remember. Boosters were always part of the sport. Jobs for family members, cash in envelopes, cars, apartments, no-show jobs, friendly local businesses and all the other wink-and-nod arrangements were never some new invention. They were college football’s version of dark money.

People can pretend otherwise if they want, but that does not make it true.

The difference now is not that money entered college football. The difference is that money became harder to hide and harder to control. The old power structure liked it when the schools, coaches, conferences, television networks and boosters controlled the flow of money. The current world bothers people because the athletes now have more leverage inside the same marketplace everyone else already occupied.

That does not mean the current system is healthy.

It is not.

The transfer portal has created real roster management issues. NIL collectives have created a marketplace that is often confusing, uneven and full of gray areas. The lack of national standards has made compliance difficult. Coaches have to recruit their own rosters constantly. Fans are being asked to invest emotionally in teams that can look different every few months. There are legitimate problems here.

But a legal fix that tries to structure how athletes are paid without also addressing the lack of financial control inside athletic departments will not fix the real structural flaw of college football.

It will only protect the parts of the system that were already protected.

If lawmakers want to talk about fiscal responsibility, then talk about all of it. Talk about coach buyouts. Talk about guaranteed contracts. Talk about the pressure to build facilities that look more like luxury resorts than athletic buildings. Talk about the ballooning number of staff positions. Talk about conference realignment decisions that were driven by television money and then blamed on everyone else. Talk about athletic departments that operate like professional sports organizations while still asking everyone to believe this is simply about education.

It is tough to make a convincing argument that college athletics needs saving only when the saving begins with limiting what the athletes can make.

That is not reform. That is preservation.

And there is a difference.

That is where fans in general are being asked to hold two thoughts at the same time.

It is fair to miss the old sport. It is fair to miss the regional conferences, the clean bowl structure, the feeling that New Year’s Day had its own mythology. It is fair to look at the transfer portal, NIL bidding wars, conference realignment and playoff expansion and feel like something familiar has been pulled apart.

But it is also fair to ask who pulled it apart.

It was not the athletes who decided television money mattered more than geography. It was not the athletes who turned conference membership into a survival game. It was not the athletes who created $100-million coaching contracts, massive buyouts, bloated support staffs or the endless facilities race. It was not the athletes who taught everyone involved that every tradition was negotiable if the next check was big enough.

That is why the push to govern away the problems of college sports can feel incomplete. Everyone wants order. Everyone wants the sport to make sense again. Everyone wants some version of stability after years of chaos. But a law that mostly focuses on athlete compensation while leaving the rest of the financial machine untouched is not really fixing the sport. It is just deciding which part of the money is uncomfortable enough to regulate.

That is the distinction that matters.

Fans are not wrong to feel exhausted by the current version of college football. Coaches are not wrong to feel overwhelmed by year-round roster management. Administrators are not wrong to want a system that has more structure than the one we have now. There are real problems here.

But the problem was never simply that athletes started getting paid.

The problem is that college football spent decades building a professional financial structure while pretending the athletes were the only people who needed to remain attached to the old amateur ideal. Now that the athletes have leverage, the same system that monetized everything else wants to rediscover restraint.

That is hard to take seriously.

If the goal is real reform, then everything has to be on the table. NIL. Revenue sharing. Transfers. Coaching contracts. Buyouts. Staff sizes. Facility spending. Conference media deals. The postseason calendar. The academic calendar. The growing expectation that fans, donors and collectives will simply keep feeding the machine because their school has to keep up.

That is not an Oregon issue. That is not a Georgia issue. That is not an Ohio State issue or an Alabama issue or a USC issue. That is a college football issue.

The programs that adapted fastest are not the ones that created the incentives. They are the ones that understood them. Oregon did not become a national brand by pretending the sport was still operating under the old rules. It grew because it saw where the sport was going and moved aggressively into that space.

That is not something Oregon fans should apologize for. It is the reality of the modern sport.

But it is also why the sport’s leaders should stop pretending the problem can be solved by focusing almost entirely on what players are allowed to earn. The money did not become dangerous when it reached the athletes. The money became dangerous when everyone decided there was no limit to what winning was worth.