Fleecing 2.0

Old habits are notoriously bullheaded cusses, and nowhere is that more true than in college athletics. Tradition is a bedrock deal there, and tradition is nothing more than habit dressed up in its Sunday best.

And so it was 1966 before the old Southwest Conference saw its first black football player (Jerry Levias, SMU). And it was the 1970s before a lot of other southern schools allowed blacks on their football or basketball teams, among them Texas and Alabama.

Change happens in college athletics, in other words. But tradition compels the response to it to be, "Well, OK, we'll change, but not really. And not all that much."

Which brings to the state of Georgia, which doesn't hold with change unless the change is to go backward. Thus its new voter suppression laws -- which recall the good old days of poll taxes and literacy tests for primarily non-white folk who are presumed to be guilty of  voting for Democrats.

Now they're up to new shenanigans, those rascals. And this time it's about college athletics.

Georgia's governor, Brian Kemp, just signed another law into the books, see. It will allow college athletes in the state to trade on their image and likenesses, which heretofore belonged only to the schools for whom they worked for goods and services only. 

This sounds like a good deal, on its face. It sounds almost -- gasp -- progressive.

Except.

Except, there's a provision in the new law that allows Georgia schools to essentially keep milking their cash cows just as they always have. 

The provision allows an athlete's school to still confiscate up to 75 percent of his or her endorsement money, and then dole it out from a common pool once that athlete graduates or withdraws from school. 

This undoubtedly will be spun as protection for college kids who don't know how to manage their money. But to the Blob, the basic translation sounds more like this:

OK, we'll let you do endorsement deals, ya lousy ingrates. But only if you turn over 3/4 of the take to us, because there's NO WAY we're gonna allow you to think you have any kind of independence while you're here. So you keep the crumbs under the table, just like always, and we get the lion's share, just like always. 

Consider it our way of reminding you who still owns your ass.

There is, of course, one bright spot in all of this fleecing 2.0: Not every state or school will have such a stubbornly regressive stipulation. So having such a stipulation on the books would likely weigh like an anchor on the Georgia schools' recruiting efforts -- kinda like back in the day, when southern schools' refusal to break the color line ultimately hurt them and benefited northern conferences to whom southern black athletes gravitated.

In which case, it's hard to fathom that many Georgia schools would avail themselves of the aforementioned provision in the new law. So there's that.

Then again ... 

Well, you know: Habits. Traditions. The simple inertia of this-is-how-we've-always-done-things-so-why-change-now.

It's been a wellspring of dumbness before. Don't bet it won't be again.