Prime Time is anytime

 Or anywhere, to be more apt about it.

This upon the news that Travis Hunter, a defensive back who's the nation's top recruit according to the people who keep track of such things, has thrown over big-deal Florida State for Jackson State, an FCS school and an Historic Black College/University. This has created a great deal of buzz for some reason, because FOR GOD'S SAKE MAN TOP RECRUITS JUST DON'T DO THAT.

A few knobs have even suggested the kid's dinging his future draft status by choosing, ahem, some minor-league school. And of course there's the suspicion that, I don't know, Deion helped engineer a whopper NIL deal for the kid with Barstool Sports and Penn National Gaming.  

(A brief detour: The Blob is all for kids like Hunter gettin' it if they can after so many years of making millions for their schools as unpaid labor. But the fact one of his NIL benefactors operates a sportsbook app for Barstool smacks of Arnold Rothstein subsidizing Eddie Cicotte, Chick Gansel and the rest of the Black Sox in 1919. Maybe that's a flawed analogy, but the optics ain't great.)

Now, where were we?

Oh, yeah. Top prospect goes with HBCU school.

I honestly don't know why this is the deal it seems to be for some people. If you're a DB, why wouldn't you want to go play for the greatest DB in the history of the game? And if a sweet NIL arrangement  helped sweeten the pot, so what?

It's just bidness, boys and girls. And college football long ago became a purely bidness proposition, no matter how ludicrously it pushed the fiction it was all about education and such.

Difference now is the players are bidnessmen, too, which discomfits folks in some quarters. So there's been some elitist (and let's face it, vaguely racist) hand-wringing in those quarters that the kid's development will be hurt by going to, gasp, an HBCU school.

Gee, I don't know. Didn't seem to hurt Walter Payton's development any.

Walter Payton, who went to, ahem, Jackson State.

Didn't seem to hurt Jerry Rice, either. Who went to, ahem, Mississippi Valley State, and HBCU school.

Doug Williams, Bob Hayes, Michael Strahan? Mel Blount, Richard Dent, John Stallworth? Leroy Kelly and Steve McNair and Shannon Sharpe and Charlie Joiner?

You've heard of those guys, right?

Every one of them came out of an HBCU school. Everyone one of them went on to stardom in the NFL. Some of them even wound up in Canton. 

So Travis Hunter is in very good company, it would seem. And if his going to an HBCU means the dynamic has changed in college football -- if it means Nick Saban and Dabo Sweeney will have to compete with more than just the FBS schools for recruits -- well, competition's good, right? Isn't that what the Sabans and Sweeneys are always telling us?

Oh, and that sound you hear?

It's the playing field, getting a little more level.