Georgia won the football national championship last night for the first time since a Georgian (Jimmy Carter) was in the White House, so woof-woof-woof and go-you-Dawgs and all that. Georgia Rolled the Tide which had Rolled them a month ago, 33-18, scoring 20 unanswered points at the end to settle the issue.
It was exactly the sort of spectacle college football should be, with two sets of mighty scholars battling it out while taking a break from Shakespeare and chem labs. And all for the glory of dear old Whatsamatta U., long may her groves of academe thrive!
Um, OK. So no.
No, this was as professional a display as you'll ever see, and it's getting more professional with every day. Even the halftime spread in the press box was evidence that big-boy college football is swimming in dough these days like Scrooge McDuck; instead of Boiler Dogs or Domer Donuts, the working media was served shrimp cocktail from Indianapolis's famous steakhouse, St. Elmo's.
I'm trying to place a dollar figure on that, in my head. I stopped because math is not my strong suit.
Whatever it was, it had to be considerable. And yet another small display of the opulence that belies the notion that these are just student-athletes playing for coaches who teach American History 101 on the side to make ends meet.
Not anymore. These days the ends meet in the multiple millions, and the marquee coaches regularly jump ship from even the most storied programs -- (cough) Notre Dame (cough) -- for even more multiple millions. And the universities gladly pay those multiple millions, because there are even MORE multiple millions to be made if Coach can turn their programs into, well, Alabama or Georgia.
The consequence of this is the top programs have become wholly corporate enterprises, 'Bama Inc. and Georgia Inc. and Ohio State Inc. And if you're paying high-end corporate salaries to the coaches who are the CEOs of those programs, eventually the unpaid labor that sustains it all would demand a little profit-sharing.
Which is where we are now, with the introduction of the transfer portal and the Name and Image License rule that allows college football players to cut their own endorsement deals.
And if that was inevitable, so is what has happened since. College football is now an unrestrained marketplace, with players entering the transfer portal at head-spinning rates to follow coaches who bail on them for a bigger paycheck, and cutting endorsement deals that could pay them millions before they ever "turn pro."
And now the next inevitable step in that process: Charlie Batch, an Eastern Michigan alum and former NFL quarterback, is offering now-former Oklahoma quarterback Caleb Williams a $1 million NIL deal with GameAbove Capital to transfer to Eastern.
In other words, this is a rich alum doing what rich alums have always done under the table, which is pay players to come to their schools. The NIL now makes it all above board, because once players start marketing themselves, how is what Batch is doing anything but market forces at work?
The NCAA is likely horrified by this, but what can it do? It opened the door to all of it when it allowed college athletics to become a corporate enterprise, beholden to market forces itself.
Once that happened, profit became the prime mover, as it is with any business. It's why the Big Ten added outliers like Maryland and Rutgers, because those schools gave it access to the lucrative East Coast TV markets. It's why there are 50 gazillion bowl games now, all tied to corporate sponsors. It's why there's a Big Ten Network and an SEC Network and an ACC Network, and broadcast deals that could choke a horse.
So what happens next?
The Blob is no seer in these matters, but it seems we're on the road to a great unraveling that will end with the Power 5 conferences splitting off and forming their own market-driven corporate structure. The NCAA is deathly afraid of this -- but, again, the NCAA has no one to blame but itself.
That's the thing about greed, see.
It has a way of turning on those it seduces. And its teeth are sharp.
No comments:
Post a Comment