A petard, hoisted

 Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz is worried about the future of college football. So is Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald.

"The game on the field has never been better," Coach Fitz said this week at the Big Ten Football Media Days. "Once you walk off the field, it's never been more chaotic."

And Ferentz?

"I think we're in a really precarious place," he said. "There's just a lot of vagueness, a lot of uncertainty ... I mean, there are moments where it's like 'What the hell?'"

He's right. Fitzgerald is right. Neither is against the NIL (Name, image and likeness)  concept of players cashing in on the sport the way coaches and athletic departments always have. But no one seems to know where the lines are drawn, because no one in charge thought it through before rushing it into being.

The NCAA ran scared from all the potential lawsuits filed by student-athletes looking for a piece of the pie, and it's still running scared. Now no one's driving the bus -- and the bus, the way Ferentz, Fitzgerald and others see it, is heading for the cliff.

Shoot. These days, there's even a quasi-union pressing Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren for even more concessions, student-athletes acting like the university employees they've become. And don't think that doesn't send a chill up the spines of football coaches from Alabama to Whatsamatta U.

But you know what?

College football bought this. All of it.

It stopped being about "student-athletes" and degrees and academia when Iowa started paying Kirk Ferentz $7 million a year to coach its football team. Or when Alabama started paying Nick Saban $9.75 million to coach its football team. Or when Georgia started paying Kirby Smart $10.25 million to coach ITS football team. 

Those salaries reflect the value of a successful program these days, which is measured not by graduation rates but by the gargantuan revenue those programs annually bring in. And they give the lie to the notion that college football is a game at all anymore;  instead it's now a totally profit-driven enterprise as corporate as GM or Microsoft or Amazon.

As with any corporate enterprise, there are CEOs and middle managers and a labor force that does the actual work and generates the revenue. This is especially true of college football, where athletic departments sign chunky apparel deals in exchange for using their "student-athletes" as billboards for whatever apparel company is paying them.

Maybe you can tell me the last time you saw a college football player who wasn't wearing the Nike swoosh or the Adidas trefoil or the Under Armor stylized "H." I sure can't.  

All of this, of course, you've heard many times before on this platform. But it bears repeating now that college football has hoisted itself on its own petard. The coaches and administrators may be fretting about all this new chaos, but it is chaos they willingly (if perhaps unwittingly) brought into being. And they're just going to have to live with it.

 Or maybe Coach Whoever would like to go back to the true amateur days, when coaches got paid salaries commensurate with the rest of the faculty, and actually taught classes on the regular.

Yeah. Didn't think so.