Wading into the revenue stream

 The Blob holds no particular brief for Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh, who's a trifle slippery and sometimes has too nodding an acquaintance with the truth. It's why the NCAA's on his case and he's sitting out a three-game suspension levied by his university, which hopes it will soften the inevitable blow.

But sometimes the man does have a clear eye. Maybe the clearest.

Last week he got up at his weekly presser and essentially presented a white paper on the current NIL/transfer portal mess, which the NCAA brought on itself. The suits and academics who run the show there couldn't bring themselves to simply declare their workforce a workforce, so they introduced a stopgap measure that would allow the workforce to cut its own financial deals.

Thus, the NIL. Thus, college football and basketball can still maintain the fiction of the student-athlete, and the myth of academic purity that comes with it.

Harbaugh said last week that won't fly.

He said, and not for the first time, that universities and athletic conference should cut the bullspit and institute revenue sharing.

"The current status quo is unacceptable, and won't survive," Harbaugh said. "In my opinion, when we capitalize on the talent, we should pay the talent for their contributions to the bottom line."

Abso-effin'-lutely. Every word.

Seismic conference realignment has forever shattered the illusion big-boy college football and basketball are anything but professional corporate enterprises, so enough with that noise. It's Big Ten Inc. and SEC Inc. and ACC Inc. now, driven by the same imperatives that drive Microsoft or Amazon or Dow Chemical. 

What we've seen the last couple years -- the SEC raiding the Big 12 for its two signature brands (Texas and Oklahoma); the Big Ten initiating a hostile takeover of the Pac-12 -- is nothing more than mergers and acquisitions. It's AT&T swallowing Time-Warner, Google gobbling up Android, Disney scooping Pixar/Marvel.

The ACC, meanwhile, just voted to add SMU and Pac-12 refugees Cal and Stanford, thereby rendering its very name (Atlantic Coast Conference) as obsolete as the Model T.

All of this is about cashing in on the TV money that flows like water and generates billions for the Big Ten, the SEC, the Big 12, the ACC. And all of it the conferences and universities keep because ... well, because revenue sharing with the "student-athletes" who are the product the teevees are buying would mean the end of the fantasy.

But, again, that fantasy died a long time ago. It died the first time one of the big football or basketball schools paid Coach eight, nine, ten million a year just to coach football or basketball. It died the moment they decided Coach was not faculty who actually taught classes (as coaches used to back in the day), but the CEO of an enterprise wholly separate from the university's academic mission.

And if that's what you are, you should operate accordingly. Acknowledge your workforce is a workforce, and pay it accordingly.

Harbaugh, who coached in the NFL and thus understands how corporations work, sees that perhaps clearer than most. Which is why he sees through the sham to the reality.

Enough with the NIL dodge, he says. If you're gonna quack like a duck, be a duck.

Damn skippy.