Taking the (inevitable) plunge

 The perfect response eludes, although some responses come to mind. What do you say now that the NCAA seems at last to be bowing to the inevitable?

"Come on in, the water's fine"?

"What took you so long"?

"At last you admit big-boy college athletics are a bidness, after all those years of denying they're a bidness"?

All of the above are acceptable, now that NCAA capo Charlie Baker has finally dropped the last of the scales from everyone's eyes. Yes, college athletics -- mainly football and basketball -- ARE a business. They are a filthy huge business, and have been for a considerable length of time. And now Baker has proposed fully treating them like one.

The other day, see, he proposed schools be allowed to directly enter into Name, Image and Likeness deals with their (student) athletes, rather than fig-leafing around it the way they're doing now. In other words, directly pay their players.

The proposed new rules would also create a new subdivision of Division I schools that would allow them to create their own set of rules for recruiting, transfers, roster size and so on and so forth.

You can interpret all that any way you want. But what seems clear is Baker and the NCAA surveyed the landscape and, because they're not complete idiots, realized they were about to become irrelevant. Division I football and basketball eventually were going to split off into their own separate entities with or without them, And so Baker and the NCAA chose "with."

They started down the path to this a few years back by allowing (student) athletes to enter into their own NIL deals and transfer virtually without restriction. The former quickly turned into bidding wars among the schools, even if they weren't technically the ones bidding. And the latter ...

Well, it's turned into Rent-A-Quarterback/Combo Guard/Point Forward. Notre Dame, just to use one example, rented former Wake Forest quarterback Sam Hartman for a year. Now the Irish may be bucking to rent Duke quarterback Riley Leonard.

And then there's Kedon Slovis, who just finished up his college career at BYU -- his third school in five years.

Now, I don't know what the NCAA is thinking. But having unleashed the wholesale jumping of schools to begin with, turning transfer rules over to the super-conference schools seems like a Hail Mary to rein in the current lunacy.

In other words: We couldn't control it. Maybe you guys can.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Doesn't the NCAA's proposal to directly pay players mean there'll be essentially no difference between the top level of college athletics and the pros? Doesn't it essentially make D-I athletics into a developmental league?"

Sure it does. But that elephant's been in the room for some time now. In fact, that elephant has escaped the room and is rampaging through the streets. Even 40 or 50 years ago some observers were calling college football and basketball a farm system for the NFL and NBA. Now it's become one in fact.

Might as well acknowledge it at last. Call a spade a spade, as it were. 

Or a bidness a bidness.