Welcome to the New Age

 ... as, you know, Imagine Dragons likes to say.

(And, no, the Blob is not going to make some awful pun involving "Radioactive" and "college athletics.")

(OK, so it might, but at least you've gotten fair warning)

("Oh, just shut up and get on with it," you're saying now)

Fine. I'll shut up and get on with it.

I'll introduce you to Judge Claudia Wilken, who on Friday formally turned college athletics professional. That's when she approved a multibillion-dollar settlement between a bunch of NCAA suits and a bunch of other suits representing all Division I athletes. The way is now clear for universities to begin directly paying their student-athletes instead of quasi-directly paying them via the corrupted (and largely lawless) NIL structure.

So goodbye, sis-boom-bah; hello, sis-boom-buy. Welcome to the New Age.

I wish I could mourn this the way so many other lovers of college sports will mourn it. But I can't.

Oh, in a sense I can, because I remember the glory days of college athletics, when "student-athletes" were paid under the table by sleazy alums instead of, ugh, right out in the open via official contracts. The games seemed so much purer then, on account of we didn't know what we didn't know. We could still watch Texas beat Arkansas in '69 or Notre Dame tie Michigan State in '66 with a reasonable assurance that everyone was playing only for free room, board and educatin'.

If there were $1,000 handshakes and fully-loaded Trans-Ams being exchanged, we didn't want to hear about it. Because then we'd have to think about it.

Now?

Now the college kids are going to be full-blown pros. And if I can kinda-sorta mourn that, I can't really, because the powers-that-be in big-boy college sports brought this on themselves.

The road to Friday, see, began a good ways back. And it's been leading to it straight as an arrow since.

It began, perhaps, the first time a school took money from some apparel company and slapped the company's logo on its student-athletes, thereby turning them into unwitting billboards for said company. The school got the dough for being Nike's or Adidas's or UnderArmour's advertisers; the billboards got zippo.

Or maybe, just maybe, the road to Friday began when the networks started throwing large green at the NCAA and its big conferences to air their various lawn-implement bowls  and Final Fours. The student-athletes -- the product, in other words -- didn't see any of that jack, either. And pretty soon they were playing games at all manner of bizarre times because that's the way the networks wanted it, and the NCAA couldn't say no because it was being paid to say yes.

It wasn't too much longer before college athletics, particularly top-tier football and men's basketball, were awash in what the Blob euphemistically calls "eff you" money. And it was the student-athletes who were getting effed. As State Tech U. increasingly became State Tech Inc., a for-profit entity driven by imperatives wholly separate from the academic mission, the generators of that profit still got the usual room/board/educatin' deal they'd been getting since the days of leather helmets and the flying wedge. 

Every year, that imbalance became more glaring. And every year, State Tech Inc. became even more Inc.-ish, as corporate as IBM or Microsoft but still denying that, unlike IBM or Microsoft, their employees were not employees but humble college students pursuing a degree.

Eventually, the cognitive dissonance simply got too great.  And here came the lawsuits and the NIL money and then, finally, Friday.

All because the NCAA and its member schools got greedy. All because more was never enough, even as it became too much for them to remember their mission and to set some boundaries accordingly.

Hard for me to truly mourn such self-immolation. Not hard at all for me to thoroughly damn them for it, however.