What is the Future of College Football?

It's being improved to the point where it has very little to do with college other than the name and age of the players and more with branding to bolster commercial market share for the masses.

 

Can't tell you how much I hate this new NIL environment. We're a free minor league system for the social platform called the NFL. We have been for a while. But, now, they want the fans to double down and pay these "amateur" athletes. The loyal prideful attachment to the program is slowly being completely eroded. It doesn't matter how loyal of a fanbase you have, or the skill or work ethic of your head coach and staff, the integrity of your program culture, the level of player development, or the in-game coaching you offer. It's all about who pays these guys more to come pretend to be students and live in luxurious facilities for three years while we fund their football development. Never thought I would cut my season tickets loose, but, this might eventually be the breaking point. I hope not. I'm still in so far, but, it doesn't feel the same. At all.

 

The soul of the game is mortally wounded - if not already dead. Meanwhile, the fetid carcass of "big time CFB" lurches on in search of a hole to fall into. Those of us who learned to love the game when loyalty and integrity weren't punchlines in an obscene joke are not quite as sanguine about the current situation as some seem to be. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it. Since bleak has already been used to describe the future, I'll go with dismal.

 

I can understand feeling this way.

Fundamentally, though, the game was a semi-pro league for decades. We generally lied to ourselves about it being about school, but it hasn't been for a long, long time.

The real issue here is not the money. It's the mismanagement. It's the free-for-all. It's the inequity and ambiguity of rules.

If we admit this is a pro game and find ways to make everyone operate under the same rules, we fix college football.

 

To me college football has been broken for some time. There is no question that some schools have really profited by boosters buying players. Like almost everything else cheating, bending the rules proves successful. You had the same half dozen teams year after year loading up with the best players. Winning brings revenue, attention and nfl deals for players. Revenue allows some schools to procure top coaches. Fact is it's not a level playing field as it was.

Now with the portal and NIL, those who have the money to spend reap the benefits, those who don't will flounder. Money talks.

And on top of this ticket prices continue to rise to help pay for coaches and all the new buildings and perks. With the rising cost of gas and inflation, imo fewer fans can afford to attend.

Personally, I think all of this will eventually take a toll on college football. My enthusiasm for the sport has really dipped to the point that I may or may not watch the games and I'm ok with that. Thankfully, I live in an area that provides many great options.

 

This stuff needs to be on the up and up, when a player signs a contract in the pros you know what the player is getting paid, we need that here, lets hear what guys are getting.

 

If we admit it is a pro game the remove them and any pretext from Educational Institutions

 

I think that's where it's going.

 

It’s going to die a slow death. You can already see fan interest in a lot of the country, including the state of FL, has fallen precipitously.

The NIL stuff will only make it worse, causing normal students to become even further detached from “their” college teams. I guess there were booster shenanigans going at least back to the 70’s and 80’s. Academic scandals. Etc. It isn’t that any of this is new, so much as the corruption has now become totally pervasive. At some point the athletic program becomes too detatched from the University mission. At that point I think the leaders should ask if it’s worth it at all. Do we really want UF boosters giving millions and engaging in bidding wars to totally unproven (and often undisciplined) high school kids? Doing that in the name of the University of Florida? Basically bribing kids to attend your school on a 1 year basis with no enforceable contract, and no real loyalty to the school going forward, hell maybe not even an expectation to be an actual student (and let’s face it, college football in particular already let this go by the wayside). The whole thing seems entirely absurd. What’s going to happen with the other sports when football sucks everything dry, resource wise, instead of being a source of funds!?

Even the pro leagues have salary caps and such. Outright bidding wars supposedly wasn’t to happen under the NIL! But the can of worms has been opened. I guess if a fool and his money want to be parted, college football is an outlet no worse than gambling or other degeneracy. It just seems silly. It’s not even like the schools winning these races have the most wealth, otherwise Stanford and Harvard would dominate. Instead, it just seems a race race to see who has the biggest dumbest crooks willing to toss money at 17-18 year old football athletes (for what ROI I have no idea). The process of acquiring a roster of semi-pro athletes has become so farcical, the national champions of college football is at this point like winning the worlds tallest midget prize. Why should anybody care at all? I’d recommend the University of Florida should get out ahead of this and lead in a completely different direction.

 

I’d like it bleaker if we were kicking Bamas and Georgia’s ass every year.

 

The problem is college football (and basketball) have for a long time been based on anything but the “up and up”.

It’s always been about bags of illicit cash and bribery, now it’s just that they are emboldened to make them briefcases full of cash (and *everyone* will now have a hand out since it’s more normalized). Even though that supposedly wasn’t the purpose of NIL. All of us who opposed the NIL vehemently could see this coming a mile away.

 

Yet there’s no example of that happening in any sport.

 

At what point do you realize you're just beating a group of professional athletes that happen to live near the university of Georgia and have permission to use the school's logo to generate revenue?

That kinda puts the kibash on any rivalry. They aren't students, they don't care about the school and many aren't even from Georgia.

 

I noticed that about 25 years ago but I was late to the party

 

You can insinuate the student athletes used to be professional athletes all you want and give me all the cheating anecdotes you can muster but the game this year is night and day different than even last season. In my opinion it's not for the better but if you're excited to watch what amounts to professional athletes sponsored by the university we can just agree to disagree.

 

I didn’t say I was excited. I don’t watch the nfl because I really get turned off by them. WhT I like doesn’t change any facts though. These professionals just got an across the board raise is all I see. The 200k cam got to go to auburn is now peanuts. The teams tgat were cheating the best are still right in the thick of things and the ones scared to cheat or spend are still struggle. I don’t see any concrete evidence of any changes other than more money is involved and these kids can openly negotiate for a bigger bag instead of pretending Rashada just lives Miami. The other difference I see is there may be other major players coming to the table. If the top teams are getting by with a couple mil a year, those days just ended. Don’t get me wrong, it sucks. I can’t stand attention seekers running their mouth and throwing shoes while getting their asses handed to them. It’s just the way it is. Hope it doesn’t turn me off completely. I know I could stomach it all a lot better if Bama and Georgia were our bitches.

 

I agree that the game has been twisted into a grotesque commercial proposition and placed under extreme duress for a long time. But there is a point at which winning without honor or decency or any concern for fairness at all will destroy any endeavor and we stand on the brink of that now. I was born in 1950. I watched my first Gator games on TV when Spurrier was an underclassman. I know what school spirit and team loyalty feel like. I remember the mythic bonds between schools, players and fans. But the concept of winning with fairness and at least some degree of dignity no longer exists because CFB as we have known it no longer exists. With the Jimbos and Ruiz types of the world setting the new standards, the prospects are not encouraging. I will always be a Gator fan, but the current direction of CFB is a great deal less certain.

 

Imagine the sponsors Tua could have had if his deals were NIL. Could have had deals from the airline he and his family flew from Hawaii to ...Alabama, the real estate company than set up the family house, whatever company that employed the fam etc.

I mean he had deals just not legal ones at the time.

 

I’m interested to see how collectives infiltrate pro sports

The LA Lakers, TOR Maple Leafs, NY Giants all could get $20-30m extra yearly via collectives. That could destroy the competitive balance of those leagues. I’m not sure what pro leagues could do, if anything to combat that

College sports has a bigger out, they just need to have the courage to do so. The major universities need to split and form their own league with their own rules.

 

I’m not sure the pro’s could do anything to stop a collective type initiative to bypass the cap, but I don’t see it happening. The fanbase/booster system has always contributed millions to the athletic dept in college (for the big schools anyway), but there’s no precedent for that in the pro’s. There’s no real network in place to generate that extra money in the pros like there is in college. It could happen, the transition in college was just much easier because the fans were already generating tons of extra money to contribute to their teams budget.

I’m not sure how much new leagues will help either. The third party money cannot be limited no matter what type of cap you set up for the individual teams and the system is already in place to bypass it. I don’t see the collectives going away just because the league has a different name. I do see the new leagues as the only real way to implement any type of team cap, just don’t see any way you get rid of the third party system that’s already in place, and the courts have already said you cannot limit that third party money. The pros don’t have any way to regulate the third party money either, they just don’t have a system in place for the fans to generate that money directly, and I don’t really see that developing.