They aren’t cancelling the season because they’re worried about COVID. They cancelling the season because players rightly balked at the liability waivers schools or conferences wanted to get them to sign, and the schools want nothing to do with the potential for liability claims from players who have the potential to make hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of their career.
The NCAA, in not wanting to go the bubble route, because it would require them to classify players as employees, effectively won the battle but lost the war. Yes, they didn’t have to classify players as employees
this year. But now you’ve opened players’ eyes to the fact that the system was set up such that billions are at stake, and schools want players to sign waivers so they aren’t on the hook for multi-million dollar claims caused by a disease with unknown long-term consequences. And the players rightly said, “No, if you really want us to play, you’ve gotta give us some protection here.” Schools don’t want to do that, and so they’re going to blow up the season but the toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube here.
I want to go a little deeper though into how badly the NCAA misplayed this:
- Building a bubble, either for a conference or P5 as a whole would have required paying for space for playing fields and living arrangements for players, most likely off-campus.
- If you’re removing players from campus and giving them compensation in the form of housing, meals, testing, etc simply so they can go play football, without attending classes, then there’s a very clear line that gets drawn in terms of whether they still fulfill the “student” portion of ”student-athlete”.
- As such, if a freshman next year says, “I want pay equal to what each member of the team implicitly received last year simply to play football”, it becomes a really challenging argument to fight.
- While it is true that in today’s climate, football players still get all kinds of free stuff and access to buildings and equipment other students don’t get, this all happens on-campus while classes are ongoing, so there’s some cover.
- It’s it’s just, “Go to bubble, play football”, there’s no cover.
The NCAA decided they preferred to try to maintain cover in order to classify athletes as amateurs, rather than build a bubble. They made a bet that COVID would be a minimal risk by this point, and they tried to win this year while keeping the system intact. Instead, they get no season this year, and now players realize all of this and are talking about unionizing (which they still probably can’t fully do because of public state universities co-mingling with private ones in conferences), and you’ve also now spent all summer telling them how important their sport is to the country and towns that are dependent on it.
I don’t know what P5 football looks like a few years down the road, but it’s not going to be what it was previously. This is Curt Flood fighting the reserve clause. He may not have won, but he changed the landscape for those who came after him, and I think that’s what we’re on the verge of here.