The current state of college football is this: Across the nation, paunchy, over-exalted ticket managers who title themselves athletic directors are racing in ungainly circles trying to find a padded, covering seat for their butts in a game of musical chairs. For years they cried that
name, image and likeness payments to players would be
a threat to the game’s tradition and uniqueness. It’s nothing compared with the destruction wrought by these administrative gluttons, with their combination of treachery and ineptitude, who would give away a century to grab a television minute.
The 100-year-old Rose Bowl is in danger of collapsing into one of those tumbled-down structures you see on the slopes of old Rome while the supposed business geniuses turn college football into something sickish that looks like three different tumors stuck together. They have arrived at a situation in which Stanford, TCU, Cincinnati and Central Florida could wind up clapped into the same distended conference, in which players must take red-eye flights home from games, just so said administrators can claim to be media honchos while covering years of overdrafts.
All of the people saying college football would lose the character that made it distinct if players were ever allowed NIL payments? They didn’t recognize that the real people leeching it of originality and distinctiveness were the ones sitting in the corner offices.
These functionaries would do any kind of business, no matter how unseemly, rather than do the most fundamental thing: balance sensible budgets in the name of academia. College athletics is supposed to be a break-even proposition, a nonprofit endeavor with education as its aim. Amateurism was never required for that. Simple integrity was. The right intention.
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The University of Georgia’s president at the time, Fred Davison, made clear why the big football schools were suing to strip the NCAA of regulatory control over TV rights:
He wanted an end to “a tyranny of the majority to impose itself on the commercial enterprise.” Why should Georgia have to split airtime and media profits with a mass of smaller colleges? Even then, the ministers at the power schools were talking about forming a single “super conference” in which the peons would be brushed aside so the giants could compete solely against giants — and not have to profit-share with Rutgers or Hofstra or Vanderbilt. They have been trying to get to this consolidated-wealth point for decades.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/01/ucla-usc-big-ten-expansion/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_19
In a dissent, Byron “Whizzer” White and William Rehnquist recognized this ulterior motive and where it led. White wrote that the court was “subjugating the NCAA’s educational goals” to “purely competitive commercialism.” And the end game would be total cannibalism. They were exactly right.