A Sporting Interlude

College Football and Politics - More Similar Than You May Think

I have been a fan of college football since probably my junior year in high school. One of the reasons that I chose to attend Florida State University was because their football program was quickly becoming a national powerhouse. During the five Fall semesters I spent in Tallahassee, the Noles only lost 9 games. They never finished ranked lower than fourth in the land and won their bowl game at the end of each season. Since my undergrad days I have, for most seasons, been a diehard fan, spending many a fall Saturday rooting on (or bemoaning) the Noles.

One thing that started to bug me as I got older was the extent to which the schools, conferences, and broadcast partners of NCAA Football were taking advantage of the players that did the actual work on the field. In many cases these kids were on one-year scholarships and were basically stuck to whatever school they chose coming out of high school. A player could transfer to another school, but would have to sit out a year, losing that year of eligibility. Now, coaches could, and did, leave schools for better pastures quite frequently, often leaving behind the kids that they had built relationships with over a period of years. I really started to feel that the players were being significantly taken advantage of.

Now, I am not naive. I know full well that the best players were quite often well taken care of financially, it was just done under the table. Quite often, literal bags of cash were exchanged to entice a star high school player to sign with one of the college powerhouses. It was a pretty open secret, only causing problems when a school, or it’s athletic booster organization, got a little too cocky and less careful. Even considering all of this, it still seemed like everyone was getting very rich on the backs of these kids.

Fast forward to a couple of landmark changes that have reshaped (and, in my opinion, ruined) college football.

First, during the 2018 football season a Transfer Portal was created, wherein a player could indicate his intention to leave his current school by entering the portal. In 2021, the penalty for doing so was removed, allowing players to play immediately upon enrolling at their new school. While at first blush this seems like a reasonable and fair change, it has morphed and mutated into something completely different. As with many things, there were a set of unintended consequences, including situations where players could transfer multiple times during one offseason, players entering the portal only to find that there were no schools that wanted to take, them, teams actively tampering with players at other schools to try to entice them into the transferring, and many more. Perhaps one of the most dramatic consequences happened in the fall of 2024, when Marshall University was forced to pull out of their bowl game against Army due to losing more than half of their team to the transfer portal.

The other major change was a court ruling that allowed all college athletes to financially benefit from their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL for short). This was specifically intended to not be tied to a player’s performance on the field, and could not be an arrangement directly between a school and a player. The conceit was that the community businesses around a team could enter into contracts with athletes who would then hawk that businesses’ goods. As one can imagine, this opened the floodgates to a pay for play scheme which, as one can also imagine, has had a raft of consequences as well, including players quitting their teams mid-season (to preserve a year of eligibility), locker room conflicts when players are making different amounts of money, a growing gap between the “haves” and the “have nots”, and more.

Basically, the masks are off now. A wink and a nod are given to players, some of whom are making more money than their NFL counterparts, that they are not being paid to play. Everyone who follows the sport knows full well that the players are essentially pros now. Ohio State University just won the national championship, on the back of a reported $20 million dollar team payroll.

So what does this have to do with the current political climate? (I told you I would get here…)

Take a look at a photo from the Inauguration. Seated directly behind Trump are not his Cabinet, closest advisors, or Republican Party royalty. No, behind him are some of the richest men in the world. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai (the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet) and Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) were all on the dais, having dutifully made their $1 million contributions to Trump’s Inauguration. Zuckerberg even went a step further during the first week of Trump’s term, instructing Meta to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump that the company would have easily won, for $25 million dollars.

So, as with college football, the masks are off. The Federal Government is now clearly Pay for Play, same as it ever was, but now out in the open. In some ways this is a bit of a relief, as we can stop pretending that this isn’t the case. Sure, there will be noises of discontent and disillusionment, but the sooner we recognize it for what it is, the sooner we can try to fight the battles that can actually be won.

Take care of yourselves.