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To paraphrase Frank Zappa, college football isn’t dead, it just smells funny.
To be sure, it looked like college football as a national pastime could have headed for the grave as the NCAA lost lawsuit after lawsuit in its defense of amateurism. The U.S. Supreme Court lashed out in its summary of NCAA v. Alston, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh condemning the whole system.
“The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” Kavanaugh wrote in June 2021.
The outcome brings to an end the hypocrisy of amateurism in a billion-dollar game, and the NCAA begrudgingly lowered all of the gates it had used to maintain some facsimile of parity and balance. The output is an anarchic landscape that seems destined to reduce Division 1 participation as competition escalates the cost of doing business.
If only the strong survive, we could be left with whatever arsenal of teams the SEC and Big Ten could acquire.
As NCAA member institutions move forward in the post-amateur era, can college football live on with two-conference dominance?
Football is a game of continuity and development as much as it’s about talent acquisition, but roster churn has become the new normal for every team, thanks to the additional burden of the NCAA’s lax transfer rules.
Better-funded NIL collectives mean the rich get richer, allowing elite programs to pick off the best players that other programs invested time and energy into developing. It’s turned teams from conferences below the SEC and Big Ten into de facto farm teams.
Defenders of the new system argue college football has never had parity. This is mostly true, but the gap between the top and middle has never been this great. If lesser programs can’t keep the players they develop, the path to competing against the giants appears insurmountable.
The SEC in particular…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/college-footballs-next-big-problem-120035781.html
Author : AZCentral | The Arizona Republic
Publish date : 2024-08-11 12:00:35
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