College athletes are becoming quasi professionals! Coaches are overpaid and overbearing! College presidents have lost control!
Those conclusions are both timely and shocking. They are also from a 93-year-old report on American college athletics.
There remains a void atop college sports despite nearly a century passing since that 1929 investigation by the nonprofit Carnegie Foundation. This time, however, the circumstances that vacuum has created are almost certainly to change.
This week, CBS Sports recognizes the first anniversary of name, image and likeness rights being granted to athletes as a jumping off point for a three-part series taking a more intensive look at the state of college football and future of the game.
The nation’s No. 2 sport is at a crossroads. It must adjust. The adults in the room are no longer in charge. (At least not completely.) Players have unprecedented freedom. As the NCAA and its members have been slow to change, the courts have filled the space to mandate change.
Coaches who are frequently their state’s highest-paid employees oversee their still-underpaid labor force. NCAA deregulation is sharing lanes with a landscape increasingly in need of regulation. The transfer portal is joined at the hip with game-changing NIL. Congress, if it ever catches the scent from a divisive Washington, D.C., could one day run the entire enterprise.
Whatever the outcome, college football has reached an inflection point.
“I feel a little like an escapee,” said Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, due to retire this year after more than 40 years in athletic administration. “You think of it in ‘Shawshank Redemption’ terms. I’m out of the 500-yard sewer. I’m in the rainwater, but I don’t have my dirty clothes off yet.”
The next iteration of the sport might as well be called College Football 2.0. It seems fated the NCAA has lost control over the only sport in which it does not sponsor a championship at the Division I level.
Powerful antitrust lawyer Jeffrey Kessler, who has fought the NCAA on its amateurism model, believes the legal groundwork has been set for the departure of major college football from NCAA jurisdiction.
“I think that’s where we’re headed,” Kessler…
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