Playing in bowl games is great, opting out is okay, too

With all of the changes in college football over the past few years, there has been an ever-growing trend of players electing to sit out bowl games. I am here to say that while these guys playing in these games is great and all, opting out can be the smart choice and sometimes even the more correct choice as well.

First things first, kudos to the Hawkeyes playing in this one. Jack Campbell, Sam LaPorta, Riley Moss, Seth Benson, and Kaevon Merriweather will all be on NFL teams next fall but are playing as of this moment that I type this. This is a great thing and shouldn’t be overlooked.

The players’ choice to sit out can be right regardless of any NIL money they have received, their scholarship, all of that. I will tell you why.

Let’s get into looking at the financial side of things first to look at how much money the Iowa Hawkeyes football program brings into the university. The money brought in dwarfs any sort of NIL money, scholarship amount, or any other financial reward these players receive.

Iowa’s football program brought in $39.7 million in revenue per the latest report. It is far and away the most lucrative sport there. When broken down even more, the roster size during that revenue report was 128 athletes. That comes out to $310,156.25 of revenue brought in per player in just one year.

That is 31-times more than the in-state tuition costs and nearly 10-times more than out-of-state tuition costs. In other words, when broken down, each athlete’s share of revenue brought in over just one year is more than their four-year scholarship would be. In fact, their scholarship for four years doesn’t even equal half of the one-year revenue each player accounts for.

Long story short here, the scholarship they get is simply a fraction of what their labors are worth. In today’s world, a scholarship is not in the realm of being equal to what these players bring in to the university. That should not be held against a player should they choose to sit out a…