A New Year's Lament

For 60 years I have been watching college and professional football. New Year's Day for me has always been an extreme football day.

Let's go back fifty years to the 1975 college football season, which ended on January 1, 1976. There were five major college football conferences: the Big Ten, the Southwest Conference, the Southeast Conference, the Big 8 and the PAC-8. Each of these conferences had a tie-in to the one of the four college bowl games played on January 1: the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Orange Bowl.

In 1975, there were seven other lesser bowl games played in the ten days before New Year's Day. These were the: Tangerine Bowl, Liberty Bowl, Sun Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl, Gator Bowl, and Peach Bowl. So overall twenty-two of the best teams in football played in eleven bowl games. The games were usually seen as a reward to teams that excelled that season. There were no named corporate sponsors. Revenues came from ticket sales, television and radio broadcast rights, and local booster organizations.

Which team was the official national champion? No team; there was no college football playoff. The unofficial champion was Oklahoma, who was ranked number 1 in both the Associated Press and Coaches polls on January 2. There was not much controversy about the 1975 champion, but in other years there was as coaches and fans debated which team really deserved to be called the champion. It made for a good discussion for a few days as everyone was getting back to work.

How much did the players make? Nothing in cash. Scholarship athletes received just that - a full ride scholarship with room and board. For a star athlete, a local booster might arrange a summer job in his car dealership. Of course, some boosters might offer an athlete more, but this was cheating and the NCAA had a strong enforcement organization that could assess significant penalties against the college.

We all know how we got to today's game. In 1986, three bowl games became the first to sell corporate naming rights. The number of bowl games rose steadily: 18 in 1985, 28 in 2005, and 48 (including the play-offs) this year. In 1995, the Southwest Conference broke up, starting a process of conference realignment that has continued for thirty years. In 1998, the first football championship playoff system began. In 2019, under pressure from the courts and state legislatures, the NCAA began allowing student-athletes to retain and license their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights. ln 2021 the NCAA began allowing student-athletes to enter the transfer portal with immediate eligibility.

The combination of NIL money and the penalty-free transfer portal has significantly changed college football. Now in order to build a college football team, coaches must do high school recruiting and work the transfer portal, with the transfer portal often attracting more attention. Colleges form donor groups which purchase the NIL rights from a sought after player. This year, the NCAA even began to allow colleges themselves to buy the player NIL rights. NCAA rules still require that player payments should be made for NIL licensing rights and not for performance on the field, but there is no enforcement provision to make sure that NIL license agreements actually reflect commercial pricing for a player's NIL rights.

So student-athletes now have a one-time unrestricted free agency to sell themselves through the transfer portal to the highest bidder. Just today I read an estimate created by Hearst newspapers of the expected 2026 prices for the most highly rated players in seven key positions: QB - $3.5 million, RB - $1 million, WR- $1 million, Blindside Tackle - $2 million, DE - $2 million, CB - $900,000, Kicker - $250,000.

So what? On the field, the college football game is as good of an entertainment product as it has ever been. More exciting, I think, than professional game. Isn't it right and good that players at last are getting money out of what is, let us admit, a huge entertainment business?

Yes, I agree that the old scholarship system was unfair to student-athletes. But there is something that is corrupting in the NIL-transfer portal system. Seek after the higher things, says St. Paul. What are the things higher than money? Loyalty for one - loyalty to teammates, to schools and to fans. Truth for another - is the commercial value of the name, image and likeness of any starting left tackle really worth $2 million, or is this really pay-for-performance? How many people, even fans, actually know the name of the left tackle on their favorite team? Virtue for another - how does millionaire status help build the character of a 20-year old? And how many vultures are out there trying to take advantage of these young and inexperienced men?

We live in a time of corruption and decadence. The new college football game is one example of our times. I have enjoyed watching the college playoff games this year, and I will watch the the rest of them. But I will do so feeling a bit guilty and soiled.