Relish college football's final act before era of unbridled professionalization arrives

Go ahead, watch the football games and savor everything: The Apple Cup, Bedlam, #Pac12AfterDark. Better yet, fly to Berkeley and soak up Strawberry Canyon; venture into Lone Star watering holes along I-35 between Austin, Waco and Fort Worth to witness divided Big 12 loyalties; and – what the hell – be badass and flash a “Horns Down” gesture. 

Preserve all memories for posterity. Bathe in nostalgia.

This college football season marks the close of a long chapter – the end of an unsettled era. Ahead is a line of demarcation separating this confounding period of accelerated change from what awaits in 2024: The doorstep of unbridled professionalization. 

An expanded 12-team College Football Playoff, two super conferences in full bloom, the absence of a 108-year-old league pillar, further movement toward a revenue-sharing model and perhaps an employment paradigm – it’s all on the horizon, if not next year then the near future.

Even NCAA President Charlie Baker concedes: This current model (whatever this is) is probably not sustainable.

Try keeping a straight face while saying the words “amateur enterprise.” 

“It is professional in every way right now – the lone exception is the players,” Jay Bilas, the ESPN analyst, told On3. “The players are going to be paid. That is going to happen. The question is: Will the NCAA machine just admit, ‘Look, what we’re doing here is professional?'”

Between NIL opportunities and the transfer portal, the age of player empowerment is full steam ahead. But so are 2,847-mile flights from Seattle to Piscataway, N.J., for a not-so-natural Big Ten rivalry. Hypocrisy abounds, as a multi-billion-dollar industry super-charged by media rights dollars is about to fully ignite in 2024.

The quest to qualify for the last-ever four-team CFP will be compelling. More consequential will be the NCAA’s long-shot quest to secure long-sought federal NIL reform legislation. Even more impactful could be litigation snaking its way through the courts; the highly anticipated November National Labor Relations Board hearing carrying significant athlete-employment status implications; and a growing number of industry leaders saying it’s time to explore giving athletes a slice of the media rights pie.

The industry is being reimagined in real-time.

Market forces are shaping the contours while the NCAA largely recedes as a bystander. When a national champion is crowned at Houston’s NRG Stadium in January, the curtain will fall on an era soon to be a relic.

Love or curse it, the tectonic plates are shifting. This is not evolution. It’s a revolution. Whoa, Nellie! 

“I really believe these are very critical moments,” Tom McMillen, CEO of LEAD1 Association, told On3. “But I don’t think the point of criticality will be here for another year or two. You’ll see the train moving forward.”

1984 Supreme Court case ‘released the tiger’

Watch the games and remember Andrew Coats, an 88-year-old Oklahoma attorney who can conduct a master class on how the industry reached this inflection point.

Four decades ago, Coats represented Oklahoma and Georgia in the landmark Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma v. NCAA case. The NCAA had monopolized the TV market, limiting schools’ appearances on TV. But Coats was the legal mind behind the 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court victory in June 1984.

He played a leading role in unlocking the door leading to escalating TV media rights revenue for schools and leagues and, in turn, incessant conference realignment. Now the longtime Sooners fan is watching one of the sport’s great rivalries, Bedlam, first played in 1904, go up in flames – knowing he lit the fuse.

“I’ve probably screwed up college football so much you can hardly fix it,” Coats told On3. “When we released the TV money, it released the tiger. It has changed things ever so much.”

Months after the ruling that the NCAA’s control of TV rights violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, Justice Byron White, who wrote a dissenting opinion, told Coats, “Andy, you may win that case. But you will regret it.”

Coats never did. But he conceded it “really caused some terrible problems. That, and with NIL and transfer portal, it has changed the game. It is hardly recognizable.”

College football changed after the ruling

After the ruling, Coats had thought all TV money would be poured into one gridiron pot and divided up equally among big football-playing schools. Had that occurred, he said, the realignment wheel – which began spinning in earnest in the 1990s – would not have gathered momentum and the Pac-12 would be intact.

Coats called the current state of affairs a professionalized model at its highest level. Amateur athletics is an artifact, he said. He called Chuck Neinas, then-executive director of the College Football Association – formed to negotiate TV contracts and push back on the NCAA’s monopoly – his “henchman.”

The duo, he jokes, “screwed up college football about as bad as you can screw it up.” During this summer realignment madness, Neinas, 91, laughed while telling On3 that his wife always reminds him, “You created this monster!”

“There was good, and there was not so good,” Neinas said. “It disrupted conferences.”

‘Football came and got in the way’

That ruling “fired a shot heard ’round the world,” Coats said – an ignition point. Soon Penn State joined the Big Ten Conference. The realignment craze was underway.

Even the basketball-rich Big East Conference succumbed to adding football schools or risk extinction. And extinction came anyway a decade ago. When the Big East broke apart, Jim Boeheim sat alone with me in his office, bemoaning the fact the league didn’t remain at its original number of nine schools after Pittsburgh joined in 1982.

“Football came and got in the way,” Boeheim told me.

His cohort, Rick Pitino, put a finer point on it in an ESPN documentary: “It became like Walmart – a big corporation.”

Fast-forward: a coast-to-coast super conference has bloomed in the Big Ten, which leaned on FOX Sports to secure almost all marquee West Coast media markets. The ESPN-fueled SEC has planted its formidable flag in the heart of the Midwest, adding Texas and Oklahoma in 2024. The Big 12 will stretch from Phoenix to Morgantown. The ACC – yes, the ACC – is on the verge of adding California and Stanford.

And the 108-year-old Pac-12 is a cadaver.

“No question conferences compete against each other – they are vicious,” McMillen said. “They’ll look for any angle to get ahead of the others, even when working together might be in the best interest of college sports. There is a fragmentation where dog-eat-dog is the prevailing culture.”

It has intensified. But the money grab? What’s old is new again.

“All these people within the structure act like Ed McMahon knocked on their door and handed them billions of dollars for winning the Publishers Clearing House,” Bilas said. “They have methodically and purposely and thoughtfully built this industry into what it is. And they’re saying, ‘How did this happen?’ Oregon and Washington, they weren’t the first to do this. They were just the latest. Like, what are you talking about?”

‘What the hell are we doing?’

Watch the games this fall and remember Betsy Mitchell, the athletic director at Division III Cal Tech. 

During the NCAA transformation meeting in January 2022, Mitchell asked the seminal question during the open forum. With more than 1,100 institutions offering disparate resources, revenue and missions existing under one proverbial Big Tent, “Why are we still trying to stick together?” she asked. “We do not have one model of college sports. Those days are long over.”

Nineteen months later, she is still awaiting an answer. 

Mitchell said “all in we spend about $4 million bucks” annually on athletics. Ohio State’s annual athletic department expenses? $225 million. Now, as TV dollars further widen the gap, her disappointment and “disgust” peak. None of these realignment decisions, she said, take into account athlete well-being.

“So, what the hell are we doing?” Mitchell told On3. 

The industry has evolved – or devolved – into “two minor league football conferences [SEC and Big Ten],” she said. “Call it that and get those young professionals the support they seem to need. The whole thing is screwed up … There has not been a transformation of the NCAA – that is hogwash.”

Amid the frenzied chase for TV revenue, what’s in the best interest of the broader enterprise has been lost. Regionality, tradition, century-old rivalries and the charm that attracts most of us are thrown by the wayside. 

Bilas explained how college athletics stands in stark contrast to a property like The Masters. Augusta National Golf Club could pursue maximizing revenue above all else, pursuing more sponsorship signage and a more lucrative rights package. But it does not. Its product is near perfect as is, year after year.

Nobody is creating consensus in college football

In college sports and especially in college football, no one is attempting to find that sweet spot – maximizing revenue but not at the expense of the quality of the product or student-athlete experience. Who is the steward of the enterprise?

“No one,” Rick Neuheisel, the former Washington football coach and current analyst on Full Ride on SiriusXM College Sports Radio, told On3. “Somehow, someway, at least [NFL Commissioner] Roger Goodell‘s job description is to create consensus. There is nobody trying to create consensus. Nobody brokering compromise.”

As the Pac-12 disintegrated, Washington State coach Jake Dickert assessed the carnage: “The old question – how long would it take TV money to destroy college football? Maybe we’re here … at the end of the day, we’ll look back at college football in 20 years and be like, ‘What are we doing?'” 

‘The biggest Brooklyn Bridge I’ve ever seen’

Gloria Nevarez, the Mountain West Conference commissioner, says she isn’t one to shy away from change. In fact, she embraces it. Yet, the extent of change engulfing college athletics now, she told On3, “is pushing my boundaries of comfort.”

Decades ago, ACC basketball teams rode buses to five different conference games during a season. Next year brings a whole new world order, with Big Ten athletes trekking cross-country.

“The Big Ten now has an NFL schedule,” Bilas said. “They are traveling the same amount, if not more, than the New England Patriots.”

One longtime college administrator: “Sounds horrible, doesn’t it?” 

Seattle-based attorney Julie Sommer, executive director of The Drake Group Education Fund, a nonprofit advocacy organization, drilled down on the hypocrisy. Institutions and the NCAA still use the antiquated phrase “student-athletes” even though the driving force of realignment is, “‘You are going to go out there and make us more money,'” she said. “When they do that, they are treating them as an employee. You have no say. We’re restructuring. You’re going to be doing this … 

“The volleyball team for their Wednesday night match – so UDub [Washington] is going across the country to play Rutgers. Essentially miss an entire week of school? Or just four days? To say it interferes with their ability to perform academically is a huge understatement.”

The NCAA has a lot of high-minded rhetorical principles, Bilas said. But when you match the stated rhetoric to the actions of NCAA members, he said, “they bear zero resemblance to one another. Zero. Then this same group is going to step before Congress and use that high-minded rhetoric to try to get federal legislation to continue to violate federal antitrust law. If anyone buys that, that’s on them. 

“That is the biggest Brooklyn Bridge I’ve ever seen.”

Athlete contracts won’t work? ‘Absurd’

Watch the games and remember Jennifer Abruzzo, the National Labor Relations Board general counsel.

Next month marks two years since Abruzzo issued the headline-grabbing memo that provided guidance regarding her position that some college athletes are employees under the National Labor Relations Act. The entire industry has one date circled – and it’s not Ohio State–Michigan. It is Nov. 7, the date of the hearing for the NLRB’s complaint against the NCAA, Pac-12 and USC.

College sports is methodically marching toward at least some athletes being deemed employees of their schools, conferences or the NCAA. That formal designation would usher in a dramatically new era, albeit one not expected to arrive next year. Say hello to potential collective bargaining. 

“There is no stopping the train,” said Sarah Wake, who advises universities on athletic compliance issues in her role as an attorney at McGuireWoods.

Whether athletes are formally deemed employees or independent contractors, Bilas expects universities in the relatively near future, absent Congressional intervention, to realize the cleanest and easiest way to procure and retain talent is to sign players to contracts.

“Contracts work for the rest of American society,” Bilas said. “The idea it wouldn’t work for college sports is kind of absurd from the get-go.”

What will happen if an employee model takes hold at the D-3 level?

“What will happen is we won’t have sports,” Mitchell of Cal Tech said. “It will all go away.” 

As the NCAA continues to aggressively lobby Congress for a federal bill, it seeks a formal designation that student-athletes cannot be deemed employees. Consider those efforts akin to a fourth-down Hail Mary.

“There will not be a bill in Congress that comes out that codifies non-employee status,” McMillen, the former U.S. Congressman, said. “It is dead on arrival. There is going to be round two in this. And round two is going to be much more important – much more existential.”

What is ‘way of the future’ for college football?

It is possible to implement a revenue-sharing model without a full-fledged employment paradigm.

Several stakeholders said realignment moves, driven by TV dollars, will accelerate progress toward a revenue-model structure. The moves illuminate hypocrisy: Athletes don’t receive a dime.

A growing number of industry leaders – including Oklahoma Athletic Director Joe Castiglione, AAC Commissioner Mike Aresco and the MWC’s Nevarez – told On3 that now is the time to explore what that model would entail. And West Virginia football coach Neal Brown told On3, “College football missed the boat when the TV contracts went up and up. Players deserve a piece of that pie.”

At other levels? Pushback. Tom Wistrcill, the Big Sky Conference commissioner, told On3, “The devil is in the details. It’s really difficult to manage because you’re getting to pay-for-play.”

Regardless of the model, Castiglione stressed that a future structure needs to be conceived with athletes and for athletes. The responsibility rests on the entire industry, he said, to figure this out. 

“We’re not going back,” Castiglione said. “We can wish it all we want. We are not going back to the way it was. But what is the way of the future?”

‘Know what NIL stands for? Now it’s legal’

Watch the games and remember Trent Dilfer, former Super Bowl-winning quarterback turned first-year UAB football coach.

He is receiving a baptism by fire in the NIL world. Alleging that Power Five schools routinely coerce his players into the transfer portal with financial promises, Dilfer told On3 that, if proven, punishment should be harsh: Lifetime bans.

Schools coerce players into the portal who “had no desire to go into the portal,” Dilfer said. “They are in my office in tears. ‘I don’t want to leave, but my dad is being told by the collective or by my high school coach, or by the frickin’ player director at Power Five school, that I can make way more money with them than with [UAB].’ He’s crying. He doesn’t want to leave. It is tampering.”

NIL isn’t going away. Neither is the time-honored tradition of pay-for-play schemes. As Neinas said, “Know what NIL stands for? Now it’s legal.”

“It is chaos,” Aresco told On3.

The NCAA has shown little appetite for policing NIL activity because it is fearful of litigation. But McMillen said it’s past time for the association to assume “litigation risk” and establish and enforce recruiting restrictions. 

“We’ve got professional sports …,” Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said at SEC Media Days. “In the NFL, it’s business. It makes for a very different dynamic, and we’re now moving toward where it is really business. I would say the joy is not the same.”

College athletics: ‘In the midst of a revolution’

As the future takes shape in 2024 and beyond, watch for a potential Football Bowl Subdivision football breakaway from the NCAA. The reform-minded Knight Commission has long endorsed it.

Watch more big brands in power conferences (see Florida State) grow tired of carrying the financial water and sharing the revenue pie with also-rans that lack a brand name or major TV market. In a game where networks often play puppet master, a veteran media rights source told On3: “The networks will pay whatever you need them to pay you for top inventory. What they don’t want to do anymore is pay $9 million a game for Michigan-Ohio State and also pay $9 million a game for Rutgers-Maryland.”

Massive change abounds. As Steve Hank, executive vice president for college athletics at Affinaquest, told On3: “College athletics is not undergoing an evolution right now. It’s in the midst of a revolution.”

Mit Winter, a college sports attorney at Kansas City-based Kennyhertz Perry, said 2024 will move us toward a new college athletics model, one acknowledging some athletes are professional. But it is unlikely to be fully formed next year. 

Winter laid out the path: Expect either a court or the NLRB to rule that college athletes are employees this coming year, which will likely take a few years to resolve through appeals. Look for more movement at the state level on bills that include revenue sharing and potentially college athlete employment status. Keep an eye on more movement on proposed revenue-sharing plans from other organizations. And expect more activity at the state level with bills that likely allow schools to bring certain aspects of NIL in-house.  

“To fully bring all elements together into a coherent model will take some work,” Winter told On3. “Where we’re at in a year will also be heavily dependent on the approach the NCAA and conferences take: Do they want to continue to fight where things are headed? Or will they be part of the process of creating a new model?”

After this season, the enterprise reaches the doorstep of unbridled professionalization. David Ridpath, a sports business professor at Ohio University who has appeared before numerous Congressional committees regarding college athletics, said the veneer is gone.

Big-time college athletics is now seen for what it is: big business, not education. 

Relish the memories this season: the four-team playoff, the Pac-12’s last dance, Texas and OU vying for Big 12 supremacy. Bathe in nostalgia. Player empowerment, super conferences, and a revenue-sharing reckoning loom ahead – a professionalized world fueled by billions of TV dollars. 

“Nothing is perfect, but where we are going comes close,” Ridpath said. “If we make bargained decisions based on what is best for the athlete and they have an equal seat at the negotiating table, college sports will be just fine. It will be different. But as in all cases – we will still watch the games.”