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Will never happen- why? Because no life loser whose whole identity is Alabama football will pay their players more than this league will. People in Ohio who would have never sniffed admission to OSU will donate millions to the buckeyes because its the most important thing in their lives. This minor league can't compete with stupidity. Little can. The casino industry is built on it.
That's fair. My counter point would be that that benefit was no longer commensurate with the value generated to schools and networks by CFB collectively.
If I can ever get motivated, I want to read this book on the topic.
LMFAO so 4 times the NBA rookie salary for a lottery pick.... fucking clown show. I thought Mormons were great businessmen?
If you're not finding the games entertaining then sure, I get it. But for the 2-3 hours of actual football, I still find the games worth watching and entertaining. The end result does not change the fact that I turned off my brain for a couple of hours, had a couple of drinks with friends, and as was the case for this year, saw a lot of close back and forth games that had me tuned in to every play.
If you are a freshman LB at South Carolina now you get a $1.5m to wear the cock
NEWS: South Carolina EDGE Dylan Stewart has agreed to a new deal to stay with the Gamecocks for the 2025 season🤙The true freshman is expected to receive between $1M to $1.5M, per @PeteNakos_💰https://t.co/bHhWyCxrko pic.twitter.com/SBKRdx0MJT— On3 (@On3sports) December 10, 2024
I was just making a point
There ought to be development of a new minor league, totally divested from college sports. All the 18-24 year olds with the top talent go to that league and jump from team to team pocketing as much as possible until they're eligible for the draft for the NFL
Return college football to how it was before the portal/NIL days. This will be for the players not as talented as the minor leaguers, but still wanting to continue to play football. Pay the players and set a standard leaguewide individual salary cap. The on-field product won't be as good, and yeah, you'll still have boosters paying under the table - but the players that are good enough for that kinda money can go to the minor league.
Players good enough make their bank, players not as good get to continue playing, and maybe still develop into NFL talent. Fans won't see the skill on display that we have now, but we'll cheer for a consistent team of people who are proud of where they play and want to be there.
Before the portal and NIL days, I couldn't care less about the NFL. I was all in on college football, consumed my Saturdays. And during the week, I was reading about other teams and what all I missed. Nowadays, I watch VT (usually) and that is it. Don't keep up with rankings, coaches, league standings - none of it. Over the past couple of years I have gotten more and more into the NFL. At least when you have an NFL team, those players are locked into a contract (to a degree) and you know who you are going to be watching from year to year.
It's hard to get emotionally invested in a team that is going to have a full new roster every season. Crazy to say this as from about 2000 onward I have been a diehard VT fan, but the way things are going coupled with how bad we are - I'm getting to the point where I really don't care and may just give up on college sports.
Even I- yes no bullshit- would have been fine with a true and regulated NIL model. If hardees legitimately wanted to sign Drones to be in a commercial in the NRV and he gets paid for it- fine. Most normal people would not have had a problem with it. If fanatics sells x number or player jerseys- and like the NFL- Tuten got a legit cut of that? fine- nobody would take issue with it. But every school short of Texas, Bama, and Ohio State- whose boosters literally donate GDPs of small countries levels for "Go my school, yay" - they ALL knew they couldn't generate real NIL money for these kids. So they quickly went to pay for play- and the NCAA is too fucking weak to control it. Take even some SEC schools- take Ole Miss and Arkansas- 2 small towns in the south where covid and wal mart have killed many many small businesses. Do you think there is a legit bakery in Oxford, MS. that is going to pay Jackson Dart a million dollars to do a commercial for them? in other words, their total revenue for 4 years? nope. not remotely close. All of these schools knew this, thus the collectives were born. A close friend of mine owns several businesses in charlotte, NC and is a huge FSU fan. He is not a mega booster because you don't stay rich giving Willie Taggart 7 figures... but I asked him about his businesses getting involved in NIL for FSU players. He laughed at me and told me he's not a fan of throwing money away and that paid endorsements are a tax and book keeping nightmare. It's a fucking joke, all because we felt there was no "value" in a 250K dollar education.
And I'll die on the hill saying that not graduating with student debt was a massive fucking leg up and benefit that every scholarship athlete enjoyed and it's horseshit that we were gaslit by the talking heads into thinking it wasn't.
Oh right. I forgot we only support people who dress. The other kids are still there too, ya know
Like look at this
I'm told AJ Dybantsa's NIL number was close to $7 million https://t.co/c73h3ErkTR— Adam Zagoria (@AdamZagoria) December 10, 2024
Kid is a high school senior and is getting $7m guaranteed before he picks up a ball at the collegiate level. Fucking ridiculous.
The whole goddamn system has jumped the fucking shark. We've gone from whining about kids who were already graduating college without ANY student debt (at a time when tuition already costs upwards of $60k per year at most schools, especially put of state) being so poor they can't afford food (when it's literally been supplied for them in school and athletic run dining halls) to now needing upwards of 8 figures per year just to be in the race for their services.
Fucking ridiculous. If you aren't P2 or have absurd oil or religious money backing you, you cannot compete anymore.
I started as a VT fan. I became a CFB fan. I enjoyed watching all the games - including the ones that didn't feature VT
Now, I ONLY watch VT - and the product has been poop for the last 15 years so my patience is running really thin. I just can't watch CFB anymore - it is not entertaining to me anymore
There's a pretty big gulf between where we were (which was not equitable) and where we are now (which is not sustainable).
Not paying athletes in the 80s was fine. But by the mid-2010s, with schools, coaches and TV networks making billions, it was absolutely clear that student athletes were being exploited. Tuition and board was a fine compensation in the 80s. Much less defensible in the 2010s. Recognizing that and advocating that athletes get a cut of the vast sums their work is generating isn't advocating for where we are now.
We're where we are now because no one had the courage to just come out and say that college football is a pro sport. We're trying to layer professional features on top of an amateur infrastructure. It will not work. Demonstrably.
The fix is to fully embrace the professional nature of the sport and get government permission to set up things like salary caps, trading windows, etc.
We all could see this coming, yes. Agreed. That doesn't mean the way it was was right.
Never close to 100 on the dress squad. Never. Which is why I fucking melt down at multiple number penalties.
Then why aren't we winning?
Yes, speaking of Rich Rod and Brian Kelly- once upon a time at WVU and Oregon, you could drive a truck through holes their OL opened up. Mysteriously neither team had Anthony Munoz or any great NFL prospect O lineman. They were making bigger holes than Bama was doing in the early Saban years running the I formation WITH a bunch of NFL OL. Of course it's the scheme. WVU and Oregon- at the time- were not signing 5 star OL, but their lines opened up huge holes in the run game. We should find something remotely similar.
We're fans because regardless of how they get there, there will be 100+ kids wearing maroon and orange on the sidelines representing our school. And, generally speaking, we like our school.
I can hate the system, hate the roster construction, hate the portal, hate the playoffs, hate everything about CFB, but come Saturdays, I will never hate the team that suits up. They're playing for us, literally for our entertainment, and I'll root for them.
But in the short term, any school that can throw money at winning will.
There is no short term on that, there will always be schools willing to throw more money at winning than anyone else. Look at baseball, the "free market" now has some teams paying individual players more money than small markets can afford to pay an entire payroll, and those smaller markets are being absolutely crushed at the gate with plummeting fan attendance and engagement.
Free markets never correct if there are entities out there willing and capable of asserting their dominance. Bad faith actors will always work to create power imbalances that assert dominance over the rest of the market and regulations are vital to preventing that from happening. And as long as we keep treating NIL as the wild West, and no, none of the new laws will really curtail any of it or put rigid guardrails around any of it, well then nothing will change and we will continue going down this path. The rich are getting richer and the poor are being rapidly squeezed to death.
This point in time is likely a bubble in the NIL market. With the new laws coming into effect where schools can pay players, there will be more money in the market than ever before. You are right in that it is probably unsustainable. But in the short term, any school that can throw money at winning will. I would guess this winter window and maybe the next spring window would be the peak of the feeding frenzy. After going through a season or two, schools will start to figure out he cost/benefit of their NIL investments and the market will start to correct. But for the moment, the players - and in particular the agents who are in their ears - should probably be licking their chops. Crazy.
Most of us (and football fandom, to be honest) saw this coming, but we were shouted down because any criticism of the system was met with bad faith arguments taking evetything as a offense to those poor college kids who were just trying to make a few dollars to pay for textbooks.
We all saw this coming. We saw that it would kill non rev sports, we saw that it would kill the vast majority of non-P2 schools, we saw that it would create an unsurvivable power imbalance and we were told to shut up.
So yeah I don't know why anyone is a fan anymore. Fuck the whole system. Hope it burns
There's really no reason to. Other than the fans of the top 5-8 Blue Bloods, college football fans are largely being told that they don't matter.
And if they want their team to be competitive, they need to take out a reverse mortgage on their house to help pay ridiculous NIL money for guys who mostly have no chance whatsoever to ever play in the NFL.
Guys like Malik Murphy who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn and no NFL scout takes seriously somehow has 6-figure value in this broken-ass Market.
It's not sustainable, never has been, and most of the teams not in the top echelon are going to flounder and ultimately fail financially.
This was always where the system was headed without any oversight. It was stupid from the start and never about actually "fairly" compensating players.
Fans of VT football, should have seen this coming from a mile away, and called bullshit on it from the start.
Honestly this season I thought our line did a great job run blocking but in pass pro, Parker Clements got beat like a drum and as mentioned elsewhere our offense has been extremely slow developing in our RPO.
I don't necessarily agree with his take on the transfer portal specifically (if there is one change in college football that I could undo it is easily conference realignment – that's a distant first), but, I totally get what he's saying about wanting to tune out from the sport until the dust settles. We've seen 4 decades-worth of changes in a 5 year period, and we know there's more coming. I get how some find that exhausting.
so we need an OC who can scheme around deficiencies in the OL to protect them? Well, maybe that's what we've been missing. It just seems to me that our OL is always getting blamed for our offensive ineptitude. And our offense has been inept far more than it hasn't over the last 25 years.
Not disagreeing, but how do we determine which athletes are really generating profits and how do we then divy it up? Certainly no one on the Water Polo team is generating any profit....so do they deserve nothing?? Is their work and dedication not equally as taxing and worthwhile as the QB #1??? If QB#1 has a bad year do we then get to take back some of his money?
Which is why the SENSIBLE THING to do from the start would have been to have allow players to sign with Agents. (Like actual agents here...not NIL Agents who are mostly College Students or recent Grads who look like they had sub-3.0 GPAs in Business School) Guess what, Agents aren't looking to sign the 3rd string RB or every 17 year-old who has 3* or more on 247----that's because those individuals don't actually have any monetary value in the real world.
Let those that can profit off of merchandise, autographs, video game royalties, ect. That is real "NIL"
I don't think anyone here had a problem with that, but like Alum07 said above, if anyone said anything slightly disparaging about paying players they were met with contempt by those that feel like all those "poor 20 year olds" have been so exploited....with multimillion dollar facilities, private chefs, the highest quality training, and free academic assistance.