First, the obvious: Everyone has an angle.
So when we delve into the morass of fixing college sports, keep that at the forefront.
Doesn’t matter how many blue ribbon commissions are held, or how many superstars or influencers or heroes of the past join the fight. Doesn’t even matter if the President of the United States decides to weigh in.
You can’t sell a plan to fix what’s broken if someone doesn’t want to hear it.
Unless they’re ordered — by law — to do so.
But the front porch of any change begins and ends with the university presidents and chancellors of the Big Ten and SEC, and by proxy, their right-hand men, commissioners Tony Petitti and Greg Sankey.
The same two men who can’t agree on a simple format change for a multibillion dollar College Football Playoff that would ensure even more money for all conferences.
So keep that in mind when Trump and Nick Saban and Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow and university presidents and conference commissioners meet to discuss how to get their arms around the unwieldy mess — while also dealing with the intensely tribal environment of Washington D.C.
There’s enough fault here to last two blue ribbon committees. It’s not just sharing media rights revenue, or returning to the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
We are now in an era where college athletes — specifically football and basketball, because those sports drive revenue — have annual unfettered free agency. Season after season, schools can now bid for players to improve rosters.
Contracts aren’t being honored — because, in some cases, they’re really not contracts — and everyone from coaches to players to general managers to sports agents are gaming the system.
Meanwhile, we’ve all but eliminated the college experience. The ideals of growing and maturing, the joy of learning and loving, and yes, losing.
Failure, long the greatest motivator of the college (and life) experience, has been all but eliminated. If you fail at one school, another will throw cash at you to try again.
Academics are now secondary to team building, with every university turning admission processes into come one, come all — if you’re an athlete.
When Cal-Berkeley, the No.1 public institution in the United States — and not exactly the easiest place to be academically accepted — allows 32 transfers (many who have already played at multiple schools) in one transfer portal recruiting class, we may have a problem.
By comparison, Stanford, the No.1 private institution in the United States — and not exactly the easiest place to be academically accepted — allowed six transfers from Washington, Bucknell, UCLA, Michigan, Yale and Harvard.
A veritable Who’s Who among academia.
I realize academics mean very little in this football/basketball equation, but the exercise of explaining just how far off course we’ve traveled in such a short time can’t go unnoticed by the Presidential commission. Or whatever they’re calling it.
So they’ll argue about money next week, and they’ll give slight mention to academics. Meanwhile the lost value of the college experience, those four and five years of invaluable life learning and personal growth, have somehow morphed into an annual cash grab.
I don’t blame the players; this is the setup they’ve been given, and they’re taking advantage of it until the legal system says otherwise. They were at the short end of the deal for the first 150 years of college football, given a degree and professional development in their sport in exchange for generating untold billions for universities.
So all of those important faces of college sports will talk about change at next week’s event, and they’ll look at numbers and projections of how much money the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 can add to the pie.
They’ll talk about how a collective television deal could lead to more money, and not limit the Big Ten and SEC earnings. The framework is everyone gets more — at their current percentages.
In other words, if the Big Ten and SEC currently receive 50% of the overall revenue, they’ll still get 50% — only it will be 50% of more money.
Is it realistic? Petitti and Sankey say it’s a pipe dream, that there’s no concrete evidence that shows schools can make more money by collectively bargaining with providers.
A billionaire booster at Texas Tech, Campbell says he has spent personal millions to research the potential increase in revenue the SBA will bring as part of his Saving College Sports campaign.
The same campaign the Big Ten and SEC — who, remember, can’t agree on anything of late — criticized together Thursday when releasing their “white paper” to Congressional leaders.
“I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why they released that right now,’ Campbell told USA TODAY Sports on Thursday.
I can: You can’t sell a plan to fix what’s broken if someone doesn’t want to hear it.