Taken a look around college football these days? It's a mess.
Players have started to make money, and they often aren't satisfied with what they get. Throw in the fact that if someone is benched because of a bad game, he starts to look into the transfer portal the first chance he gets. The rosters often change greatly from year to year.
Meanwhile, the coaches often can't wait to move along to the next big job. Merely the threat of that switch is enough for their current employers to rewrite their contracts with some more zeroes involved.
And scheduling has become a minefield. Rivalries that have been taking place for many decades are thrown by the wayside as conference affiliations seem to be rewritten on a yearly basis. That's led to such oddities as Stanford playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and the Mountain West Conference courting Northern Illinois to join as a football-only member. Bowl games are played before mostly empty seats with several players refusing to play because an injury might threaten their NFL draft status.
There's no rhyme or reason to all of this. It's a good idea to examine what's happening, and Armen Keteyian and John Talty help with this solid, long look at where we are in their book, "The Price."
This sort of explosion was a long time in coming. The rules involving student-athletes had been exploitive for years. Their performances pulled in millions and millions of dollars to the universities, and all they saw out of it was a full scholarship. If they were in a bad situation for one reason or another, they had to wait a year to transfer ... which the coaches that picked them to receive grants-in-aid had no such restriction. The class example of the situation was when Doug Flutie walked around the Boston College campus in his playing days, and saw classmates wearing Flutie jerseys. His take from that purchase was $0.
A group of lawsuits eventually worked their way through the system, and some of the rules disappeared. The phrase "Name, Image & Likeness" or NIL became ever-present around college sports, as there was a race to cash in on the opportunities. But any sort of system to standardize the rights of athletes hasn't been worked out. So no one knows what's legal, and no one knows what they can do. As Clemson coach Daby Swinney said, "There's no rules, no guidance, no nothing. It's out of control. It's not sustainable. It's an absolute mess and a train wreck, and the kids are going to be the ones who suffer in the end."
Keteyian and Talty have come along with a series of good-sized snapshots on events that have taken place in the sport recently. Some of the big names in the business are profiled nicely. Nick Saban, arguably the greatest coach of all time, was one of the most driven personalities in college football. Even he was worn down by everything around him, and retired from Alabama. That set off a chain reaction of coaching moves that affected several universities including the University at Buffalo, which lost its coach well into the offseason. Speaking of big names, Jim Harbaugh left Michigan right after winning the national championship, with something of a dark cloud following in the form of investigations. Jimbo Fisher was paid more than $77.6 million to go away. The way that coaches' agents try to manipulate the hiring process also gets a long look here.
The "haves" share some time with the "have somes." Maryland and Arizona can't keep up with Ohio State and Michigan under most circumstances, but it at least can have a winning record in the right circumstances. The catch is that if someone succeeds at that level as a coach, he may wind up elsewhere as soon as the season ends. And the midrange schools - Macy's instead of Sacks Fifth Avenue, in the authors' words - have to start over.
That's a lot to cover, and it certainly took some work to put it all together. Kudos to Keyeyian and Talty for their legwork. There's probably only one thing missing here. The subtitle of the book is "What It Takes to Win in College Football's Era of Chaos." That concept isn't really answered here, and it would have been nice if the authors had tried to guess what a workable system would look like eventually.
We'll probably get to that point in the relatively near future. Still, "The Price" is a good snapshot at the state of college football today.
Four stars
Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.)
Be notified of new posts on this site via X.com @WDX2BB.
No comments:
Post a Comment