College Football: The Greatest Illusionist of Them All

Programs spent the last five years convincing fans to believe if they don’t donate and fund collectives, they can’t compete. It's about the haves and the have-nots. The haves will continue to flourish while the have-nots will continue to fall farther behind. NIL means that top programs will keep their competitive advantage over the small ones.

Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said recruits are getting paid as much as $20,000 per month to uphold commitments, but wouldn’t identify the schools. Why? The answer is either it's not true or the schools involved know what Smart and other schools are doing on the recruiting trail. Smart has more than $13 million reasons to rid other teams of their NIL recruiting advantage but didn’t because in the process he could have lost his.

College football continues to look for the fix, but it is staring them right in the face. In other major sports, salary caps tied to collectively bargained agreements made the leagues more competitive. And that’s the reason it hasn’t been fixed, the programs that control the sport can’t figure out how to fix it without losing their competitive advantage.

Rich Getting Richer

The transfer portal is free agency with the entire sport on a one-year deal. The portal lets players roam freely from team to team without restrictions. And for the top programs, it’s essentially a mulligan giving them an opportunity to make up for past recruiting misses.

But the best gift the portal gave college football is tampering, helping the rich get richer at the expense of smaller programs. Backed by resources and lucrative NIL deals, teams can target players whether they are on rosters or not. Stories of top players being offered six- to seven-figure NIL deals to enter the portal have become the norm.

Tampering has become a part of college football. Because of tampering, teams canceled their spring games because of fear that their best upcoming players will be targeted by other schools. It seems every year coaches come out and accuse teams of tampering but very rarely name the teams involved in the allegation.

And now the push is on for players to have one opportunity to enter the portal instead of two with a January window opening just after the national championship game. The only problem is most classes would have already started by the time the so-called student-athletes arrived on campus. Cardale Jones' “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain't come to play SCHOOL” has never been more true.

The biggest reason for a January window push is college coaches are tired of reshuffling the deck of cards to come up with their next trick to use for the upcoming season. The last window would send coaches to the drawing board having to address late departures. A January-only window cuts down the time coaches spend on maintaining the illusion that certain players are more than depth players.

If they are student-athletes and not employees, why wouldn’t the portal only open after the school year is done? Is it not in the best interest of the student to finish the year so they are one step closer to their degree? The fact is the student-athlete is the biggest Illusion out there.

The Playoff

SEC’s Greg Sankey said, “It's clear that not losing is more important than playing quality opponents." 

Winning is the only thing that should be important.

Whether it’s a four, eight, 12, 16, 18 or 24-team playoff, the same argument of who should be in will continue to resurface. And it's always the same question that’s argued over, is it the most deserving or the best team that gets in? The problem with answering the question is it's a subjective opinion and it will differ from person to person. When you leave it to the perspective of a committee who they believe is the best versus who someone else does could be very different.

The truth is, every year there are only four to five teams that have the ability to win a championship. And usually, the same teams can year after year. And that’s college football's biggest problem. They are trying to model the playoff off the NFL but are missing the most important component of why it works in the NFL, parody.

In the NFL teams go from last to first, from one season to another. When was the last time Vanderbilt won the SEC or Purdue won the Big Ten? That’s because college football, unlike the NFL, is built on the top teams having the ability to remain on top while keeping everyone else down.

Consequences of Realignment

When Texas and Oklahoma announced, they were heading to the SEC, and Oregon, USC, Washington and UCLA to the Big Ten, it was about strengthening the conferences. Fans were excited about unbelievable matchups. A Saturday night matchup featuring Ohio State at USC or Texas at Alabama had most people excited for the two super conferences to start.

But conference realignment is really just the networks paying for the teams they want without having to pay for the teams they don’t. The SEC and Big Ten used realignment to take a stranglehold over the rest of the conferences. What it created was two money conferences and everyone else.

The consequence of realignment for teams in the two conferences is now teams will face some of the toughest paths to make the playoff. But when you let greed take over and chase the money that’s what happens.

The SEC and Big Ten now want to complain about how difficult the schedule is when it was their own doing. Texas and Oklahoma didn’t vote themselves in. Oregon, USC and Washington didn’t tell the Big Ten they were joining. Both conferences decided to let them in for money and now believe their greed should be rewarded with preferential treatment.

The SEC and Big Ten conferences wanted to take control, having the power to dictate what's happening moving forward.

College football is betting on the fact fans will be happy when they get their football Saturdays back. That once football is back and the season starts, all will be forgotten. They're hoping that the tradition and passion surrounding college football hasn’t started to evaporate yet. But it's only a matter of time before they lose that bet and the business side of college football waters down the sport.