Big Business Getting Bigger (and Messier?)
The College Sports Industry has never looked more like an industry, especially around these parts.
Three months after agreeing to a new contract that doubled his salary Trev Alberts leaves his job as Nebraska’s athletic director for the same job at Texas A&M. Less than six months after becoming the athletic director at Washington Troy Dannen leaves that job to succeed Alberts in Lincoln.
Neither move looks good nor does much to deflect the notion that something is really rotten in the world of college athletics. Yes, it’s been a ‘business’ since the end of the 19th century when colleges started charging fans to see football games. But the greed and unprincipled behavior by the ‘adults in the room’ — the people in charge of the business — seems to regularly hit all-time highs.
The recently retired seven-time national college football champion coach Nick Saban raised more than a few eyebrows in early March when he said at a Congressional roundtable that the new NIL rules are a detriment to college sports.
“All the things that I believed in, for all these years, 50 years of coach, no longer exist in college athletics,” Saban said. “It was always about developing players, in was always about helping people to be more successful in life.”
Saban recalled a comment his wife Terry made about how different the players are now, “’All they care about now is how much money you’re going to pay them.’”
Alabama paid Saban about $11 million a year to develop those players. He cared enough about how much they were going to pay him that he was the highest paid of a whole bunch of highly paid college coaches. Many of them are trying to figure out how to explain their incredible salaries while they try to figure out how to pay 18-year-old quarterbacks millions of dollars. And here in Nebraska, how they are going to come up with a half-a-billion dollars to renovate a 100-year-old stadium. We can delve more into that at another time.
I have been a proponent of paying the players for a long time. For decades. The idea that a coach makes ten million dollars a year and officially the college athlete makes nothing or comparatively nothing is morally reprehensible. A $30,000 scholarship is considerably less valuable than it was generations ago.
So, please spare me any comments about athletes transferring to take the money. Yes. They are transferring to take the money.
It won’t be long before the athletic departments will pay the college athletes directly. Matt Rhule made reference to that in a press conference March 18.
“We must have vision for the future, for twenty years from now,” he said. “Trev Alberts spent the last year telling everybody that revenue sharing is coming. We have to have a plan. Twenty million dollars is going to be going (directly) to the athletes at some point.”
And one would think sooner than later. The lawsuits are piling up. Supreme Court associate justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote three years ago in the Alston v NCAA case (which the NCAA lost on a 9–0 SCOTUS vote) that the NCAA member schools can’t continue to consider college athletes amateurs.
What remains to be seen when the players get their share, is how much is left over for $10 million coaches, $2 million athletic directors, $150 million dollar football facilities, and $500 million dollar stadium renovations.
The people who run the College Sports Industry could use some vision and some humility.
