It’s insensitive to call college football players “slaves,” but the analogy comes up for a reason. More accurately, they are unpaid interns who happen to work in an industry where their (again, unpaid) labor creates all the revenue. Supervisors and managers rake in millions of dollars, the owners (universities) rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, and yet the performers—who happen to be performing acts that will definitely injure them, possibly for life—rake in nothing but room and board. Their bodies are being used up, their schedules and expectations are akin to professional standards, and yet they’re subject to wildly complex rules against making even a minimum wage for their efforts. This is profoundly wrong.

I could make this a diatribe about why universities and colleges are the new evil corporations in America, exploiting citizens with unchecked power under the guise of providing a public good. But let’s take universities and colleges at their word, that they exist solely to enhance Americans’ intellects and career prospects. If that’s the case, the ones with Division I-A (FBS) football teams should have no qualms about spinning those teams off as for-profit organizations.

The teams could be bought by boosters and licensed the university’s branding as a sponsor organization. Let’s start with a 99-year lease, which would include all football-related facilities, though the university would still own the land and retain the right to upgrade and use those facilities as needed for other purposes, similar to the way deals are structured with NFL teams playing in municipally-owned stadiums.

Players would be paid. High school graduates would be treated as free agents. Recruiting would be done with dollars. If sponsoring universities choose to provide lifetime scholarships to members of “their” teams in order to sweeten the deal, so be it. That might provide a particularly competitive advantage for the teams sponsored by Notre Dame and Stanford. Those scholarships could be used by players whenever. Point is, they’re playing for money, and there is no requirement that they attend the school they play “for” either now or in the future (just as NFL players are not required to live in the cities they play “for”).

Objections

Won’t this create a competitive imbalance, with the richest schools getting the best players?

Look at FBS football today. There is no competitive balance. The richest programs get the best players. It would be better for this system to be codified in dollars than in lies and under-the-table dealings.

What about the schedule? Conferences? Bowl games?

The owners could decide this. Personally, I think college football is perfectly suited to a relegation-style tiered system such as the one used by English football. We could all rattle off the schools that belong in the “Premiere League” of college football, and we’ve already seen schools cross from FCS to FBS and back, from Div II to Div I and back.

Hold bowl games if they make sense financially to the teams. Hold a playoff. Who cares? What matters is that the players, who actually create the entertainment value and absorb the lion’s share of the risk, are cut in on the wealth they create.

If the players aren’t student-athletes, will there be a rule they can only play four years? What about redshirting? Eligibility?

Yeah, all of that is bullcrap anyway. High school graduates are not big or developed enough to go straight to the NFL, so there will always be room for a minor league. However, football’s history and tradition are so wrapped up in collegiate athletics that it would be impossible to set up such a league to compete with college football.

If a player signs with Ohio State and keeps playing there for eight years, so what? It’s up to Ohio State to decide when a player should be shed, and up to the NFL to decide when a player should be drafted. With 120+ teams at the FBS level and another 120+ at the FCS level, there should always be plenty of roster room for high schoolers.

But won’t this take the fun out of going to a college and rooting for your team?

Why? The branding is all there. Is it less fun to root for people in New England to root for the Patriots because almost none of the players grew up in Boston? I believe the ties to tradition should be maintained, but the financial structure needs to be modernized in order to stop exploiting the players, that’s all.

What about other sports? What about smaller schools?

I actually think the same should apply to college basketball. In fact, I think that whenever a collegiate sport starts to generate significant revenue, it should be spun off by the university. After all, these are either public institutions or nonprofits. What use have they for a for-profit business that detracts from their mission? (Don’t answer that. The answer is obvious, but it exposes what universities and colleges really are, and I told you I want to save that diatribe for another time.)

Smaller schools with non-revenue football teams, say Divisions II and III, could continue to provide amateur experiences for students. Maybe even the FCS could keep up the student-athlete game, given that so few of those schools have television exposure. If the program doesn’t make money, it stands to reason that the athletes can’t, either. But let’s not keep pretending that FBS football isn’t drowning in revenue. It’s filthy with it.

So the schools won’t make any revenue on their football teams?

The schools would make, in addition to the initial sale price for the team, the annual lease payments for the brand and the stadium. Teams get the gate, the television and radio contracts, the sublicensing for apparel and paraphernalia, and whatever other sources of revenue they can dream up.

What would stop a team from disassociating itself from its university?

Same thing that stops an NFL team from moving to another city and changing its brand: nothing. It would be a dick move, and there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and there would be cognitive dissonance with a “college” football team playing without an association to a college, but life would move on. Life always moves on.

What about the NCAA?

Yeah, that’s why this would never happen. Actually, there are lots of reasons this would never happen, but mainly I can’t see the NCAA committing suicide like this.

It will take some court cases and a massive shift in popular opinion to get college athletes paid. In the end, it will probably happen the way it did for Olympians, where the pay will come in the form of open endorsements and image licensing, benefitting mainly the best players and leaving the rest of the poor saps banging their helmets together for your pleasure in absolute poverty.

It’s fun to dream of a world in which an anachronistic business is transformed overnight into a modern one. Until then, we’re looking at the last vestige of indentured servitude in America. I honestly can’t believe it’s legal.