As the college football season begins, a word to the wise: If you spot your university’s quarterback cruising around campus in a Lamborghini, don’t go all Woodward and Bernstein, thinking you have spotted a Pulitzer-worthy scandal (“Lamborghini-gate”). The quarterback might be looking for the molecular biology lab (or not). His vehicle is his legal, rule-abiding reward for pleasing well-heeled alumni by bringing his talented passing arm to their alma mater before he graduates to the NFL. There, he might even take a pay cut.
Welcome to the world of NIL, where athletes are paid for the use of their name, image and likeness. What has been said of Washington (the shocking thing is not what’s done there that is illegal, but what is legal) can now be said of the college athletics industry. It is lightly superintended — very lightly — by the NCAA, which endearingly persists in referring to “student athletes.”
The new football season, which will end shortly before spring practices begin, will be the first in forever to be free of sanctimony about “amateurism.” Few recruiting rules will be broken because few such rules exist.
Consider recent goings-on at The Ohio State University. (It trademarked the “The” in 2022. The school not known as “The Oxford University” has neglected the definite article as a source of prestige.) When, last January, Michigan won the national championship, OSU — sorry, TOSU — went to the mattresses. (Mafia-speak from “The Godfather” seems somehow apt.) TOSU boosters — traumatized by three consecutive losses to Michigan and believing that the axis of evil is Iran, North Korea and Michigan — revved up their three “collectives.”
These organizations — most football factories have them — raise money to fund NIL deals to entice “blue chip” prospects: either high schoolers or stars at other colleges who can “enter the transfer portal.” (This is NCAA gibberish to avoid saying “become free agents.”) A TOSU collective called THE Foundation has “platinum” donors who fork over at least $50,000 to help the athletic department or the classics department. (Just kidding about that last part.)
The Wall Street Journal’s Laine Higgins and Jared Diamond reported on Jan. 24 that, in Columbus, the first month of 2024 was “a period of furious seething and scheming.” An estimated 60 percent of one collective’s 2,500 members had joined since Michigan was crowned champion on Jan. 8. Another collective’s “coffers stretch into the high seven figures.”
Payouts to adolescent athletes that are now negotiated forthrightly — free markets are agreeably transparent — were formerly done under the table. Today’s hot pursuit of beefy boys is unlovely, but not as ugly as the NCAA was when, years ago, Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit called it a cartel that created monopsony — a market with only one buyer. For a jaw-dropping, stomach-turning tour of the corruption that flourished in college basketball’s pre-NIL monopsony, read investigative journalist Guy Lawson’s “Hot Dog Money: Inside the Biggest Scandal in the History of College Sports.”
Football and basketball players do not have a monopoly on NIL money. A flame-throwing sophomore has been lured from Stanford to Lubbock, Tex., by an affluent Texas Tech alumni couple with an intense devotion to women’s softball. Her one-year NIL contract is for $1,050,024. This would be chump change to the highest-paid college quarterback, but life is unfair.
College football’s postseason, until now a four-team playoff, has been tripled to 12: Wretched excess, thy name is Division I football. The format is more puzzling than string theory, but the evening championship game on Jan. 20 will distract the nation from festivities surrounding the inauguration of a president displeasing to approximately half of Americans.
Sportswriter Stewart Mandel has written a guide to this football season that follows conference realignments caused by the scramble for television money: The Big Ten Conference has 18 teams and no divisions; some team could finish 18th. The Pac-12 has become the Pac-2, disintegrated like Yugoslavia. Its remnants are Oregon State and Washington State. The University of Oregon and University of Washington have migrated to the Big Ten, so they get to play conference games in Maryland and New Jersey (against Rutgers). Looking on the bright side, the lads can read lots of molecular biology on transcontinental flights. The Atlantic Coast Conference now extends to the Pacific Coast (Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley), with an outpost in the Central time zone (Southern Methodist University in Dallas).
Remember the saccharine gushing about the sacredness of regional rivalries? Never mind.
