AT $2.4 BILLION PER YEAR, DO COLLEGE ATHLETES KNOW HOW THEY’RE CRUSHED?
The football playoff expansion will bring $1.3 billion annually, along with $1.1 billion for the NCAA basketball tournament, which strings along every kid including those making relative NIL peanuts
A college basketball player looks at a document that isn’t a tournament bracket. He sees how CBS Sports and TNT Sports are paying $1.1 billion a year for the NCAA tournament through 2032. Or if he’s a college football player, he saw a story Friday that ESPN — as the lead story on ESPN’s website — will splurge $1.3 billion a year for an expected 14-team playoff through the same year.
The power players from the super conferences, the Southeastern and the Big Ten, will have “ultimate control” over the football playoff as two financial brutes. We will hate it, too, because those leagues annually will make at least $21 more million per school beyond others from the playoff. They will determine top seeds for their own conference champions. They will sway the room when ESPN is booking postseason games that tilt toward the SEC, which enters a deal with ESPN for 10 years. Notre Dame will receive a break of sorts, though I’m not sure why, while the Atlantic Coast and the Big 12 and the Group of 5 will suffer severe competitive warts.
Coaches don’t just come. They go. In basketball, Juwan Howard was dismissed at Michigan, crashing beneath his temper despite Elite Eight and Sweet 16 appearances this decade. Rick Pitino survives at St. John’s but the program he crammed into a latrine, Louisville, needs a coach. Football? Chip Kelly leaves the head position at UCLA for an offensive coordinator’s job at Ohio State.
College sports is beyond haywire with too much nonspiritual money to claim. “It's like the Godfather's offer you can't refuse," a Group of 5 athletic director told ESPN, explaining why those lowballers accept merely one team for a setting in the gala.
No wonder athletes are sincere about forming labor unions. It seems averse to life allowing collegians to bargain with universities for their services, but when we do the simple math — $2.4 billion arriving to the conferences annually for football and basketball — it’s easy to understand why kids want considerably more to play amid plutocratic circumstances. A rebellion is in order, with a renegade system spreading money that doesn’t involve names, images and likenesses. In today’s world, too many players aren’t interested in attending classes, allowing radicals to create leagues for ages 18 to 23. Until then, more Americans will oppose unionized collegians, with an Associated Press poll indicating 55 percent favor the current structure paying them as appropriate under NIL rules.
“It would absolutely kill college sports,” said Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, the former Auburn football coach. “You know, the last time I looked, they’re not employees. These students are student-athletes. And if you want the federal government involved and ruin something, you try to make the student-athletes employees.”
He should try telling a young person who risks bodily functions — for a fraction of money or very little or none at all — why it’s OK to play three or four years at a major program. Again, $2.4 billion is floating. They receive remotely less than one percent of it. NIL is a bogus wage for a few stars. It is not real, which is why Nick Saban — who works for ESPN, natch — countered Tuberville by saying college sports might die without more revenue-sharing with athletes. Saban said his decision to retire at Alabama involved players being obsessed with money. Does that mean the great coaches — and many not so great — will be staying away?
“What we have now is not college football. All the things I believed in for my 50 years of coaching no longer exist in college athletics,” Saban said at another Congressional hearing on the topic. “If we had a sort of revenue-sharing proposition that did not make student-athletes employees, I think that may be the long-term solution. You could create a better quality of life for student-athletes, you could still emphasize development, you can still create brand and athletic development with a system like that and it would be equal in all institutions. You couldn't raise more money at one school to create a competitive advantage at another.”
Anyone listening? “We have collectives that in some places are raising huge amounts of money and going to compete against places that do not have the same resources to raise those kinds of funds to pay players," Saban said. “It’s whoever wants to pay, the most money raised, the most money to buy the most players is going to have the best opportunity to win. You’re going to create a caste system where the rich will get richer and the poor get poorer, and eventually the fans will look at it like, ‘I really don’t want to watch the game.’ ’’
He’s right. The schools with the most NIL money will be frontloaders in the SEC and Big Ten, the programs that fare best from year to year. Saban, who should not work for ESPN and might take up a complete commissionership, wants schools to realistically share revenue with players. That would work. But how many university presidents and trustees would agree? They want players to be innocent bystanders, even when coaches have ears wide open. “There’s a lot of them that want to ask about NIL,” Georgia’s Kirby Smart said.
At $2.4 billion a year, how would you like to be Caleb Williams or Jayden Daniels and make a few bucks? How would you like to enter the NCAA tournament next week and know the coaches take sponge baths — Bill Self at $8.6 million a year in a $53 million deal, with John Calipari at $8.5 million a year — while R.J. Davis, Zach Edey, Dalton Knecht, Reed Sheppard, Rob Dillingham and Cody Williams wait for a feeling on NBA draft night.
It’s time for a revolution. But the people armed with mutinous brains are creating playoffs and making money and don’t care about young athletes. The networks will try to conger emotions about loving the mid-majors and staying true to your school, but deep down, they know $2.72 billion will be wagered by gamblers this month and in early April.
The money continues to knock a kid across his face. He’s barely out of puberty when the slapdown happens. Does it even matter anymore who wins a national championship? The schools with the windfalls are the winners.
“Now it’s time for the colleges to stop wasting their time and money fighting athletes in court and lobbying Congress to roll back athletes’ rights, and instead start negotiating with athletes on revenue-sharing, health and safety protections, and more,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut.
“These college athletes aren’t making millions of dollars like the pros are. They have nothing really to fall back on,” said union man Eric Williams, who participated in the AP poll. “If they get injured, it’s over.”
Nothing is collegiate about any of this. It’s a professional league that sends the best to a bigger professional league. The only option is to look and hope elsewhere, and somewhere in this insurgent world, an original will lead athletes to realize they deserve more of that $2.4 billion a year. Saban is right.
He’s alone, sitting beside Ted Cruz somewhere in Washington at an event called “Safeguarding Student-Athletes from NLRB misclassification.” He’s lost. We’re all lost. And the promos for Texas at Michigan, on Sept. 7, are only weeks away, which should stop another network from playing “One Shining Moment” on a Monday night soon. There is only one shining moment.
A payday at a monster athletic department.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.