COLLEGE FOOTBALL WAS COOL — WHY DID GREED HAVE TO MESS IT UP?
If it’s dizzying to see players paid seven-figure sums, it’s sad when the SEC and ESPN trash tradition and raid the Big 12 for Oklahoma and Texas, which creates one mega-league amid lopsided disparity
We can begin by not calling it college football. Nothing is collegiate or academic about the megalomaniacal arms race that has transformed a fun sport, which didn’t have much wrong with it, into a ruthless playground of 2021 manipulation and greed. Inside the sandbox are university presidents, a conference commissioner, distinguished guests from two oil-rich states, Nick Saban (of course) and a slippery TV executive.
They are not playing nice with the rest of the world, plotting schemes worth tens of billions of dollars.
“STAY OUT!’’ screeches a sign, adorned with an ESPN logo.
Inside a barbed-wire fence and a few local-flavor stadium hedges, they have created a Disney-controlled monopoly that tilts power heavily toward the Southeastern Conference — soon to be renamed “The God’s Country SuperDuper Monster Football Alliance, sponsored by Chick-fil-A’’ — while shrinking the remaining national footprint to Ohio State, Clemson, Notre Dame and any flotsam emerging west of the Rockies. What began as a refreshing and long-awaited Supreme Court decision, allowing athletes to derive income from names and images and likenesses, has abruptly morphed into a facial-stubble version of the National Football League. But at least the NFL has 32 franchises that share revenue while scattered across the land. The GCSDMFA party is restricted to 16 schools in 12 states, most notably Alabama, Louisiana State, Georgia, Florida and new members Texas and Oklahoma.
As Lynyrd Skynyrd once dissed Neil Young, “A Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.’’
In theory, the radicalized look eventually will involve four “superleagues’’ that — detached from a newly emasculated NCAA — govern themselves and make their own rules within the framework of their own 12-team playoff. In reality, this is orchestrated SEC privilege destined for lopsided chaos amid near-exclusive control of talent and championships. Having planted the perception seed that a strengthened SEC is The Place To Be, as if it hasn’t been for a long time anyway, what stops the six or seven superpowers from using the new NIL rules to pay lucrative professional salaries? And without legitimate compliance watchdogs beyond a strategic Paul Blart or two, who will blow the whistle on inevitable recruiting lawlessness and criminal conduct? The programs with the most money and prestige will dominate more than ever, and if you doubt it, consider the bombshell dropped by Saban last month while speaking to a group of Texas high school coaches.
His presumptive new quarterback this season, sophomore Bryce Young, has thrown all of 22 passes in his Alabama career. He hasn’t been named officially as the starter. Yet already, he is assured more than $1 million through his new representation at Creative Artists Agency, the Hollywood powerhouse known for handling established sports superstars and show-business giants. Young has filmed a commercial with NFL quarterbacks Daniel Jones and Trey Lance, and he has deals with memorabilia and trading-card companies. Just wait until the local Mercedes-Benz dealership, maybe the one owned by Saban, gives Young a Maybach GLS 600 — priced at $161,550 — for a TV commercial and some appearances. And it’s all legal.
This is how life will be now for the most visible players at the mightiest programs. Two Alabama defensive standouts, Christopher Allen and Henry To’o To’o, are promoting PSD underwear. “Anything that I say now, because there's no precedent for it, you don't really know how it's going to affect things," Saban said. “Everything that we've done in college athletics in the past has always been equal. Everybody's had equal scholarship, equal opportunity. Now that's probably not going to be the case. Some positions, some players will have more opportunities than others.’’
Some programs, too. Across the coaching landscape, at schools not part of the MegaSEC, the backlash is loud. “It's obvious to me that Nick wanted to plant that and make sure people knew that," said David Shaw, the coach at academia-rich Stanford. “It's a way to recruit people to come to you."
The inequity will produce a competitive imbalance — a handful of elite programs, a much larger pool of “have-nots’’ — that leaves the sport with a familiar postseason monotony. Tired of Alabama, LSU, Georgia, Oklahoma, Clemson and Ohio State? Assuming the dozen playoff berths will be filled annually by as many as six MegaSEC teams, based on whatever power metric is driven by conference commissioner/potent influencer Greg Sankey, it’s a good bet the same-old, same-old awaits every winter. The Atlantic Coast, Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences will be around, but only via Dabo Swinney, the Buckeyes and USC if Clay Helton ever is replaced.
It’s a Saban/Sankey world, down yonder in Sweet Home Alabama. For that disparity, blame ESPN, which has committed the sort of reckless business sin that suggests Stephen A. Smith is running the joint. It isn’t normally a TV network’s place to trigger the merciless realignment of a sport, but when it comes to long-term financial windfalls, Bristol can be a wretched place. Seeing an opportunity to bolster the SEC after signing a new $3 billion deal, the company actively recruited Oklahoma and Texas to flee the Big 12 in time for the 2024 season — not coincidentally, when ESPN assumes rights to broadcast all the conference’s football games.
Just ask Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, who is threatening legal action and said as much in a blistering, cease-and-desist letter to Burke Magnus, ESPN’s president of programming and content. Bowlsby thinks Magnus masterminded the Oklahoma/Texas escape while also inviting at least one other ESPN-contracted league, the American Athletic Conference, to snatch up remaining Big 12 programs.
‘‘This whole thing has been a complete articulation of deception," Bowlsby told the Associated Press. ‘‘I have absolute certainty that they (ESPN) have been involved in manipulating other conferences to go after our members,’’ adding that the raid “reaffirms that these plans have been in the works with ongoing discussions between the parties and television partner for some time. … ESPN is incentivizing other conferences to destabilize the Big 12.’’
While ESPN was issuing a typical denial — “The claims in the letter have no merit,’’ said the statement — how curious to hear the network’s former president suppport Bowlsby. John Skipper, among the power players who forged the network’s control of the College Football Playoff, was ousted in a 2017 cocaine scandal. He has freedom to speak, then, about how the place operates. Said Skipper, speaking on Dan Le Batard’s podcast in their new Meadowlark Media collaboration: “I doubt all of that is unrelated. I would not assume this is just happening, that one day the Texas and Oklahoma guys woke up. I would guess that it’s a logical sequence of events that ESPN now has all of the SEC, now they bring Texas and Oklahoma in. Think of all the good games you get.”
As you might know, I grow queasy — no, disgusted — when ESPN plays power games with sports properties. The bigfoot ploys reduce its news-gathering operation to a farce. How can the network be forthright with viewers about inevitable scandals involving a business partner — Are unsavory types paying the players? Is gambling involved? How much is too much? Are they going to any classes? — when ESPN is in bed with the SEC? It invites journalistic malpractice, nothing new in Bristol, and any miked-up broadcast talent is in place for promotional reasons only. ESPN also owns the ACC Network and, if it wants, probably could own the Big Ten and Pac-12 networks. This as legalized sports gambling turns all forms of football into betting frenzies, which expose young athletes to the potential of game-fixing and various scams. Not that ESPN cares when it hypes gambling via studio shows, scrolled betting lines, prop bets and the “Bad Beats’’ of overgrown frat-house president Scott Van Pelt.
When the tag team of Sankey and Magnus came calling, Oklahoma and Texas accepted the invitations in a nanosecond. Tired of 11 a.m. kickoffs in the Central time zone, they drooled at the chance for prime-time Saturday nights on ABC and hyped-up afternoons on ESPN. You know, the REAL big time. The Oklahoma president, Joseph Harroz Jr., said the Big 12 was “last in line’’ in the media rights game and said awkward time slots translated to “disadvantages in recruiting of top talent, disadvantages for our student-athletes and a detriment to the fan experience.’’
More to the point, athletic director Joe Castiglione said, “After thorough consideration and study, it became obvious that standing pat would be falling behind. It would mean putting our program in a precarious position, both competitively and financially. It would leave us to play catch-up with our competition."
Never mind that they killed college football as we knew it.
We can accept the quirks that come with sweeping change. Income disparities for athletes, I get. Transfer portals and dizzying movement, I get. With the elimination of slave labor, progress is upon us.
What we can’t swallow is the corporate dismantling of tradition. This always has been the essence and beauty of college football, but rather than let America share in the continuing joy, ESPN opted for the Dixie hustle and money grab. Let’s hope the sport doesn’t go South with it.
Jay Mariotti, called “the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes sports columns for Substack and a Wednesday media column for Barrett Sports Media while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts in production today. He’s an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and radio talk host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects. Compensation for this column is donated to the Chicago Sun-Times Charity Trust.