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Every professional sports league wrestles with the problem of maintaining competitive balance in the face of some teams having more financial resources than others. The Kansas City Royals of the world will not stay in business if their sole purpose in life is to constantly lose to the Yankees. Every league uses some combination of new player drafts, restricted free agency, salary caps, and/or revenue sharing to give each franchise and its fans reasons to think they have a legitimate chance to win.
Until recently, college sports had the strictest salary cap of all. No player could receive anything more than a free college education. The governing body, the NCAA, also had spending controls and revenue sharing from television contracts. This system was great for competitive balance, but terrible for player income.
Now, court cases and new legislation have unleashed unlimited spending by college boosters. This is unprecedented. Sports fans in Chicago have never pooled their money to help the Bears hire a more expensive quarterback, nor have Los Angeles movie stars ever contributed cash to get free agents to play for the Dodgers. Fans of professional teams contribute by buying expensive tickets, expensive parking, expensive hot dogs, and expensive clothing with logos. Nothing more.
This new environment has been great for college players. They are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, and each off-season they are free to negotiate new deals with school boosters across the country. It is a wild, unregulated, free market.
None of this new spending is coming from ticket sales and television contracts. It is coming from boosters — rich alumni willing to spend millions to improve their alma mater’s football team.
This new era is only a couple years old. It is, of course, unsustainable.
Athletic departments now go to their alumni and ask that they “invest” in their football team. They don’t get better seats; seats cost extra. All they get is an invitation to a nice cocktail party and the joy of watching their team play winning football.
The problem, of course, is that every football game has both a winner and a loser. Some “investments” will not produce winning football. The college’s answer is, of course, to invest more. The more you invest, the more we win.
Very few boosters will continually pay big bucks to win 6 games a year. There is only one national champion. There are only 12 playoff slots. If all you do is buy a ticket, you cheer for whatever team you have. If you pay thousands or millions of extra dollars to attract the best players, you demand results. We are seeing stage one of this frustration this year, with a handful of highly paid coaches being fired mid-season. Merely winning most of your games will never be enough for a booster paying big bucks.
For the next few years, it will be great to be a player. The second reaction (after firing the coach) will be to pay even more for players. But the boosters of 50 teams can’t all demand their team make the 12-team playoff every year.
Eventually, the alumni from Rutgers, Northwestern, and dozens of others will realize they are engaged in an endless, no-limit, zero-sum game with a bunch of fanatic millionaire alumni from other schools that “want-it-more.” When that happens, they will reevaluate their investment options.
Eventually, college football will have 10-to-20 teams engaging in extravagant bidding wars over top talent as they pursue a national championship. That, along with 50 other schools seriously considering whether to quit scheduling games with the top schools. The boosters of the 50 losers will close their wallets, and the competitive gap between the top and the bottom will become embarrassing.
Competitive balance is not obtainable without regulating or excluding boosters. Unfortunately, the boosters of Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Florida State, Miami, Notre Dame, LSU, and a half dozen schools in Texas have zero interest in competitive balance. Neither does a single booster in Oregon. (Oregon only needs a single booster — the owner of Nike).
It is easy to see that the present is not sustainable. It is difficult to see what follows.
G-Pub
P.S. Meanwhile, over in men’s college basketball, everyone has a one-year contract. Each off-season, players who played well leave for more money at another school, while players who played poorly get kicked out to play for less money at another school. Some teams have 100% turnover from the year before. No continuity. No loyalty up. No loyalty down. Total mercenaries.
No one remembers why collegiate athletics began in the first place, and no one remembers why it became so popular.
Discussion (14)
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And if the professionalism doesn’t kill it, gambling will.
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I used to love college football. I watched the games, analyzed the rankings, and followed the players. Now I can't be bothered, even though my (formerly) favorite team and alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, is ranked #8 in the AP and #11 by Sagarin. I had to look it up because I just don't care. Even if OU makes the "playoffs," I won't watch the game. They have killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
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There's never been competitive balance in college football. College Football has been dominated by 5 or 6 schools the last 50 years. All the money has democratized college football. All the sudden, also- rans like Indiana, Mississippi and Texas Tech have a real chance of winning a championship. I think they eventually need to structure the NCAA more like professional leagues. Things like Collective bargaining with the players and salary caps may be necessary at some point.
It's my dream job to be a fired coach at one of these huge programs who is bought out for millions of dollars. I envy Brian Kelly. It pays to be a jerk and suck at your job. His buyout is mostly paid for by millionaire and billionaire donors. It seems like a waste of wealth to me. Maybe they love the power of being able to fire a coach they dislike. I'm not one to tell billionaires how to spend their money, but it seems like the money could be spent in more productive places.
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I suppose that, lost in all this, is the value the players received in the form of a free education. And the free training. Not that many of them actually made much of the education. How many players fail to graduate, or graduate without being able to read or score a big fat goose-egg on the NFL’s Wonderlic Test? It seems like colleges are getting rewarded for failing to do their primary job. An anecdote…
My kids were competitive swimmers. One teammate was just amazing. He got an Olympic tryout and was heavily recruited by big name schools…including Stanford. Stanford also has a reputation for stellar academics. His dad said that when he asked the swim team coaches at Stanford about the divide between “student” and “athlete” they told him “Your son has 5 years of NCAA eligibility and we intend to get every minute. If, in that time, he manages to get his degree, that’s great.”
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Billionaires have been buying professional sports teams like they buy trophy wives. Now, they are starting to "buy" college sports teams. An NBA team costs $10Billion, but put $10Million into a college team and you are treated like an owner. We have more billionaires than college teams.
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