Yes.
All of CFB is dying.
After months of maneuvering and spending—farewell, Pac 12; hello $75 million for Jimbo Fisher—it’s impossible to pretend it’s anything but another ruthless business.
www.wsj.com
PAYWALL SO:
The Year College Football Ate Itself
After months of maneuvering and spending—farewell, Pac 12; hello $75 million for Jimbo Fisher—it’s impossible to pretend it’s anything but another ruthless business
I will indulge reasonable arguments to the contrary, but only one event deserves to be called the biggest sports story of 2023.
This is the year college football ate itself...
What happened in college football in 2023 will reverberate for decades, and probably forever.
Denial has died, and the myth has left town on a Gulfstream 800. College football’s stubborn delusion that it was something apart and elevated from professional sports—an activity less about dollars than about tradition, loyalty and (laugh track) amateurism—hopped on a jet from the West Coast and flew east for better deals with deeper pockets...
The money’s been around for eons, as have eager sponsors, surrogates, pushy boosters and middle men feeding under-the-table money to athletes capable of tilting the field. It has long been true that the top-paid state employee in most U.S. states isn’t a governor or university president, but the head football coach.
In recent years, however, the money got too extreme to laugh off or ignore—the lavish salaries of head coaches, assistant coaches, assistants to the assistants, strength czars, nutritionists and specialists, to say nothing of the training facilities that would make Knute Rockne feel like he’d been beamed to the Year 3000...
Television deals have swelled from millions to billions, and we know all about it, because schools brag about it, and the business of college sports has evolved into a sport of its own. At the same time, the tumult of the transfer portal and the nascent economy of name, image and likeness (NIL) have made it clear there’s a robust paying market for college athletes.
It’s right in our faces. No one even tries to shame or deny it anymore. The NCAA, facing growing antitrust scrutiny, is finally rushing in with a proposal for paying players and it all feels a little insincere and very behind.
If you needed an extra exclamation point on this year’s absurdity, Texas A&M decided to fire its head football coach, Jimbo Fisher, giving him a $75 million parting gift for his trouble.
It was a signal of how cuckoo things have gotten. Some dude is now going to be paid $75 million to not coach college football...
We’re approaching a seismic new chapter, and yet the field feels fragile. The NCAA, slow to everything, is laying the groundwork for a “super league” approach, with the biggest, best-funded schools breaking away from the lesser-funded riff raff to create their own system. Television networks—the hands behind the curtains here—will surely want a say in who makes the cut. Feelings are sure to get hurt. In any reorganization, low-rated schools are going to get dropped.
I’m probably a hopeless naif, but maybe there’s opportunity here—for the craziest schools to run off and for the rest of the colleges and universities to tap the brakes and return to a version of athletics that’s less lucrative, but saner.
Sanity is worth considering. After a year in which college football ate itself, it will feel like a polite burp. "
