In those pro sports you can choose to sign a player to a one year deal where they are a free agent next year or you can sign them to a long term deal. People should have been signing players to multi-year NIL deals with the incentive increasing each year and therefor its beneficial for both parties if they stay. If you leave early and break the NIL contract then you are subject to a penalty.

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This model is doomed to result in losing a lot of fans if it goes unchecked.

Perhaps in the past, players should have been able to transfer with more freedom perhaps should have been able to get some fair and reasonable share of proceeds. But what made college sports special was seeing teams of young guys play for passion and for the love of the game and for the honor of their university.

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College sports, particularly football and basketball, were never supposed to be this popular. Once money started changing hands over the rights to broadcast games this was always going to be the inevitable outcome, even if people have tried to stall it for as long as possible. The model was always doomed.

But rather than incremental baby steps or putting together any sort of long term cohesive vision, schools (and therefore, the NCAA) wanted to delay inevitable changes as long as possible and now the dam has finally broken and we're just getting massive change after massive change.

Is what it is, it'll settle down eventually into some sort of "normal" environment and people can decide if they like it or not, but college sports became pro sports a long time ago and a reckoning of the players not getting their share was always coming.

I agree with most of what bobinator said above, except that college football and college basketball were "never meant to be this popular." That too, was inevitable. Even before TV, various regions of the country and various schools built massive stadiums and mostly sold their venue's out every home Saturday! Radio discovered that covering some well-known schools or maybe even conference game hook-ups could draw very good ratings and sell plenty of advertising.

Schools that you would have thought had no business building big stadiums based on their actual enrollment figures - regionally that would have included Rice, TCU, and even A&M (even the original Kyle layout held more than twice or three times the actual enrollment of the school!) - were able to do so because of how popular football is in Texas. SMU is a unique case in that Dallas built the Cotton Bowl for the most part, but that was with the understanding that SMU would play home games there and have players like Doak Walker playing for them!

TV, radio, and newspapers - all also morphing and growing all the time - needed (and need!) ongoing reliable content that draws the ratings that bring in the advertising income. Depending on reliable entertainment writers for comedies, dramas, and even variety entertainments is hard to come by. A sport like college football and basketball could fill several hours of content a week with ever improving ratings; so, it was inevitable that as broadcasting outlets increased from the original three networks and schools chaffed at not having control over their own TV rights and the NCAA's (as always) uneven distribution of exposure to some teams over others, that the floodgates would open and the income generating potential for both broadcaster and schools would increase tremendously!

Sadly, the NCAA was always a creature of reaction - created as a reaction to stave off potential federal government rules and interventions, maintained as a figurehead for a kind of fairness (all the while some schools always seemed to have the NCAA under their thumbs), and almost always a day late and a dollar short when it came to anticipating and actually pushing for controls for the actual good of the game.

I meant more that the apparatus of college sports was never meant to actually be popular. It's kind of bizarre in the United States that our national amateur sports programs are tied into our higher education system. It's one of the things that makes this current situation so challenging.

College sports have been a business for a long time, it's just now the players are also part of it, and when it comes to the academic mission of most of these universities, does it really contribute to the mission to be running a professional sports program?

I think schools are having to wrangle with that question in some uncomfortable ways for their fans, but again, is what it is.

I think the NCAA came into existence because Teddy Roosevelt threatened to shut down college football for populist reasons.

What they did since then is let small schools dictate to large schools the rules. They are about to find out how that will likely bankrupt a bunch of small schools…

Quick…why was the UIL established???

That's a more complicated question than it really seems on the surface. Communities certainly get behind teams. We're also talking a lot of different sports at a lot of different levels. I don't really know the answer and I'm not saying it's necessarily good or bad, it's just unique compared to major sports in other countries and now that the money is going to really start flowing to players, schools are going to have to make some hard choices.

Again, if anyone with any sort of vision was put in power long enough ago things might be different. The process of possibly spinning off FBS college football into its own association, for example, probably would have been a great idea like 25-30 years ago and would have saved a conference like the Pac 12 and kept dumb stuff like SMU being a non-revenue member of the ACC from happening.

Method Man said:

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Just hope we win a championship soon so I can stop caring.

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Wise…just wise

West Point Aggie said:

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Method Man said:

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Just hope we win a championship soon so I can stop caring.

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Wise…just wise

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Wouldn't you just want a 2nd one at that point?
Then a 3rd, 4th, etc. etc. etc.?

AggieCrew44 said:

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If sports team weren't connected to schools, the amount of support would fall off a cliff and they would fold in an instant

You don't have diehard minor league baseball fans, even if you have a team locally in the community. There is a reason for that

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This is why I said it's more complicated than that though, because in countries like the UK you do have that for soccer and I'm sure you have it for other sports in other countries I don't follow as much because of the promotion/relegation system.

There's no diehard minor league baseball fans because there's no hope that the Corpus Christi Hooks or Round Rock Express or whatever could someday move up into the upper tiers of baseball, and their best players are under contract to the major league team. They're literally farm clubs for the major league teams.

But if you broke the farm club tie-ins and had a promotion/relegation system, you could not only get more interest in what are currently minor league teams, you'd also stop major league teams from tanking. The A's would probably be in double A by now if there was a promotion/relegation system.

The major league clubs aren't as protected from the results of poor performance as the NFL and NBA is. But none of them would vote to adopt relegation and give up their goose that lays eggs of gold…

AggieCrew44 said:

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BuzzFan24 said:

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Would anyone really care at all if these lower level sports leagues (NCAA compared to pros) weren't connected to a larger community such as a school/college? Doubtful. Being connected to an alumni and campus aurora is (or was) what makes it special.

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If sports team weren't connected to schools, the amount of support would fall off a cliff and they would fold in an instant

You don't have diehard minor league baseball fans, even if you have a team locally in the community. There is a reason for that

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You do have die hard fans of second and third division soccer leagues though all over the world. With deep roots in the community and multi generational support.

I think the reason that minor league baseball doesn't have die hard fans is that everyone knows that their only purpose is to develop players. Nobody is throwing parades for winning trophies.

Edit: would be more clear to say fans of soccer clubs in second or third division leagues.

I don't think you even need to have pro/ rel. You just need to have teams and fans that care about winning rather than just player development.

bobinator said:

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Quote:

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This model is doomed to result in losing a lot of fans if it goes unchecked.

Perhaps in the past, players should have been able to transfer with more freedom perhaps should have been able to get some fair and reasonable share of proceeds. But what made college sports special was seeing teams of young guys play for passion and for the love of the game and for the honor of their university.

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College sports, particularly football and basketball, were never supposed to be this popular. Once money started changing hands over the rights to broadcast games this was always going to be the inevitable outcome, even if people have tried to stall it for as long as possible. The model was always doomed.

But rather than incremental baby steps or putting together any sort of long term cohesive vision, schools (and therefore, the NCAA) wanted to delay inevitable changes as long as possible and now the dam has finally broken and we're just getting massive change after massive change.

Is what it is, it'll settle down eventually into some sort of "normal" environment and people can decide if they like it or not, but college sports became pro sports a long time ago and a reckoning of the players not getting their share was always coming.

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Football and basketball at least. Some other sports had spikes in carefully hidden "professional outbreaks."

Easy…

Effed