Anger, denial, bargain, and depression are over. The nation’s major universities are finally landing at acceptance.
The NCAA is dead. The long-overdue reckoning has killed it. The powers-that-be know it’s time to move on. They’re trying to, with the only solution that can introduce control into the chaos that has become college football.
Andrew Marchand and Stewart Mandel of TheAthletic.com report that a group of college presidents, working with NFL executive Brian Rolapp and others, are trying to form what is being called a “Super League.”
The current system would be blown up. The conferences would fold. The playoff system would go extinct. In their place would be a league with 70 fixed teams and 10 others that will be subject to relegation and promotion from the remaining 60 schools.
The “Super League” would have eight 10-team divisions, with the division winners and eight wild-cards qualifying for a 16-team playoff.
College football would essentially become pro football. Which it already is, without the levers and protections that create stability for the teams.
The idea would be to embrace a unionized workforce, which would legitimize rules that, in the absence of a multi-employer bargaining unit, are antitrust violations that have been hiding in plain sight, for years. Now that one case after another is proving these violations of federal law — and racking up potential liability that currently exceeds $5 billion and counting — those who get it know that college football needs to break glass in event of emergency, because emergency has arrived.
Two school presidents gave on-the-record quotes to TheAthletic.com regarding the situation.
“The current model for governing and managing college athletics is dead,” Syracuse chancellor Kent Syverud said.
“We are in an existential crisis,” added West Virginia president Gordon Gee told TheAthletic.com.
They’re right. It’s over. The system is and has been inherently corrupt, and the corruption is being exposed through viable litigation that will continue to blow massive holes into the budgets of conferences and their members.
“I really think conferences in the NCAA are at a very significant likelihood of going bankrupt in the near future because of the lawsuits, both the ones that are going to trial soon and those that will follow,” Syverud told TheAthletic.com.
That’s the point we made in a recent item regarding the efforts to unionize the Dartmouth men’s basketball team. Schools that have fought the concept of unionization tooth and nail need to realize that a nationwide union of paid players is the only way out of the current maze.
” For decades, the schools have refused to dip a toe into the pay-the-players pool,” we wrote. “Now that successful litigation against the rampant antitrust violations have dropped a shark into the water, the only way to get a bigger boat is to embrace the concept of a national, unionized workforce.”
It won’t be easy. Many within the structure will resist. They’ll resist because they’ll still refuse to realize it’s the only way out of the mess they’ve created and maintained. Those who just don’t get it need to get out of the way, before it’s too late for the entire sport.
Actually, it’s already too late.
