In Reply to: This is the best thing Ive read on CFB future posted by SehornBlew on February 05, 2024 at 11:50:44
a professional construct? If you turn college football into a free-flowing, full on capitalist enterprise, it will end up being just another professional league, no better than perhaps a glorified development league. Following up on the premiere league analogy, if the NFL is the premiere league, this (non-)college league will be the League 1 or League 2, below the Championship League (= UFL?).
Look at it from the point of view of:
(a) casual fans of the game (like me, for instance) who care about the teams, the tribe, and the emotional charge that college football brings and are not at all fans of the NFL or at most follow the NFL pretty casually with no emotional investement in the game. You infuse more unrestricted money into the game and turn it into a professional league with no guard rails against capitalist excesses (something that is already under way), and I can see this group beginning to go cold (cut off the connection to the universities and the process will only accelerate).
(b) pure fans of the game who appreciate the sport, love the NFL as much as they love college sports and high school etc ... When college football moves into the same professional territory, it will only look like a pale facsimile. They will eventually lose interest because the delineation between college and professional that protects college football from that comparison will start eroding.
(c) folks who could never get into college football anyway because the game is played so much better at the professional level ... they're a lost cause anyway.
So I'm thinking that if college sports takes the full-fledged capitalist road, it will probably start out making good chunks of money out of initial excitement but the bubble will eventually burst and it will go downhill fast.
I'm all for reorganizing college football alignments, and I am ok with paying the players, but I'm gonna swing the other way suggest that we should put more structure around how much money comes into college football, what salaries are being paid (salary caps), and how the player payments are being handled (put them into a fund they can access after graduation). Otherwise, I think this whole thing collapses before people can ask what went wrong.