Radically Transforming College Athletics

COLLEGE FOOTBALL SEASON has begun, under the new order, the new paradigm. For perhaps the first time in the history of the ancient sport, which played the first football game ever in 1869, when Princeton and Rutgers played to a six to four score, nobody really has any verifiable idea exactly how good or bad their favorie team is, or will become this season. Previously, college football teams began football season with a majority of its players returning from the previous year; the teams were all, to a certian extent, able to be rated in advance, because the returning players and their strengths and weaknesses were all known. Now, however, with all college athletes free to transfer from one school to another between seasons without any penalties being applied, players all across the collegiate athletic landscape are indeed taking advantage of their newly acquired freedom, and transferring, early, and often. This is true of every organized, sanctioned college sport, men's and women's. The "transfer protal", which opens and closes several times every year, is here to stay. College athletes have endured and survived the era of indentured servitude, and no longer are de facto indentured servants, bound to their univeristy for a four year unpaid apprenticeship. The age of Name,Image, and Likeness allows the players to be paid, and the plan for payment has been corrupted beyond recognition by the university system, which competes for the best athletes and players with offers of huge sums of cash, giving some few players the opportunity to make more than a million dollars a year while in college. Thus players move from one university to another, taking the best offer, trying to improve their pay, and each year, college team rosters are filled with newly acquired talent, and the fans are left to learn an entirely new team, every year, almost starting from scratch. Collegiate athletics has been radically transformed with an entirely unsustainable new system, a system which will of necessity soon be discarded, and replaced by something financially and socially saner. It now takes millions of dollars to buy and field a good college football team. The competition for talent is, as always, fierce. The already staggering sums of money being offered teenaged athletes will only continue to increase, making the financials of college athletics as crazy and out of control as professional sports. College athletes,in the blink of an eye, have been lifted from starving artist poverty to extravagent wealth and essentially professional status. For decades they were abused, and too poor, relying on parents for money back home, pinching pennies on campus. Now many of them are too rich, driving cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, adorned in lavish wardrobes, as college students. Some of them. How well will the million dollar starting quarterback get along with the still playing for free offensive lineman, whose service to the superstar millionaire quarterback is indespensable? Not always well, initial evidence seems to suggest. Most offensive limemen at major universities with major football prgrams won't be playing for free, but the wage gap between players on the same teams is bound to become substantial, until something is done to regulate the N.I.L. system. The question is, how crazy will the situation become before something is done to repair it?