Greedy, clueless administrators are ripping the charm right out of college athletics
It was all so routine on Friday. Kentucky football’s Media Day. There were the typical grips and grins, the team photo, the question-and-answer periods with coaches and players, the usual pledges of improvement and excitement for the upcoming season.
Outside the bubble at Kroger Field, Friday was anything but routine, however.
College sports experienced yet another seismic shift in the continual cause of conference realignment. Unable to secure a satisfactory media rights deal, the Pac-12 crack-up escalated. After Arizona jumped ship to the Big 12 on Thursday, Arizona State and Utah followed suit on Friday. Meanwhile, the Big Ten grew to 18 with the ever-expanding conference tossing life preservers to Pac-12 refugees Oregon and Washington.
Meanwhile, in the Eastern Time Zone, Florida State continued to make noise about abandoning the ACC, prompting North Carolina Athletics Director Bubba Cunningham to tell the Seminoles to quit “barking” and honor their conference commitment.
When Friday’s dust had cleared, Colorado Coach Deion Sanders summed up the day’s events the way only Coach Prime can: “Everybody’s chasing bag.”
That would be bags of cash. Big money. Television money. Ridiculous money. Funny money. If money is the source of all evil, then we are seeing that play out in real time in what was formerly known as intercollegiate athletics.
I’ve long resisted the “Old Man Shouts at Cloud” stance. I get it. Things change. And many changes are good. As Kentucky Coach Mark Stoops said Friday, the landscape is now just different. Not good. Not bad. Just different. And as the saying goes, if you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less. Sometimes, it’s time to let the old ways die.
But come on, let’s be serious here. Friday threw sanity over the edge. A conference (Big Ten) with three members (Rutgers, Maryland, Penn State) near the East Coast and four members (USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington) on the West Coast. Another conference (Big 12) stretching from UCF to West Virginia to Kansas to Arizona and dots on the map in between. So much for tradition. So much for history.
College football and basketball players can board chartered flights to make the four-hour trips cross country, but the “Olympic” sports will have no such luck. From tennis to soccer to softball to volleyball, those student-athletes are more likely to squeeze into commercial airline seats or experience excruciating bus rides for conference competition. Washington at Maryland on a school night anyone?
Remember, it’s all about the student-athlete.
Yeah, right.
Who’s to blame for ripping the charm right out of college sports? Administrators. The guys in suits. Clueless school presidents. Hypocritical athletic directors. Corporate-speak conference commissioners. Unrealistic boosters with deep pockets. All have sold their souls to ESPN, Fox, CBS and NBC in the name of greed, in an all-out chase for the “bag.”
So TV wants them to play a noon football game in early September? They’ll do it. So TV wants them to join a conference with schools a zillion miles away? They’ll do it. So TV wants them to stand on their heads in the middle of main street? They’d probably do that, too.
Maybe, at the end of the day, the television viewer wins. He or she will get USC vs. Ohio State and Oregon vs. Michigan in football, plus Arizona vs. Kansas in basketball, all in living room comfort in front of an 80-inch HD TV.
Plenty of fans will lose, however, especially the ones who love to actually attend the games, to follow their teams on the road. Now, as the Allman Brothers sang, the road goes on forever.
I’ve long wondered when the college sports bubble would burst, when the tenuous enterprise would succumb to escalating costs, ridiculous salaries, outlandish expectations and a mindset of everyone is in it for themselves. The model is not sustainable. The tipping point draws near.
It reminds me of a scene in the movie “Oppenheimer” when at one point the physicists wondered if detonating a nuclear bomb might produce a never-ending chain reaction that ultimately destroys the world.
Here’s the question: When it comes to college athletics, are we now experiencing what those physicists feared?
