How to Fix College Football

W hen Ohio State and Notre Dame met last Monday night for the first iteration of the twelve-team college football playoff, it was the moment for which fans, players, and coaches have been clamoring for years. And yet, for all the exciting football action, the new tournament was played against the backdrop of a considerable shift that has and will continue to reshape the sport moving forward.

This shift has occurred in three forms: conference realignment, player compensation, and the transfer portal. These three issues are the outgrowth of the self-centered and cynical culture that has taken hold of the sport. This culture shift, however, did not take place in a vacuum. Rather, it is the logical conclusion of the continual failures of institutional leaders to make prudent decisions and act with character.

The recent onset of geographically incongruous conference realignments has been the downstream result of Justice John Paul Stevens’s 1984 Supreme Court decision that gave universities the right to seek their own broadcasting deals apart from the NCAA. That ruling set the stage. But, one could ask, why did it take 40 years for the situation to get so out of hand? Well, the critical new development is the growing misunderstanding about the roles and responsibilities of college football’s institutions.

Institutional leaders — whether they be at the NCAA or the administrators for the conferences and universities — are now comfortable sacrificing their responsibilities to student-athletes and the fan bases for sheer monetary gain. Both the players and the fans have lost out: Fan bases in the form of the disappearance of reasonably geographically proximate away games and the storied rivalries that define what makes college football so unique and exciting, and student-athletes in the form of brutal travel schedules that force a deprioritization of academics and student health and wellness. There is obviously a place for monetary considerations in life. But this particular set of institutions have core responsibilities that they are sacrificing in service of mere economic profit, and by making these cynical choices, they feed the very culture they admonish.

It was always absurd to tell college football players that they did not own their own names. For the overwhelming majority of players, the brief stretch in which their “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) was worth something was the only time in which it was not theirs to sell. But the juxtaposition of this situation with the fact that many college coaches are their state’s most highly paid public employees, while their football programs clear enormous revenues, left it untenable to continue denying players the opportunity to make money during the short period in which there was a market for their NIL. But this has led to the absurd state of affairs in which so-called collectives of boosters pay players for simply playing, without the boosters receiving anything of substance in return. This overcorrection has been ugly, and yet it was an inevitability.

The NCAA turned college football into a multi-billion dollar entertainment business and somehow expected that the entertainers themselves wouldn’t ask for a cut. “Free enterprise for me and the ‘love of the game’ for thee.” The administrators and coaches professionalized their role while requiring amateurism from players and, by doing so, they delegitimized the authority with which they spoke of lofty and worthy ideals — ideals that matter but appear meaningless when paid lip service by men unable to make decisions consistent with them.

For that very reason, we should have no issue with the transfer portal. The clownish picture it renders of college football is an accurate representation of this moment. The organic shuffling of athletes from team to team reflects the unseriousness of the men who lead them. The transfer portal would be a far less consequential factor if coaches emulated the spirit of coaching for “the love of the game,” rather than for the love of a paycheck. Before the advent of the portal, it was not the rule that required transferring players to sit out a year that kept them from doing so; it was the strength of the culture of the teams they were on, the love and respect that they had for their coaches and teammates, and an academic ethos that the culture of the sport had not yet eviscerated. It doesn’t have to be any different today. What’s changed is that the leadership of unserious men has withered away these bonds.

Blaming players for the ugly state of the transfer portal — in which some players today transfer two or even three times over the course of their college careers — is to blame supply for meeting demand. If head coaches prized building a culture and doing right by the players that they recruited with the promises of mutual success to those who bought into their football program, there would be far fewer transfers. The coaching staffs would not be clamoring to cover up their own recruiting and development failures with outside talent, making their players far more loyal and signaling to others to stay put. Unfortunately, the lofty ideals that many coaches hold their players to only stretch as far as is expedient.

When Deion Sanders began his first meeting as head coach at the University of Colorado by letting his team know that their relationship was purely transactional and that he could cut any one of them at any time — he eventually made good on that promise — how could the players be anything but cynical? And when the Colorado athletic director’s only defense was that his school was not the first to set this standard, the accuracy of this tragically pathetic excuse highlighted just how broken the culture of coaching college football has become.

Sanders is indeed just one in a long line of coaches who have made the relationship between coach and player a business one — although he is perhaps a bit louder than the rest. Coaches constantly shop the open market for transfer players and attempt to force those that they deem a waste of a scholarship from the team. However, this practice misunderstands the responsibilities of coaching college football. A coach’s job is to develop the talent and character of the young men he has in his program, and only in unique circumstances should he make roster changes as would a professional team. When players know their coaches are out hunting for their replacements instead of pouring time into their development, and when coaches cease to accept the responsibility that they have to develop players and mold their characters, there is nowhere else for college football to go but to a place of cynical self-interest.

There are interesting proposals to fix conference realignment and broadcast deals, as well as compensation for student-athletes. Still, without leaders willing to sacrifice the narrow goals of financial gain and victory alone for the worthy principles of commitment and responsibility, I’m afraid we will not get to the heart of the problem.

College football’s institutions have always been the governor holding the sport back from excess, even before the seismic shifts over the last 20 years. The real difference is that there were once leaders who understood and took seriously their role within those institutions. Today, that’s much less often the case.

Those who hold the reins of college football have consistently shirked inconvenient responsibilities and have, in the process, undermined the legitimacy of the institutions that they stood on like soap boxes to promote their narrow self-interests. Ironically, they seem surprised that undeveloped young men want to do the same. If leadership would like to correct this ugly state of affairs, they can start by embodying the principles and virtues they wish to see reflected in the sport. Otherwise, they cannot ask 18-year-olds to do what they cannot.