Conference rivals buying starters to keep them off other teamsā rosters.
Can guess which side of the equation we are on there.
Iām with Wolken on this. Itās no wonder UAB fans want a housecleaning that begins with football. The Victimhood Era continues on.
This is only happening because there is no union in college.
If there was doubtful the stars would be making this much.
It has to spread out more in the NFL. Not just salaries but benefits and pensions and such.
They should be contracted for a set time with penalties if they break their contract. Other teams should have to pay to take a teams player/s from a school.
I donāt know if the players should be full time employees or part time. Instinct tells me part time like others working in the system. Either way they shouldnāt get a pension. They can contribute to their own retirement.
This whole situation is an abomination. Dabo Swinney may be right not taking transfers.
He has finally gotten over that.
The elephant in the room is the question of why college football has anything to do with colleges. Once upon a time, it made sense, since it started at a club level sport. Now is a professional team, with paid employees, and the core mission no longer has anything to do with education. Should colleges just spin off their team to investors, including a lease to the stadium owned by the university, and then the teams could form a minor league? There could be A, AA, and AAA leagues.
But if they do that it will fail. No minor league or professional football league has ever succeded beyond the NFL. USFL, XFL, Arena Leagueā¦etcā¦all failed.
The ācollegeā portion is what makes this work. Tradition, legacy, players that develop and become associated with the school they gave 4 years to.
Once all of that is goneā¦no one will care about another minor professional league.
One reason minor league football has always failed is precisely because of college football. College football has usurped that role. BTW, the one thing that keeps college football alive, is because the fans do not just consist of alumni. The fans at the game are primarily made up from people in the community. The donors to the program include many non-alums. In fact, how many alums of Charlotte donate money to UNC or another P4 school? One reason G5 football exists, and why G5 teams aspire to join P4, is the hope of recapturing those donations.
Itās easy to say āthis canāt continueā, but quite another to stop and ponder why the current path has to be the only option.
Tradition and association to a college may stick with college football for a while but I think it will eventually wear thin and cease to work.
Itās been reported that the CFP ratings for the semi-finals this year is the lowest since 2021ā¦my guess is that trend continues the more we move towards the semi-pro model.
Say what you willā¦thereās a reason why college athletics resonates with so many and the USFL, XFL, Arena League all do not. Connection to the players. Nobody wants to watch random kids playing for random teams on the level that they do when there is a connection. It is what makes college sports unique and differentā¦or at least it was.
With that goneā¦itās just another XFL
People are and will continue to abandon itā¦especially when it comes to spending their hard earned money on it. Weāre already seeing itā¦and it has just begun.
It shouldnt. Especially the top 20-30 Schools. Our program still exists because of our students and alums. The top programs are professional programs in how they operate, the money being made and their approach to everything. Academics are now an afterthought - more now than it ever was.
I agree with TRL long term that fails because people watched college because of what it was. Now that its the NFL basically it wont be the same.
TV ratings a bit more nuanced as the semis didnāt occur at same point as they did last year. Overall, ESPN pretty happy.
Right. No one is arguing about the past. Almost everyone agrees that the current path is historically unusual, and questions whether it is sustainable. It seems logical that, at some point there needs to be discussion of what other alternatives exist. Minor league? Semi-pro? Go back to club sports? Let P4 do itās thing, and everyone drop back to Division II or III?
Itās worth thinking back to before there was an NFL. Once upon a time there were businesses that had teams made up of employees that played each other. Then they brought in ringers. Then they morphed into a pro league in 1921. One team still bears a name that traces back to that business origin, a packing plant in Green Bay.
Things do change with time. College football is in time of dramatic change. There is no reason to believe that in ten years it will look the same as it looks today.
Cardinals too. They were based on Chicago and were employees of a meat packing company and wore company color red and some Newspaper reporter said they looked like a bunch of cardinals. I remember reading they lost a loser leaves town game to the Bears and thats how they ended up in SL.