The ‘train wreck’ of college sports is actually a cash machine: Telander

CHICAGO - The horror!

The college sports transfer portal is a "train wreck."

It is "sucking the life out of college sports."

Save yourselves while you can, people!

While I settle myself down from an extended chuckle of this-whole-world-is-insaneness, let me tell you who said those damning quotes above: Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmeti.

That’s right, one of the main men who created the whole new Moneyball world of college sport by filing with other states’ attorneys general an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA in 2023… and winning. There’s the key. Winning. The law sometimes gets things right. And it did here.

For over a century, the NCAA has called its entertainment-driven, big-revenue football players "student-athletes," and "amateurs," like regular kids in college just there to study, have a little side fun on weekends.

Me, I thank USA Today for doing a nice research piece in Monday’s edition on the professionalization of college football (and by extension, college basketball, and well, every sport, at times). How did name, image and likeness, money and school pay and players transferring from college to college through the portal (Jan. 2 to Jan. 16 for football; Apr. 7 to Apr. 22 for men’s basketball) become so wild and over the top and, let’s admit it—fun?

To cut to the quick, it all came about because you can call a lion a house cat all you want, but eventually the courts will straighten you out, if the lion doesn’t eat you first. The NCAA is filled with a bunch of old, stupid men living in a movie from 1910.

NCAA leaders through the years have liked the unpaid labor model for big-time sports so much that no amount of explanation or demands for fairness or appeals to decency have ever settled in. Nope, this is the way we do it.

The NIL freedom came first. I mean, how crazy is it that an individual athlete was forbidden to profit off his (or her) own face? I remember athletes being suspended for doing things like charity calendars, totally unpaid, but NCAA evil. A free meal from a booster? Free pair of shoes for showing up at the shoe store? You’re done at this school!

So, big props to the Supreme Court for using those two things the NCAA had excised from its brain—reason and logic—to strike down what the NCAA could have done itself decades ago. The Court’s vote was 9-0, by the way, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing that what the NCAA had been doing was "flatly illegal."

Of course, the NCAA could have worked out a business model that compensated athletes, made them employees, made them candidates for workers’ compensation, allowed them to form a union of some sort and work out a collective bargaining agreement, put in salary caps and fairness clauses. The NCAA could have done all that. Please remember.

Because it didn’t.

It did nothing but lie and hide and obfuscate. So we’ve got the Wild West. Banks are being robbed, for sure, but not by outlaws on horses with guns, but by wonderful dudes like Indiana folk hero and recent quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, who made a reported $2 million last season.

And you know what? Mendoza should have been paid $10 million. Think of what he brought to historic underdog Indiana and all college football fans. But did he even get a wee share of the National College Football Playoff Championship Game revenue? Not a penny.

And at one point in that Indiana-Miami thriller, there were 33.2 million TV viewers. That is pure, unadulterated money. That’s a cash register ringing off the hook. Ask an advertiser, a concessionaire, a Hard Rock Stadium worker, a South Florida tourism chief.

So we end up with folks like Attorney General Skrmetti lamenting the chaos his successful litigation unleashed. He’s right, in a sense. There is no control, anywhere. (Sorry, NCAA, you had your chance.) At least 6,500 players put their names in the recent portal. Mayhem. Those dudes are buzzing off to so many new campuses it’s a wonder they don’t spend all day waving at fellows going the other direction.

Whatever your favorite college is, you have no idea who will line up on the field for it next fall. My favorite guy is quarterback TJ Finley, who has been to seven different colleges in seven years: LSU, Auburn, Texas State, Tulane, Western Kentucky, Georgia State and now Incarnate Word. Word is he sleeps in a pup tent near the bus station.

But here is where lawyer Skrmetti and all the college doomsayers are wrong. College football is not wrecked. It is not oozing life. It is booming. Stadiums are filled. Fans (and gamblers) don’t care if the players are paid or not. If they’re students or not.

College? What’s that got to do with it? Jersey colors. Geography. Alums.

But education? When was the last time you heard about a star quarterback or tailback or cornerback—any player at all—missing a big game because he failed his midterm?

Can I hear, never?

Thank you. Court adjourned.

Dig deeper:

Want more? Read some of Rick Telander’s recent columns for Fox 32:

• Unlikely Super Bowl QB duel has some Bears fans wondering ‘what if?’: Telander
• From longshot to champs: Indiana wins first national football title | Telander
• How Indiana football became a national power in the new age of college sports: Telander
• For the Bears, the whole season comes down to one more game against the Packers: Telander
• Caleb Williams is electric - but are the Bears asking too much too soon: Telander