The Rot in the System: The Chaos & Future of College Sports
THE ROT IN THE SYSTEM: THE CHAOS & FUTURE OF COLLEGE SPORTS
I’ve had people ask me what I think the future of college football entails. For those who don’t know, the transfer portal combined with NIL (the ability for college players to make money off their athletics) has created a mess in the world of college sports. Every year whole teams are turned upside down. Players dart from one school to a rival. Intraconference transfers are now commonplace. It used to be a taboo for a school in the same conference to accept a player from a rival team—now it’s becoming the norm.
Most people fall victim to recency bias—they see the mess that’s unfolding right now and they assume that it will always be like this. I’ve offered a few insights and predictions to those who’ve have asked me about all of this and I’ll share them with you here today. The tectonic plates of our sporting world in America are shifting, and when things settle, it’s possible that we could see many changes outside of the world of sports. Or, to the contrary, if things don’t change, we may see more hardening of the corruption already present in our society.
Ownership, Lease, Loans of Players
For my European audience this first prediction is already commonplace in your world of sports. Players are scouted and signed to a franchise and that franchise then holds the rights to them for the duration of their contract. They can Sell, Lease or Loan players out to other franchises, but a player can’t just go wherever they want whenever they want. In the landscape of college football right now, we have none of that, and it’s creating chaos. I think that we will see the rise of ownership/lease/loaning of players enter into college sports.
My first prediction is not that they (schools/coaches/whoever) need to introduce this structure for the sake of stability—my position is that all the economic gravity surrounding the chaos of today’s situation will be drawn toward this type of structure. When people start paying people to come play for them, it’s not long before obligations come along with that payment. Right now, people are offering the payments with no obligation in return—but that’s a fantasy economic arrangement that will not endure across time. It’s only a matter of time before people/donors/coaches paying a kid are going to require them to obligate themselves to that school (or allow the school to own their playing “rights”) for some specified amount of time: 2 years, 3 years, 4 years…for the duration of their college athletic playing days..?
An ownership/leasing/loaning type of structure will bring a layer of stability to the chaotic landscape we’re seeing today, and for that reason I predict that it will enter into the picture at some point. The way it is right now is too skewed against all the people offering the money—and one thing about people that offer money to others: they won’t go long being at the losing end of the deal.
Tiered Leagues
My second prediction is that, whether the ownership/leasing/loaning dynamic comes to college sports or not, we’ll see the rise of tiered leagues: a top league, an intermediate league, a lower league, etc., etc..
We’re seeing it right now: so many players are in the transfer portal that coaches, and news outlets, spend the majority of their time focused on who they’re getting from the transfer portal, and much less time on who they’re recruiting out of high school. Who have they newly offered?, Who’s coming to what school?, who’s leaving?—that is what drives the public discussion around player personnel on a given team.
The veteran players are of more interest than the high schoolers being recruited—and for good reason! A 21-year-old football player, even only an average one, is going to be of more value than 98% of 18-year-old football players. The difference in body size, strength, mental capacity, and living discipline are profoundly differentiated at that time. Your 21-year-old is of much greater immediate interest than any number of 18-year-olds. Add to that the unreliability of holding on to any 18-year-old you bring in (because, who knows when they’ll enter the transfer portal themselves?), and the value around 17- and 18-year-olds will inevitably diminish into almost nothing.
What I predict to follow will be a new tiering system of leagues. It will gravitate toward a minor league type system, where an intermediary phase will become the norm for 18–19-year-olds, much like “Juniors” in hockey. There just won’t be a market for 18-year-olds to jump straight to collegiate football except in the rarest of circumstances—and schools that do take the chance on these 18-year-olds and have it not pan out will further disincentivize other schools to try it themselves thereafter. Over time I predict that we’ll see the near eradication of high school recruiting from top colleges.
“College” Sports
At this point many people question whether the sports would even remain “college” sports? They begin to think that the “college” badge will fall away altogether. But I predict that it most certainly won’t, and the reason for that prediction comes down to money.
Consider minor league teams—they have limited audiences, make no money, and draw little-to-no attention. College sports are the opposite precisely because they are attached to collegiate institutions. The identification with a team, the rivalries, the financial support—it all flows from the teams being attributed to specific schools. It’s a deal that bolsters both sides of the equation—the sports teams and the institutions.
We will not see the “college” badge fall away because there’s too much to lose if it does. What will be interesting to see, however, is how the college teams retain the position at the top tier of the minor leagues. In hockey and baseball, this didn’t work out. In football and basketball, it will be paramount to the sporting product, and the economic accoutrements, that its top tier remains “collegiate” in brand. If it doesn’t, we would we see a radical shift in our entire collegiate schooling landscape—not just our collegiate sports landscape. Many state universities would go broke; you’d see a lot of chaos in the educational sector of America. I think that this disruption would not be unwelcome, both for our sports landscape and for the long-term health of our society—but knowing what I know about how people with money work tirelessly to secure their monetary interests, the colleges of our country, and their donors/backers, will make sure that this version of the system doesn’t come about.
Promotion/Relegation
With ownership/leasing/loans and a tiered system of leagues, what that will leave us with will be something much more similar to the promotion/relegation system of Europe than we ever thought we’d see here in America. With a “juniors” type level for exiting high schoolers, and the opportunity to make money with the collegiate sports teams (and much more money than the money that minor leagues with little-to-no fanbases offer), you’ll see college sports simply retain the best 20- to 24-year-olds in the country, as a final preparation stage for the Pros. The sporting landscape will get much more diverse, and the downstream effects will be hard to predict with any clarity from here… It could be that we have multiple professional leagues. It could be that we get sharp divisions in college “conferences” where no one plays outside-of-conference games except as exhibitions, or potential “champions league” type games at the end of a year… Any number of things could take place, but the introduction of money into this college sports mix, and the chaos that has ensued, will bring drastic changes to the overall structure of college sports (and the world of sports) going forward.
Anti-Competitiveness
The potentially evil participants in all of this will be those trying to secure their leagues stability by anti-competitive measures: monopolization, exclusion of outsiders, solidification of “seats at the table” for those schools/franchises on the inside. This would most likely come in the form of the conferences consolidating into one, single, national conference, and their controlling who’s in/who’s out not by athletic performance, but by backroom deal-making. At this point the pool of potential schools & players will be greatly bottlenecked, and the owners will then possess all the significant, long-term, power in the deal. If this happens—which is the most likely scenario given how all our other pro sports leagues in America followed this exact trajectory—the result will be even more power inequality in our country.
This is the real reason why any of this is worth thinking about outside of those with specific sporting interests. Sports are a key form of modern artistic expression. They are a key form of recreation and leisure in our modern society. The more these leagues have corrupted, the more corrupting these activities have been on the souls of those participating, the souls of those consuming the product, and the larger society overall. We have the radical problems with inequality (usury, cheapening of manufacturing, predatory economics, consumerism, radical materialism) because these structures have been so corrupted. The opportunity we have right now is for sports to get reset back on the right path—one in which there is a purification of the league structures and the competitiveness within them. Up until now the power brokers have rigged the game to their advantage, but it has all disintegrated in the wake of the dual advent of NIL and the Transfer Portal. If we can navigate this chaos with sanity, it’s possible that from here we might be able to build some momentum to purge other areas of our society of those same corrupt practices (banking/finance, housing, construction, medicine, academia, manufacturing, energy) …
Our society and its economy has a lot of rot in it. +