Tad Stryker: Unrighteous Mammon

We ignore the fact we’re all to blame for college football realignment upheaval

© Ben Lonergan/The Register-Guard / USA TODAY NETWORK

Over the weekend of Aug. 5, the tears started to roll. In the hours following the announcement that Oregon and Washington had decided to join the Big Ten, tears flowed copiously from national sportswriters and radio personalities, who bemoaned not only the demise of the stately old Pac-12 Conference, but the rise of NIL payments, the transfer portal, the megamillion-dollar facilities arms races, the war chests being compiled by schools in the Big Ten and SEC. In other words, major college football as it now exists.

The righteous wailing filled the airwaves and media websites. Many were preaching against the nationwide rush to revenue, the big money that is, by most accounts, ruining college football. The question of the day seems to be, “Whose fault is this?” The general answer I heard time and time again last weekend was television — and specifically, Fox and ESPN, for making the money available. If you’re going to play that game, you need to look a little farther for your answer. And maybe, take a glance in the mirror.

The thing is, if you trace it far enough, the buck stops with those of us who grew up watching college football on TV, then griped about the bowls, then campaigned for a playoff system. So that makes you and me about as guilty as Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard and Lee Corso and their bosses. I don’t remember any of those national media figures — whether on TV, radio or at newspapers — complaining about escalating college football spending, except to say there weren’t enough teams in the playoff. Many a sportswriter or radio personality has outright campaigned for more teams in the playoffs, and used higher revenue for the schools as a talking point. Now that they’ve gotten the very thing they asked for — a 12-team playoff starting in 2024 — they’re upset.

The fault extends far beyond the media. Certainly the Big Ten is complicit, if for no other reason than for using its impressive media rights deal to lure away the four most revenue-attractive of the Pac-12’s schools. Former commissioner Kevin Warren got Southern Cal and UCLA, and was negotiating with Washington and Oregon before he left for the Chicago Bears, and his successor, Tony Petitti, is a former television executive, after all. The B1G corporate suits in Chicago share the blame, as do the SEC bigwigs in in Birmingham.

The rush for revenue continues. Florida State president Richard McCullough is calling his team’s situation in the Atlantic Coast Conference “an existential crisis.” So it sounds like he doesn’t much like the good ol’ days, either. He’s fighting the status quo in a football conference his school dominated from 1992-2014, which obviously is not good enough. He’s hoping for a seat at the SEC table, it appears.

McCullough is a good reminder of the rationalization that resonates with most Americans, but often takes us to places we really didn’t want to go: “I had to do what was best for me and my family.” Sounds innocent enough, even noble. But eventually, that thinking led to the breakup of the Pac-12. You’ll have to decide whether it’s good or bad, but one thing’s for sure: whether they’re at your favorite school or the one you love to hate, coaches repeat that time-honored phrase when signing multimillion-dollar contracts, just as surely as athletes say it when signing free-agent deals with the Yankees or Dodgers or Padres, leaving their small-market fans high and dry — and if you’ve ever said, “Pay the man!”, you’re part of the problem. Apparently, the presidents at UO and UDub decided they had to do what was best for them and their institutions. What could possibly be wrong with standing up for your own interests? After all, presidents and chancellors and athletic directors only want it to give their non-revenue sports the best chance to compete that they can. And they certainly have a point; football pays the bills for almost every other college sport.

Past and current Pac-12 commissioners Larry Scott and George Kliavkoff are certainly to blame. They should start by bearing responsibility for missing their opportunity to take Texas and Oklahoma several years ago. Both men misread the landscape of major college sports over the past decade and bungled the Pac-12 media rights deal about as thoroughly as it could have been botched. And don’t let the presidents of the Pac-12 institutions off the hook, either. Larry Beil, sports director at KGO-TV in San Francisco, recently was relentless in his criticism of Pac-12 schools themselves for their two horrible hires at the commissioner level and, more revealingly, saying about his local schools, Cal-Berkeley and Stanford, “They don’t care about sports.” So it stands to reason, if Cal and Stanford really don’t care, they shouldn’t mind which conference they land in.

Ultimately, it’s my fault that the Pac-12 is on its deathbed, and probably yours, as well. Over the years, we voted with our wallets, with our feet and with our tacit support of policies that inevitably swept us downstream to this destination. We (and the above-referenced media members, including several ESPN Radio employees who tacitly criticized ESPN’s television networks) asked state legislators to give athletes NIL payments, which are already being misused as inducements for recruitment. We protested that football players were being exploited because they brought in huge sums of money for universities, then sat back and said nothing when schools started handing out payments to thousands of athletes who play sports that actually lose money. That’s a good way to promote an insatiable appetite for TV revenue.

You’d rather watch the game on TV at home, near your refrigerator and recliner, instead of going to the stadium? You’re a TV executive’s dream, and therefore, part of the problem. As I get older, I can identify with that. We can all find reasons to share the blame if we look hard enough.

Maybe there’s something to the Bible verse about the love of money being the root of all kinds of evil, after all, regardless of whether you believe the phrase, “college football realignment” is a euphemism for the savaging, looting and burning of venerable institutions, or simply a long-overdue market correction.

Personally, I preferred the days when college football was more regional, less national. Since I was a young teen, I always enjoyed reading those summer magazines, memorizing campus locations in the Mountain West, Mid-America Conference and Ivy League. I go clear back to the days of the Southwest Conference and the Big Eight. It was easier for smaller schools to win an occasional conference title back then, and it meant a lot, as did going to a bowl game. But as I listened to national commentators over the last few decades, they generally made me feel like the old geezer who needs to get with the times. Now, the national commentators suddenly agree with me? It makes me suspicious.

One other thing that bothers me is the wailing about student wellbeing. Earlier this decade, arguments abounded that the student-athletes were being exploited because they weren’t getting a share of the millions of dollars in football revenue they brought in to their schools. Now that they’re being paid, there are complaints because they have to participate in games set at odd hours by TV networks who are providing the money so they can be paid. I heard again within the past week, that students will have to make longer road trips and their study habits will be disrupted. It’s a non-issue. Big Ten volleyball, softball and baseball players were already flying cross-country for contests in California, Texas and South Carolina long before the Pac-12 crashed.

Decades ago, when Sen. Ernie Chambers first introduced a bill in the Nebraska Legislature to pay all Cornhusker football players, he argued that they were being exploited. But under the pay-the-players model, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Once the inevitable happens, and the Big Ten and SEC are the final two superconferences left standing, and the NFL Lite is created (independent from the NCAA) and full-on employment of football players leads to them being subject to massive income taxes, or some other unforeseen consequence, well, it’s only a matter of time before some other politician argues they are being exploited because they are being paid. When it comes to money, we’re a pretty irrational lot, and hard to satisfy.

For better or worse, the concept of student-athlete is well on its way to being a relic, at least in the NFL Lite. The players will be employees, fifth-year seniors will be rare and there will be no turning back. And we’re all partly to blame.

If you like the centrality of the NFL, its parity, the controls, the players’ union, labor agreements, then you’ll probably like where college football is headed. If you want Alabama (or Nebraska) to rule college football for decades at a time, you’re not going to be happy with the NFL Lite. Do you have fond memories of the 1960s Packers, ‘70s-‘80s Steelers and Raiders, ’80s-’90s Cowboys and 49ers? Dynasties are not coming back.

The NFL is set up for parity. Will the consolidated NFL Lite start to look the same? It depends upon who’s running it. If it really is TV network overlords, then yes, that’s the way college football will trend.

But cheer up. Thankfully, the remnants of college football we used to know, with actual student-athletes, likely will still exist in the schools that didn’t make the cut for the Big Ten or SEC.