05-04-2026, 05:55 PM
Although the march to where we are seems inevitable and maybe was, there’s a long list of decisions which could have gone a different way that might have stemmed the tide.
From the NCAA’s perspective, I fault them for not prioritizing the student in student athletes. Time and again, the NCAA showed that academics were “in name only” and that the “student” in student-athletes was largely meaningless.
The NCAA showing zero flexibility on the definition of amateurism. The original Alston case concerned additional educational benefits from schools. Read that again, educational benefits. Was the NCAA really that infelxible that it would enforce a limit on laptops? The O'Bannon v. NCAA case concerned the use of O’Bannon’s likeness in a video game, which the NCAA allowed; it just didn’t allow O’Bannon to get any money for it, even after he left college. Can you blame the athletes, when the system before was so nakedly exploitative? In a different world, the NCAA would have either limited use of O’Bannon’s likeness and maybe gotten fewer royalties from the game, or allowed O’Bannon to make some money from the use of his likeness.
The conferences (and NCAA) continuously worked to maximize revenue at the expense of student-athlete well-being. I never saw the NCAA say no to a proposal to add games or make the season longer or expand the size (and thus length) of the post-season. Conferences continually acceded to networks demands to provide more content even though it was scheduling at times that were not best for athletes: examples (of many): PAC-12 after dark games, especially from cities without ready access to airports meant that teams were returning home in the wee hours of the morning, day games in Arizona in the early fall, expanding the schedule outside of Saturday for football (or Thursday/Saturday for basketball), West coast teams joining the BigTen and ACC. There were lots of cases where the well-being of athletes collided with the opportunity to make more money, and the NCAA never seemed to prioritize athlete well being.
Of course the networks deserve some of the blame, for demanding “content” to manipulating the conferences to get the content they want, including breaking up the PAC-12. Honestly, it would have been fine to broadcast a rerun of an earlier game at 10 PM Pacific.
Individual schools and their boosters get a lot of blame too. The impetus to win at all costs meant lavish spending on the things that you could spend on (coaches) not to mention an entire underground economy of trying to get around NCAA limitations, whether it is UNC’s tutoring scandal, runaway coaches salaries or countless examples of boosters finding a way to transfer money to a recruit or his families, all the while the NCAA focuses on easily measurable but meaningless transgressions such as impermissible meals for recruits.
Then there are the courts, which didn’t offer any sort of alternative to opening everything up to a free-for-all. I think things might have been different if they had made a distinction for collegiate sports as having a dual purpose, not as a professional-light league where the “employees” were being denied their earnings. I wish there had been an effort to define in what ways collegiate athletics was different and how you might legally make the case that there is a way to continue operating as it had been. The issue, I think, is that there is a vicious cycle, where courts look at things and say that it looks and sounds like a professional “duck” and therefore it ought to be treated as a professional duck, but the more you do that, the more it looks and sounds like a professional duck.
And finally, there is us, the fans. We are the ones clamoring for 10 pm Pacific games to watch live because god forbid there is an hour on a fall Saturday (and increasingly on other days) without some random teams playing. We are the ones who get all hot and bothered when our team underperforms and demand that the University show its commitment to excellence in all things by firing the one person that they can fire (the head coach) and by dropping gazillion of dollars to bring in a new coach to right the ship. It’s us who obsess over 40 yard dash times and only care about high school GPAs inasmuch as for Stanford (and pretty much only for us) does it have an influence over whether they get into the school. Ultimately, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves”
And let’s face it, as much as many of us in this thread thinks that it has come to the detriment of collegiate athletics and has reduced our interest in college sports*, we are in the minority; college sports have never been more popular.
BC
* I also wonder, how much of that is because the new system has disadvantaged Stanford major sports, who have underperformed. Would we be saying this if the school had gone “all in” on the new collegiate landscape and major donors had put up oodles of cash to assemble a CFP caliber football team, and Final Four bound men’s and women’s basketball teams?
From the NCAA’s perspective, I fault them for not prioritizing the student in student athletes. Time and again, the NCAA showed that academics were “in name only” and that the “student” in student-athletes was largely meaningless.
The NCAA showing zero flexibility on the definition of amateurism. The original Alston case concerned additional educational benefits from schools. Read that again, educational benefits. Was the NCAA really that infelxible that it would enforce a limit on laptops? The O'Bannon v. NCAA case concerned the use of O’Bannon’s likeness in a video game, which the NCAA allowed; it just didn’t allow O’Bannon to get any money for it, even after he left college. Can you blame the athletes, when the system before was so nakedly exploitative? In a different world, the NCAA would have either limited use of O’Bannon’s likeness and maybe gotten fewer royalties from the game, or allowed O’Bannon to make some money from the use of his likeness.
The conferences (and NCAA) continuously worked to maximize revenue at the expense of student-athlete well-being. I never saw the NCAA say no to a proposal to add games or make the season longer or expand the size (and thus length) of the post-season. Conferences continually acceded to networks demands to provide more content even though it was scheduling at times that were not best for athletes: examples (of many): PAC-12 after dark games, especially from cities without ready access to airports meant that teams were returning home in the wee hours of the morning, day games in Arizona in the early fall, expanding the schedule outside of Saturday for football (or Thursday/Saturday for basketball), West coast teams joining the BigTen and ACC. There were lots of cases where the well-being of athletes collided with the opportunity to make more money, and the NCAA never seemed to prioritize athlete well being.
Of course the networks deserve some of the blame, for demanding “content” to manipulating the conferences to get the content they want, including breaking up the PAC-12. Honestly, it would have been fine to broadcast a rerun of an earlier game at 10 PM Pacific.
Individual schools and their boosters get a lot of blame too. The impetus to win at all costs meant lavish spending on the things that you could spend on (coaches) not to mention an entire underground economy of trying to get around NCAA limitations, whether it is UNC’s tutoring scandal, runaway coaches salaries or countless examples of boosters finding a way to transfer money to a recruit or his families, all the while the NCAA focuses on easily measurable but meaningless transgressions such as impermissible meals for recruits.
Then there are the courts, which didn’t offer any sort of alternative to opening everything up to a free-for-all. I think things might have been different if they had made a distinction for collegiate sports as having a dual purpose, not as a professional-light league where the “employees” were being denied their earnings. I wish there had been an effort to define in what ways collegiate athletics was different and how you might legally make the case that there is a way to continue operating as it had been. The issue, I think, is that there is a vicious cycle, where courts look at things and say that it looks and sounds like a professional “duck” and therefore it ought to be treated as a professional duck, but the more you do that, the more it looks and sounds like a professional duck.
And finally, there is us, the fans. We are the ones clamoring for 10 pm Pacific games to watch live because god forbid there is an hour on a fall Saturday (and increasingly on other days) without some random teams playing. We are the ones who get all hot and bothered when our team underperforms and demand that the University show its commitment to excellence in all things by firing the one person that they can fire (the head coach) and by dropping gazillion of dollars to bring in a new coach to right the ship. It’s us who obsess over 40 yard dash times and only care about high school GPAs inasmuch as for Stanford (and pretty much only for us) does it have an influence over whether they get into the school. Ultimately, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves”
And let’s face it, as much as many of us in this thread thinks that it has come to the detriment of collegiate athletics and has reduced our interest in college sports*, we are in the minority; college sports have never been more popular.
BC
* I also wonder, how much of that is because the new system has disadvantaged Stanford major sports, who have underperformed. Would we be saying this if the school had gone “all in” on the new collegiate landscape and major donors had put up oodles of cash to assemble a CFP caliber football team, and Final Four bound men’s and women’s basketball teams?