Cue the jaunty and pretentious music as the festive elephants donning glittering trunk pieces enter the ring from tent left, while the circus leader gradually descends from the rafters within a sea of aerial performers to center stage under a thunderstorm of fireworks and an underwhelming applause from a disengaged audience…
This is what modern athletics have become. A perpetual incredulous one-liner of false promises with billions of dollars on the line. This is now the standard for the atmosphere of the once vibrant gameday experience and pageantry of college football and beyond, and at a significant cost. Buy a championship. Scrap tradition. Money talks.
The dissection of amateur sports with a surgical precision has filled the already crowded morgue of tradition with another corpse and pillar of the past and thanks to the cold-blooded hitman (or hit woman) that is the NCAA, and players, coaches and fans are all facing the challenge of facing assimilation or annihilation.
With the adoption of the Names, Image and Likeness (NIL) directive by the NCAA governing body of college sports and stifling policy still in its infancy, fortunes are made and fortunes are lost and the transition is proving to be a bit more tedious for some rather than others.
Basically, pay the players outside of the room and board and guarantees offered by a scholarship and live to tell about it. However, the new world order system diverting billions of dollars of revenue generated from mainstream media and fandom to the athletic departments of institutions of higher learning with the remains trickling to players and coaches, the unfeasible fiscal equation has effectively destroyed amateurism. The initial consequences of creating and activating a new infrastructure have already been felt on a national scale that transcends all levels of what amateur athletics was during the previous graceful age of corruptive innocence, and the charm of $100 handshakes and phantom summer jobs compensating star athletes at the pinnacle of performance and the resoundingly compelling.
As an organism, such as the NCAA, experiencing growing pains and failure is acceptable in moderation, the detriment of redefinition is inevitable.
During the initial launch of the NIL coinciding with the NCAA creating the transfer portal, which allows players to be released from their scholarships and change universities on a yearly basis, chaos was abundant between the mountains of cash and the instability of countless athletes jumping from school to school in the absence of honoring commitments or loyalty to an institution. This has led to full-scale roster turnover, which favors teams located in large media markets and athletic departments backed by prodigious endowment, where opportunities for building a profitable personal brand are more abundant for what were scholarship athletes. Whisked away in a timeframe measured in nano-seconds was and is the notion of competitive balance and parity as the experiment in campus economics persists.
While the players are enjoying a renaissance based on the volatile ecosystem of an imperfect framework, the leadership is facing the wrath of an unproven system. The fortitude and rock solid status of coaches is now vulnerable to the complex processes of dispensing of cash leading to a reshuffling on a stadium field level.
The first high profile casualty of this readjustment of amateur sports is newly former head coach Mike Gundy of the Oklahoma State University Cowboys. Gundy, who enjoyed spurts of success in the small market college town of Stillwater, was ultimately terminated as the overriding factor of the pursuit for prestige and financial gain by his players resulted in a complete overhaul of the roster due to NIL over his last two seasons and brutal results on the gridiron which should have been forgiven. But what is circumstance in a crazy world? Again, from a player’s perspective, why wallow in the middle of the plain states, when one can profit by simply be seen by more eyes and avoid the stigma of flyover state? From a coach’s perspective, why care?
Gundy’s fate is the first domino falling as he is the vector that sets the whole cascade reaction in motion, as the classical system is completely flipped and coaches now are now expandable. The molding of young minds is no longer relevant, as the field generals possess less marketability than their starting lineup. Is it justice as the antithesis was true for more than eight decades of memories and progress, where players were at the mercy of the hierarchy which did not favor the subordinate, yet cultivated competition?
Questions mount as to endgame of the purity of competition marred by the inability of fans to decide on their own and players searching for a head coach in the high stakes game of the miraculous and immaculate product of college football. The NIL is here to stay and with it the future of sports as society knows it.