Ok enough of this crap. Wanna take a major step to fix college football? It’s simple. Let the booster collectives work directly with the football programs in college for NIL.
New NCAA president Charlie Baker said he wants the association to create a new tier of NCAA Division I sports where schools would be required to offer at least half their athletes a payment of at least $30,000 per year through a trust fund. The proposed shift would not require all members of a conference to be part of the new subdivision. Schools would be allowed to make that determination individually.
That’s all fine and dandy and cute, but it still tries to keep one thing intact — that football players are treated as student-athletes. And they’re not. NIL has made the businessmen, and that’s fine. Let’s treat them as such and make this a business.
Florida State just got hammered by the same NCAA for an assistant coach driving a potential transfer to meet with a booster collective group. And it’s idiotic. Let coaches and booster collectives work together to formulate NIL deals. Make it legal. Why? Because that’s what is happening all across college football already. Marijuana was illegal in every state for ages, but everyone was getting it, and now it looks dumb to even think it was ever illegal. If everyone is doing it and it’s causing no real harm, let them do it.
Guard rails are needed, of course. With my idea, a roster cap has to be instituted similar to the salary cap in the NFL. Each program gets a set amount to use in a calendar year based on the college football cycle (November to November makes sense, so this November starts the 2024 season cap, for example), and that money can be used however they see fit. Use it on current players, transfers, recruits — however you like.
Let the booster collectives meet with players and recruits on campus with the coaches. Let the booster collectives have meetings with the coaching staff on campus to determine targets and goals. Let them in. They’re in anyhow. Let’s stop the crap about pay-for-play not being a real thing.
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So let’s roll back the FSU punishments immediately. Let’s pretend they didn’t happen because they are punitive and seem targeted towards a program that is trying to buck the crooked college football playoff system and TV deals that rule the sport. And let’s figure out a number that’s fair for a roster cap and get this crap out in the open.
Pretending to be on the up and up has to be exhausting for the NCAA. Let’s just cut the crap.
