The Wild, Wild, West of NIL

The concept of "amateurism" as we all knew it is now dead. It's time to understand how we got here, what "here" is, and where we may be going.

When I was growing up, my love for college football began in the mid-1970s, when the NCAA controlled its media rights. If you wanted to see your alma mater on the tube, it was up to the NCAA, and maybe it would make the Game of the Week. The amount of choices each week was less than the number of television networks (three). But, as college football grew in popularity, so did the public's demand to watch it on TV. As of 1983, the NCAA's college football rights were $60 million (Sanderson & Siegfried, 2018).

The next year, the universities of Oklahoma and Georgia defeated the NCAA at the U.S. Supreme Court. The court found the NCAA violated Anti-Trust law by not allowing schools to create their own television deals for football. The ruling opened the floodgates. After several years, athletics conference commissioners and university presidents used this opportunity for big money and created a Frankenstein money monster. Within 15 years, hundreds of millions of dollars poured into ivory towers because of the public's demand for more football and basketball on television. In 2007, the public's increasing appetite for football and basketball was fed by the creation of the Big Ten conference, soon after duplicated by other major conference networks. Thirty years after the US Supreme Court's decision in Oklahoma v NCAA, the major conferences decided upon a College Football Playoff, again responding to public demand and bringing in more hundreds of more millions of dollars. Recent reports exclaim the Big Ten conference media package will be worth more than $1 billion annually for 14 schools. According to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, public Division I-Football Bowl Subdivision institutions totaled athletics expenses of $8.7 billion and $9.1 billion in athletically-related debt.  The Frankenstein is out of control.

Table 1. Facilities & Equipment Expenses for Division I-FBS Public Institutions, 2005-2020, adjusted for inflation

Source: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database (2022). http://cafidatabase.knightcommission.org/reports/0a58b702

What's missing from this conversation? The college athletes. ...For more, LINK HERE: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wild-west-nil-scott-hirko-ph-d--1f/