Two years ago this month, the NCAA opened the NIL floodgates, but hardly by choice. The law was finally catching up with the warped system of denying college athletes not only compensation for their efforts but also the ability to turn their fame into revenue.
On Thursday, former Raiders coach (which allows him to know a thing or two about being in a bad situation) and current Mississippi coach Lane Kiffin called the current status of college football “a disaster.”
“We’ve got professional sports,” Kiffin said, via ESPN.com.
We like Lane, but that’s a lame and lazy complaint. Major college athletics have been professional sports for a long time now, with plenty of people getting plenty of money. Except for the players.
Now, the players have power. And they’re using it. So what if it creates inconveniences for coaches who see players doing what coaches have done for years: making good business decisions and acting on them?
Is there an element of chaos in college football right now? Absolutely. But it’s the chaos college football deserves. For years, the system screwed the players — and the schools avoided the reckoning.
The reckoning arrived in 2021. Schools still continue to not have to give fair value to the students creating it, and now they want Congress to rescue them from the fruits of their own corruption.
It might work. It shouldn’t. For many years, college sports programs have stuffed their coffers and stiffed their players. The chaos college football currently is experiencing is both deserved and overdue.
Sorry, Lane and the like. Someone moved your mozzarella. At least the players are finally getting a little taste of the block of cheese the size of a car battery on which the coaches have been chomping ever since college football became the big business is what and will continue to be.
