How to Fix College Athletics
Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love a salary cap.
Hello everyone! Long time no see.
Look, there are plenty of reasons we haven’t posted a lot over the past month - some of which I might even tell you later this year - but at the end of the day, the summer months represent a great time for Joe and me to take a step back and rest up and relax (something that will be even more important given how intriguing Bob Chesney’s first season in charge of football is looking at the moment).
The summer is also the time when we typically write about things that, given our size and the fact that this isn’t a full-time job for either of us, we put on the back burner throughout the year. In this case, I’ve been reading and listening to plenty of conversation about how college athletics, in particular college football, is broken and in desperate need of a fix. In light of everything going on with Texas Tech and Brendan Sorsby, this conversation has returned to the forefront, so I’m dragging this out of my Notes app and posting some general ideas of how I would go about fixing college athletics.
A note to start: most of these changes will be focused around football, and with good reason. Football is the straw that stirs the drink, so to speak, so many of these ideas are designed to fix that specific sport. Some of these ideas can be applied in other places, of course, but football comes first here.
Fix One: Five for Five
This one already seems well on its way to being implemented, which is a good, common-sense change to the system.
Essentially, we are clarifying the eligibility rules in the future to make things as simple as possible. Going forward, all players will have five years to play five seasons of their sport. The clock would start for you when you first enroll in college or the first academic year following your 19th birthday (which would then account for junior college players). Redshirting will be a thing of the past, including the medical redshirt, which has gotten abused in recent years to get players 6th and 7th years of eligibility. There are a few exceptions to this rule, for things like religious missions, pregnancies, and active military service, but considering you would not be actively participating in your sport during those activities, that feels like a fine line to draw.
There are going to be plenty of critics of this rule, and the current iteration being discussed by the NCAA is already getting legal challenges lined up, but of everything I’m going to write out here, this one feels like the least objectionable. College athletics should be limited to your college years, and seeing guys still playing college sports into their mid-20s defeats the purpose while taking away college spots for incoming freshmen.
Fix Two: Salary Cap and Players’ Union
I’m combining these two things because they have to go hand-in-hand.
Let’s start with that first point: college athletics needs a salary cap of some kind to rein in some unsustainable spending. The reason that NIL spending has continually increased each year is that schools are only held in check by how much money they can raise, and as schools like Texas Tech and Indiana have shown, your program is no longer limited by its historic place in the college athletics pecking order if you are willing to spend the money to change it. This is great for players, who have historically been taken advantage of by the economics of college sports, but it is an unsustainable system for both schools and fans. Throw in how shady NIL can still be at this point, and you’re left with a system in drastic need of reform.
That’s why we’re going to take the current House payment model and improve on it. Instead of limiting schools to a set amount across the board, however, the schools would have a percentage amount of what the conference is getting from its media contracts, similar to what salary cap leagues like the NFL and NBA have in place. We’re limiting this to conference media contracts because these are the most static numbers we have (trying to do this off of all revenue that schools get from things like donations and ticket sales seems like a fool’s errand) and because these are the most publicly reported numbers, so private schools like Stanford and Southern Cal can’t circumvent the rules.
I’m not going to get into the specifics of what the salary cap should be set at, but let’s use the NFL salary cap and Big Ten media deal as an example. The current NFL collective bargaining agreement sets up the players to receive around 48% of league revenue. The Big Ten’s media deal, meanwhile, is a seven-year, $7 billion deal that is currently estimated to bring in $1.2 billion in revenue to the conference each year (if you want the math, the Big Ten signed that deal before UCLA and Southern Cal officially joined the conference, so the first year was a much lower payout). Given those numbers, let’s say the Big Ten has to shift 48% of its media revenue to players, which equals out to around $576,000,000, and divided up by all 16 teams, would be a salary cap of around $36,000,000 per school. Yes, that number is well above the $20.5 million of the House settlement, but most serious Big Ten schools are spending that much already between their House money and NIL collectives. The SEC, the country’s other big-spending conference, is close to that number, while the Big 12 and ACC would be around $21-24 million. Now, if they went this route, I think schools would go with a higher percentage to cover more sports (as reference, just bumping up to 56% would add an extra $6 million per school for the Big Ten, so I could see a 60% or even 70% of media revenue given other sources of revenue like donations and ticket sales would be untouched by this system).
Now, in order for this to work, the players need representation, and that’s where a players’ union comes into play. This is honestly one of the hardest things I have here to implement, as the membership in a college athletes’ union would be in constant flux, as players would only have one to five years of membership in total, compared to what we see in unions for professional sports. Union management would be a particular problem point given the constant turnover, and you’d almost need to give agents more power in helping on this front (which isn’t all that different than what we see in other leagues, to be fair), but for a salary cap to exist, it needs to be collectively bargained. And yes, this means that the schools will have to acknowledge athletes as employees, but that has been a long time coming at this point.
Back to the salary cap before I move on. The salary cap is intended to cover payments above and beyond scholarships, so schools would still be on the hook for scholarship costs (this is done to take the cost of attending variable out of the equation). The big benefit here is that by putting everything back in the hands of the schools instead of third-party NIL collectives, you should theoretically get more donations to schools, as those are tax-deductible instead of the shady grey area that the collectives live in. I think the schools would cry poor, but this system should ultimately lead to them ending up with more money than they are currently getting, thanks to donors being split between schools and collectives.
Fix Three: A New College Football Calendar
We’re focusing on college football specifically here because, for the most part, the other sports have a pretty solid calendar in place. I think you could move back the transfer portal window in all of them to be in the summer once school ends, but otherwise, they’re all generally in a good spot.
Football, meanwhile, is an absolute mess.
There are a lot of factors here, from the length of the playoffs to the transfer portal and recruiting to when schools are in session, that lead to a calendar that makes no real sense, so we’re going to simplify things as much as possible. Here’s what the new calendar should look like:
The season now starts in the traditional “Week zero”, with schools getting the first full week of August to start preseason practice.
We’re moving the start of the season up a week for a few reasons, mostly to fix things with the playoffs schedule on the back end, while allowing for conference championship games to still exist if they so choose. Those games would take place on Thanksgiving Day weekend, marking the end of the regular season, though I would lean towards those games going away in general for reasons you’ll see.
Playoffs start the week after the regular season, with the first two rounds hosted on-campus.
For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to assume the 24-team playoff model backed by the Big Ten is going to carry the day (it has support from the Big 12 and ACC currently, with the SEC alone on a 16-team island), but if it ends up being 16, then it makes things a bit cleaner.
In the 24 team model, then teams 9-24 would be in the first round, while the top eight would have a bye. If conference championships continue, then the top five conference champions (Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC, and top G6 conference champion) would be guaranteed a spot in that top 8, which would give them a break and more incentive to make and win those games; that would also mean losing opens you up to potentially playing again in the next week, so I’d expect the SEC and Big Ten to be the only conferences still running a championship going forward.
9-16 would host the first round at home, and then 1-8 would host the second round, again at home. Notably, the bracket would be reseeded after each round, similar to what happens in the NFL; thus, if you get an upset and the #21 team is the lowest seed that advances, then they would instead go play the #1 overall seed instead of the #5 seed as they would in a bracket-style playoff. Another scheduling change would be that those first two rounds take place in consecutive weeks, after which there is a one-week break while games shift to neutral sites for the quarterfinals, semifinals, and championship. The quarterfinals and semifinals would happen one week apart, and then there is another week's break before the championship. Thus, the schedule would look like this:
First round (9-24), held on campus one week after the season ends
Second round (1-8 hosting), one week later
One week break
Quarterfinal (4 games), hosted at the Fiesta, Peach, Sugar, and Indianapolis
Semifinal (2 games), one week later, hosted at Cotton and Orange
One week break
Championship, hosted at the Rose Bowl
If you applied that schedule to this current year, then we’d get the first two rounds done by December 12, with the quarterfinals taking place around Christmas and semifinals around New Year’s. The championship would take place on January 18, which is a week earlier than it will actually happen this year. This schedule also puts the majority of the neutral-site games right in the middle of a traditional winter break, making it easier for fans to justify trips. I’m not married to the locations for those games, but this would keep the semblance of the major bowl games in place.
And yes, I snuck the Rose Bowl back and made it the national championship location each year. It’s the best environment for a college bowl game around.
Early Signing Day is moved to August, National Signing Day for prep prospects remains in February
We’re trying to incentivize schools to slow down with their coaching changes by removing one of the reasons that those changes take place so soon after the season. The impetus for this change comes from talking to a few recruiting experts, who pointed out to me that the prep recruiting landscape has changed significantly in the NIL era. Teams typically have their recruiting classes wrapped up during the summer, with maybe a few spots left open for any rising senior prospects. On top of that, the era of the late flip is long gone, as these commitments also include NIL deals that do a better job of securing a decision than the handshakes of previous eras ever could.
So we’re considering that by moving Early Signing Day up to the end of August, freeing up more of the season to focus on the actual game on the field rather than the talent acquisition off of it. To protect prep players, if the school they committed to fires its head coach at any point before National Signing Day, those players can get out of their commitment without penalty. Early enrollees can still exist, but the calendar is changing to lower the need for that.
This won’t stop schools from firing coaches early in the season - and frankly, I think the number of players who would change commitments in these scenarios is minimal enough that we can live with it - but this should help schools slow down in their hiring process. Also to that end:
Only one Transfer Portal window in May
Here’s a big one, but let me explain.
Right now, we have a transfer portal window right in the middle of the CFP, with schools scrambling to have their coaching hires in place for this window. That creates miserable situations like we saw this past year with Lane Kiffin, where LSU hired a coach of a team that made the semifinals early because they needed him on-campus building his new staff. The realities of school schedules, with winter semesters beginning in January, also demand that these new team members be on campus and with their new schools as soon as possible.
We’re going to take some of the pressure off schools by moving the transfer portal back to June for a few reasons. One, this gives schools plenty of time to hire a coach and get their ducks in order. These new coaches would also have plenty of time to meet the existing roster and figure out who is staying and going, while it gives players time to determine if they want to stick around with a new staff or not. Players could transfer in June and immediately join summer classes instead of having to quickly transfer and slot into whatever courses are available in winter, which helps with the academic mission of the schools. These transfers would be able to finish out their school semester and change schools at the same time as other students. Plus, transfers don’t tend to have official visits in the same way that prep recruits do, so they should be able to sneak those trips or Zoom calls in while finishing up their classes.
Now, you may be saying that this hurts transfers by limiting how much time they can practice with their new teams, but we have one more big change to the calendar.
Spring practice system is going away, instead moving towards more of the OTA model of the NFL.
Spring practices have already lost their luster to some extent, and the days of the Spring Game feel like they are fading away. The schools seem to recognize this already, and are already proposing the shift I’m mentioning here.
Instead of a spring practice, schools have seven weeks in the offseason to hold 21 on-field practices. They can split those weeks up however they choose, but they cannot go more than five weeks in a row on these practices. This is similar to the NFL’s OTA (Organized Team Activity) model, where players and coaches have organized practices for a few weeks at a time in the offseason while allowing for rest time for the players.
My theory here is that schools would use this model and the new calendar changes with the transfer portal to shift their practices around. You’d see 2-3 weeks in April from most schools for existing players and any early enrollees, but schools would do more of their OTA weeks in June and the beginning of July, allowing new transfers and prep recruits to join and get real work in with the team. To accommodate many schools that exist in warmer climates, you can also host your summer OTAs wherever you choose, so schools in the south can go north if they so choose.
Fix Four: Bringing in a player transfer system from soccer
Ok, this one will take some explaining, so bear with me.
One concern I do have with my fixes and the salary cap is that this will leave a lot of schools behind financially, especially at the G6 level, so I’m cribbing an idea I heard from Split Zone Duo and bringing in the player transfer system from soccer to college football.
The idea here is simple: players can still transfer at any point of their college career, but we want to incentivize players to stick with their schools for the first few years whenever possible. Thus, if you enter the transfer portal before your fourth season (aka, during your first three years), then the school that wants to bring you in needs to pay a set fee to the original school to bring you in. This fee would be outside of the salary cap, and schools can choose to waive a fee if they so choose (for example, if a player is encouraged to transfer out, they can waive the fee to make them more attractive to other schools).
This system would give a ton of protection to smaller schools, as they can recoup some costs through this system while ensuring that they’ll have more of their players for a longer period of time. The system would also have higher fees for players moving up from the G5 to the P4 than it would for players moving down a level. For the schools with more money, like Ohio State, these fees would be negligible, but for a smaller school, these fees can help pay for more sports and scholarships, acting in tandem with buy games to support these athletic departments.
I do think this change would be subject to some lawsuits, as it could be seen as limiting athletes’ ability to make money, but this is something that a players’ union can solve as well.
Of course, these changes are all fine and good, but what if we want to be really radical?
Secret Fix Five: Break Away Football, Realign other sports back to regional conferences
The last fix, which I’m sure many of you would love, is to break football away from the other sports and put everything else back in more regional athletic conferences.
The reason UCLA is in the Big Ten, or UC Berkeley is in the Atlantic Coast Conference, or the Big 12 now stretches from Arizona and Utah to Florida and West Virginia, is because football rules all, and these conferences are trying to maximize their media revenue by gobbling up as many brands as possible. This is fine in football, when teams play once a week and can afford that travel, but it starts to break down when you consider a sport like basketball; UCLA had multiple week-long road trips to the midwest in the middle of the school year for both the men’s and women’s teams, that were more expensive when you factor in flights and hotels for an extended period of time. This math breaks down even more when you consider non-revenue sports like softball, which are now forced to take expensive cross-country flights multiple times a season. UCLA is not alone here, and while it has some ways to mitigate those costs (like being in the MPSF for a few sports) it is unsustainable over the long term for many schools.
Then throw in how stratified football is between the haves and the have-nots. There is a common joke that Alabama and UAB are playing a very different game, and while the parameters of football are the same, everything surrounding it is so different for these two programs that the joke has more than a hint of truth to it. Trying to create a unified set of rules to govern both the Michigans and the Fresno States of the world is a fool’s errand, and instead of trying to make it work, maybe it makes more sense to make a drastic shift.
So let’s imagine a world where we don’t have to deal with those constraints, where we can just snap our fingers and split the monster that is college football away from the rest of college athletics.
The first question is: why would we do this in the first place? And it’s a fair question to ask! Splitting college football, or at the very least the top 60 or so programs in the sport, away from the rest of it would not only feel wrong spiritually but would potentially put the rest of the college athletics world in jeopardy. A lot of smaller programs rely on the revenue they generate from football, especially from things like buy games, to help fund their athletic departments, and removing that money from the system could be a major problem. Similarly, figuring out which programs would get to be part of this Super League would be difficult - you could assume most, if not all, of the Big Ten and SEC would be a part of it, but what other programs would make the cut here? A Clemson or Miami, sure, but what about a new money school like a Texas Tech, or a Power Two hanger-on like Rutgers or Mississippi State? It’s a legitimate question, one that I am going to choose not to answer because this article is already long enough.
That said, let’s set this initial group at 60 members just for fun. We can divide this into six different divisions of 10 teams each, and each division would play each other in a round-robin style format. Throw in two cross-divisional games and one “preseason” game against a team outside of the Super League (done so that these schools can still have buy games and get some revenue into their programs), and you have a 12-game schedule. Then do a playoff however you so choose; it’s all fine.
The important thing here is that this only applies to college football and would allow the schools to reorganize themselves back into more geographically appropriate conferences in the other sports. Gone would be the current megaconferences that make up the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, and ACC, and you could realign back into groupings like the original Pac-10, Southwestern Conference, Big Eight, and Big East now that football is no longer driving the bus. Schools would save money on more localized travel, while fans would get a return to the rivalries they grew up on. What’s not to love?
But how about you? What changes would you make to fix college athletics? Sound off in the comments!
(And feel free to use this article to talk about anything UCLA in the meantime. Hopefully I have a few more articles done before we rev things up again in August.)
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At my age I’m flummoxed. I miss the days when the AP vote and the Rose Bowl was the end of the season…
Fine analysis and suggested fixes. I can think of 12 million additional reasons why a cap is needed.
I'm looking forward to this year from Joe and DD.