Anyone who has followed me on social media or been a reader of mine here for more than a few weeks knows that I am a hopeless sports fan. Other than referring to myself as "hopeless," I make no apologies about it. I know that there are a lot of conservatives who have stopped enjoying sports for various reasons, most of them political; I am not one of them.
My two greatest passions when it comes to sports are Major League Baseball and college football. My friend and podcast partner Chris Queen is also a college football fanatic, so we talk about it a lot. These days, our biggest concern is that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) doesn't ruin the sport that it is supposed to be watching over.
College sports have been radically transformed in recent years with the advent of the transfer portal and Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) contracts. The combination of the two has created annual free agency in the major college sports, and has pretty much sucked the life out of the college fan experience.
Now, a college football player can enter the transfer portal, field the NIL offers, and head to the highest bidder. Because there are barely any rules in this wild west college athletics era, he can do it all again the following year. If he uses up all of his eligibility before going pro, he could have four or five schools on his résumé.
This isn't about how any of us feel about the portal or NIL — I'm not a big fan of either — it's about the fact that hardcore college football fans like myself were never in the market for a bastardized hybrid NCAA/NFL version of college football. I'm also an NFL fan, and I've spent my sports-fan life greatly enjoying the differences between the two. I've also been lamenting what the Roger Goodell NFL has become. The last thing I wanted was for college football to become NFL Lite. NIL has the potential to make it more like the NFL on steroids.
The third rail of college football ruination is the chase for the almighty television dollar. That is, of course, what makes NIL possible. Back in the good old days, only teams that were winning played on television. Now, the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) is all over the tube. One is treated to a host of 2-4 teams slugging it out on one of the 17 or 18 million streaming options.
There are even Friday games now, because those expensive conference TV contracts have to be paid for somehow. Any football purist will tell you that Fridays are for high school football. This may be the NCAA's most egregious slap in the face of tradition.
Attending televised games can be a real slog. At home, you can get up and make a snack or easily go to the bathroom during a four-minute timeout. When you're there live, you just stare at the on-field TV timeout clock and resist the urge to throw things at the official next to it.
Here in Tucson, we're regularly given start times between 7:30 and 8 p.m. because it's hot and football is being forever wussified. I say we play noon games when it's 105 in September and watch the teams from cooler climes drop like flies because they're cramping up. With a late start and all of the television timeouts, it's almost time for me to go to church on Sunday by the time I get home.
Back to the annual NIL free agency. It's not just the top-tier players who are moving all over the place; guys who might end up only playing 10 preseason downs in the NFL are getting offers, too. It's impossible to build up affinity for a team when the roster is constantly in flux. Gunner Maldonado was my favorite UofA defender from two seasons ago, and he was here playing against Arizona as a member of the Kansas State Wildcats earlier in the season. He's an Arizona native, and he didn't even stick around. The NIL money is so tempting that a guy who grew up in sunshine would subject himself to the weather in Manhattan, Kan.
Former NFL tight end Greg Olsen has a solution to fix some of this: make a player choose either the portal or the NIL money. The kid can take the cash, but he has to stay at the school for at least two years. That obviously doesn't apply if he only has one year of eligibility left. If the player wants to hit the portal because he needs a change of scenery, he doesn't get the NIL payday. This would end the psychotic annual free agency nonsense.
It's an idea that makes sense, which almost certainly means that the NCAA isn't even considering it at the moment.
For those wondering if this list of grievances is going to make me stop being a college football fan eventually... nope, I'm still hopeless and know my limitations.
My stadium beer budget is going to get a heck of a lot bigger, though.
As a palate cleanser for myself, I'll leave you with one of my happiest moments from Arizona football — Chuck Cecil's 105-yard interception against Arizona State. My sister and I were sitting in the endzone where he caught it, and had a great view of him streaking down the field. Cecil played his entire collegiate career at Arizona and is a coach there now. I don't know how many loyalty stories like that we'll have in the future.
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