College presidents’ arrogance created a mess

Athletic departments at universities all across the country are bracing themselves for the revenue-sharing model and final version of House v. NCAA ahead of Monday’s settlement hearing.

You think the world of college athletics has been a circus in the past few years because of NIL? You haven’t seen anything yet, baby.

This is going to be every bit of the mess it sounds like, and it will be a catalyst for even more lawsuits and chaos than anything we have seen in recent years.

There will be Title IX lawsuits because schools will use a large chunk of their settlement money for football. There will be lawsuits about what is essentially a salary cap that was never collectively bargained. There will be lawsuits about caps on roster sizes, lawsuits about sports that are going to be cut and lawsuits about NIL caps and fair market value.

Grab your popcorn and settle in because it is going to be quite a something-show.

That being said, let’s get real and break it down the way it needs to be broken down.

This cesspool, this circus, this nonsensical world of high-stakes college athletics is exactly what everyone from administrators and presidents to athletic directors and coaches — and athletes — deserve. They all created this mess, so they all need to wallow in it and roll around in it. There are no victims in this, so excuse me if I don’t cry a river when the men’s swimmer whose team was folded gives a sob story about how unfair it is.

Athletes wanted to be paid. They wanted their bag. They wanted to get theirs, and they absolutely deserved to get a piece of the pie. The problem is that money has to come from somewhere, and while the agents and player advocates would have you believe there are endless trunks of cash in every athletic department, that simply isn’t true.

So while some athletes — mostly men’s and women’s basketball players and football players — get paid in full, the unintended consequences will be the swimmers, the wrestlers and the track and fielders, who will all have to worry whether every single season might be the last, as their sport could be a victim of budget cuts.

Is it fair?

Nope, but when it comes time to save money, sports that don’t generate revenue will get put on the chopping block, or the size of the rosters will be reduced. That’s fewer opportunities for athletes, but hey, that doesn’t matter because the Cooper Flaggs of the world got their bag.

Again, in the grand scheme of things, the athletes are probably the least culpable for our current situation because they have been asking for decades to get paid. The problem isn’t the athletes — for the most part; it is the agents and hangers-on who have pushed the money end of this way out of proportion with what it should be. And there is no turning back.

I mean, yes, they should get paid. But if these sports are sponsored by colleges and universities on some level, shouldn’t the education provided be a part of the equation?

The athletes are just grabbing what they can, and I don’t blame them. I just believe, had all of this been handled differently, the model would be more sensible and sustainable than it has been. It is a joke right now, and I don’t know how it can continue this way.

The stakeholders in House v. NCAA all have different levels of culpability, though, so let’s go with the largest and single biggest culprit of all this, and they’re supposedly the smartest people in the room: the college and university presidents.

They are obviously intelligent but also some of the most arrogant and intellectually elitist people in the room — which is why we are in the mess we are in.

This could have been handled completely differently in the mid-1980s to early 1990s when it became clear college athletics were headed toward big business. That’s when all the shoe deals, licensing deals, TV deals and marketing deals began to add up to billions, and everyone was getting their bag but the athletes.

A good friend of mine played at Pitt, and he laughs when he tells the story about how he and one of his buddies were in the Original Hot Dog Shop scraping together $4 or whatever to buy a pizza, and three or four guys were walking around the shop wearing the one guy’s jersey.

College presidents, however, were so arrogant and tone-deaf and wanted so badly to cling to this nonsensical idea of amateurism that they wouldn’t hear of any changes that might involve giving the players a piece of the action. They wouldn’t even let players have a job, and there were countless stories of athletes having to pay back money they won in some contest or something to maintain their eligibility.

Back then, when the cat was in the bag, all they needed to do was come together and say, “Listen, I know we like to hang out at these cocktail parties and talk about how pure the academic pursuits at our schools are and how smart we are, but we better come up with a system so we can get some money to our players, or there will be a lawsuit and it will blow up in our faces.”

I can’t believe there wasn’t at least one of those smartest-person-in-the-room types who at least had that thought. They didn’t.

They could have solved it right then —- “Hey Muffy, Gordon has a brilliant idea: Let’s give every scholarship athlete $1,500 a month on top of their scholarship and call it a licensing agreement share or something creative like that!”

Honestly, that is an oversimplification of why we are where we are, but it is the bitter truth. These college presidents created their own mess, and now they have to own it and lay in it to the tune of $20 million per year, per team and $2.8 billion overall.

Good luck with that.

I can’t imagine anyone thinks this revenue-share settlement — on top of NIL, the transfer portal and everything else — is the right model for college athletics. But it is the model we have, which means everyone involved can take a bow for creating this situation.

I don’t hate that athletes get paid. In fact, I am all for it.

But I hate that this goofy system, which has led to them getting paid, is in place because the smartest people in the room were too short-sighted to get out ahead of it all.

They should’ve been proactive and creative and created a model that makes sense and will work. They didn’t. So get your popcorn ready.