For over thirty years covering college football, I’ve been warned about things that could destroy the sport more times than I could count.
Skyrocketing coaches’ salaries, paying players, scholarship limits, roster sizes, never ending facility improvements, ticket costs, oversaturated television deals, advertising on the uniforms or fields, Title IX, a playoff, an expanded playoff, conference realignment, legalized sports wagering or the Rose Bowl having to change their preferred time slot.
You name it and somebody, somewhere, was afraid of it.
More recently, the transfer portal and NIL have transformed the sport into something that my grandfather would barely recognize.
Many of those things, critics argued, would make college football too much like the NFL.
They should be so lucky. Professional football is the most popular sport in the United States by a wide margin.
If we believe ratings and revenue are good pigskin barometers, college football is doing just fine, too. Of course, everything costs more, but that’s just life. I once read an article about spiraling salaries killing baseball.
It was written in 1912.
But we’ve finally reached a case that has the possibility to rock college football to its core. This time, it isn’t just fear mongering.
Matthew Sluka was a starting quarterback for UNLV until early Wednesday morning. That is when Sluka announced that he was leaving the school to redshirt, because his promised compensation was not being delivered.
UNLV is 3-0, a start the Rebels haven’t matched since 1984. Sluka, a transfer after four years at Holy Cross, was a big reason why. The quarterback had accounted for just over 600 total yards and seven touchdowns.
I don’t know what UNLV or some outside party representing UNLV promised Sluka. I don’t know what he agreed to. I don’t know who could have been impartial in brokering a settlement to keep the quarterback on the field.
I do know that if players can demand to renegotiate, in season, or else they’re leaving, then the doomsayers may very well finally have their day.
Don’t laugh.
The players already opt out of the bowl games. Sometimes they opt out of some or all of their final season for various reasons. What is to stop a group of top players from marching into the coach’s office two days before a big game and demanding more compensation?
Would it hurt their professional chances? Sure, but many of these kids are just really good college football players and no more than a longshot to make the NFL. This would be the last chance for some to score a big payday.
Love of school? That ship has mostly sailed. Love of teammates? Hey, business is business. It might cost them a year of eligibility if they did it later in the season, but imagine the leverage a starting quarterback has the week of a championship game?
The NFL has free agency, but it doesn’t have perpetual free agency. Pat Mahomes can’t go to the Chiefs in January and tell them to redo his contract or else he is leaving for Denver.
The transfer portal is here to stay, and, in the offseason, it’s just a part of doing business now. However, there must be some genuine disincentive for players not to pack up and leave in September or October over financial disputes. Otherwise, the game itself is in jeopardy.
It could be that written contracts become required. The NFL has successfully gone after players who quit to return parts of their signing bonuses. A major college football players union, which seems inevitable, might actually help insure reasonable negotiations.
But a conference championship game or a playoff game cannot be in doubt because of an NIL dispute. If college football doesn’t figure out a way to hold both players and schools accountable, it is waiting for a potential disaster.
There’s a great line in the movie “North Dallas Forty” from a professional football player arguing with an owner.
“Every time I call it a game, you call it a business. Every time I call it a business, you call it a game.”
It is past time for everyone in college football to call it the same thing, even if that thing looks more like a profession than an athletic event.
