NCAA 2.0: The end of college sports as we know it. But is it all bad?

The 2021-22 school year changed college sports irrevocably.

First, we heard whispers from the treetops of a seven-figure bidding war over top football recruit Walter Nolen, one with table stakes that exceeded Michigan’s pocketbook at this stage of the game.

Then things started careening downhill at the conclusion of the basketball season. First, Kansas State guard Nijel Pack, perhaps the nation’s most coveted transfer, landed a two-year, $800,000 package and a car to move to Miami, which then triggered a Twitter statement from the agent (you read that right) of current Miami star Isaiah Wong, demanding a raise from his $100,000 deal or he would transfer... which in turn triggered a stunning response from John Ruiz, the billionaire Miami booster whose company, LifeWallet, provides these “NIL” deals:

“He has been treated by LifeWallet exceptionally well. If that is what he decides, I wish him well, however, I DO NOT renegotiate! I cannot disclose the amount, but what I can say is that he was treated very fairly.”

Wong has since distanced himself from his agent’s comments.

Meanwhile, DePaul freshman wing David Jones entered the portal after averaging 14.5 points, 7.4 rebounds, 2.4 assists and 1.7 steals in the Big East for a resurgent Blue Demons squad, in search of a higher profile program and presumably the bigger payday that comes with it.

Finally, the 2021 Biletnikoff Award winner for the nation’s best wide receiver, Pitt’s Jordan Addison, entered the portal amidst rumors of a multimillion-dollar “NIL” offer from USC.

NIL, of course - being able to capitalize on one’s name, image and likeness as codified into law by the Ed O’Bannon case - is prohibited by the NCAA from being used as a recruiting inducement. However, the guard rails have so many gaps that it simply isn’t very difficult to be letter-of-the-rules compliant while grossly flouting the intent and spirit of NIL Many are calling for the NCAA to step in and strengthen these guard rails to prevent NIL from being thinly-veiled pay-for-play,

The truth is: you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

This market value exists for college players. The NCAA has spent decades trying to prevent them from capitalizing on it, and while Title IX complicates the issue of schools simply paying players directly, NIL was meant to be the steam valve that released the pressure.

That the containment room would blow, and quickly, was inevitable.

It was always going to be pay-for-play under a different name.

Layer on top of this the new rule allowing a single free transfer without having to redshirt and what has resulted, predictably, is chaos. Players that a coaching staff spent two years recruiting are quickly bolting for a better offer. The recruiting process now must include not just mining the high school ranks but mining other college rosters. Even professional sports don’t allow for at-will player movement! The closest is soccer, where players are able to decide when to leave a club, but even then a transfer fee needs to be agreed to between the two clubs. (Just this week, an idea was floated for two “transfer windows” in college sports, mimicking how soccer works.)

The starkest case of this chaos ravaging a program is LSU basketball, which a few weeks ago found itself with literally zero players on its roster - the entire team either graduated, declared for the NBA draft, or entered the transfer portal.

Either the opening up of NIL or one-time free transfers would have been fine on its own, but the two together create a lethal reaction, one that college sports ultimately cannot withstand without a major course correction.

Fewer and fewer coaches are going to want to contend with the insanity of every year having to scramble to patch the holes left by an increased number of transfers. The new normal of roster instability is going to degrade the quality of play in both basketball and football and create a less compelling product.

From a fan’s perspective, the three elements that differentiate college sports (which we’re passionate about) from minor league sports (which we don’t care at all about) are:

1. Regional rivalries mirror the parochial passion of English and European soccer.

2. The satisfying exercise of following players from recruitment through graduation or departure for the pro ranks.

3. The feeling of solidarity with the players, being of the same university community.

The first has already been compromised by Big Ten, SEC and Big 12 realignment creating conferences that blur or full-on obliterate regional lines. A conference that used to be synonymous with the midwest now includes New York and the mid-Atlantic in its footprint. The state that is synonymous with the southwest, Texas, is now part of the Southeast Conference. And in what world does having Cincinnati, West Virginia, Central Florida and Houston in the same conference make sense?

The dilution of regional identity is the dilution of a brand, a tradeoff conferences were, perhaps myopically, willing to make for the payoff that came from their media rights deals.

Now we have entered a realm where the last two are being wiped away and fans can’t even keep up with who is on their teams from year to year. The players whose courtship we followed, often from when recruits were 15, can now depart at will for a bigger bag.

The Baconian ideal of the amateur student-athlete was always quaint and in large part fraudulent, but the complete abandonment of even the pretense of what college sports used to be, with player movement becoming completely mercenary, will inevitably degrade fan investment in the game. We will finally, fully, as Jerry Seinfeld once joked, be rooting for laundry. The bodies inside those uniforms will be completely fungible.

Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick posited recently that the big conferences will almost inevitably secede from the NCAA and start something new. Once upon a time, this may have been viewed as a threat to college sports as we know it. Recent developments have made the idea of a blank slate appealing as a way to save college sports in some recognizable form. Un-tethered from the constraints of an obsolete legacy organization that lacks the will, the tools, the competence, and the vision to manage this new semi-professional world we are now entering, we can build a new framework that balances the unique appeal of college sports with the players’ rightful claim to some agency of movement and to share in the lavish profits that the game generates.

So... what would that look like?

Let’s call this NCAA 2.0.

***

The vision here is for 7 conferences of 10 schools each.

There are currently 69 teams in the Big Ten, Pac-12, Big 12, ACC and SEC.

Congratulations, SMU, and welcome back!

In football, teams will play all 9 conference opponents and 3 non-conference. The quality of the non-conference schedule will go up substantially from what we have now, as they’ll only be playing other major conference teams.

The playoffs will simply be the seven league winners. The top three get a bye into the semifinals, the other four play off for the last spot.

There would also be second and third place tournaments, so 21 of 70 schools get to play some postseason football.

Call the three tournaments the Playoff, the Challenge and the Showcase.

For basketball, we’re including the current 11-school Big East as well as basketball powers Gonzaga and Memphis (see below.)

The basketball season will be 18 or 20 conference games - a home & home with each league opponent - and filling out the rest of a 30-game schedule with a high-quality non-conference slate.

The March Madness field of 64 is an easy one: just the top 8 schools from each league. Those late-season battles for the final spots will be fierce.

The schools will be organized primarily with the aim of tight geographic alignment, which strengthens the regional rivalries and brand identity that are the lifeblood of college sports and minimizes travel time and expense:

PACIFIC: USC, UCLA, Cal, Stanford, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State, Arizona, Arizona State (plus Gonzaga for basketball)

CENTRAL: Utah, BYU, Colorado, Kansas, Kansas State, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M

SOUTH: Baylor, Texas Tech, TCU, SMU, Houston, LSU, Arkansas, Missouri, Ole Miss, Mississippi State

MIDWEST: Iowa, Iowa State, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Northwestern, Indiana, Purdue, Cincinnati, Louisville

NORTHEAST: Notre Dame, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State, Pitt, Syracuse, Boston College, Rutgers, Maryland

APPALACHIAN: West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, North Carolina, Duke, NC State, Wake Forest (plus Memphis for basketball)

SOUTHEAST: Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, South Carolina, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Florida, FSU, UCF, Miami

BIG EAST (basketball): UConn, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Villanova, Georgetown, Xavier, Butler, DePaul, Marquette, Creighton

There is obviously a lot to unpack here.

First, remember, the objective here is geography and preserving as many traditional rivalries as possible, not the competitive balance between the leagues. In football, the Northeast and especially the Southeast are incredibly strong; the South and Midwest not as much. In basketball, the Appalachian and Pacific (and to a lesser extent the Midwest and Northeast) are looking awfully good. And the relative strength of programs does evolve over time; in a new paradigm, expect some more volatility than we’re used to.

We don’t know, for example, how LSU will view being in a conference with no other traditional powers. Will they look at their regular season schedule as being too tepid, or will they see the easier path to the football Playoff as enticing? How will FSU and Miami - already struggling to regain past glory - feel about being in an even tougher environment?

We also can’t underestimate the complexity of re-working media rights. What happens to the Big Ten Network when the current Big Ten schools are now divided into two conferences? This is going to take a lot of negotiating, re-purposing of conference networks, and possible dissolution of some existing deals in favor of newer, more suitable ones. Making a change like this will be a mess, no doubt, but where there’s a will, there’s a way. No stakeholders are going to be left without a seat in this game of musical chairs. There’s going to be plenty of money and plenty of jobs for everyone.

To make the new entity work best for all member schools, there will need to be across-the-board media revenue sharing. All 70 football schools - and all 83 basketball schools - will share in TV revenue equally. We want every program to have the infrastructure to compete. To make increased player capitalism work is going to require a little socialism among the member institutions.

Now, what about compensation and player movement? This is where we have the chance to do something really interesting.

Start with this: every football and basketball player will receive a stipend of $50,000 per year plus tuition and room and board allowances and health insurance.

Players are then free to negotiate more money from donor collectives and true NIL opportunities as they choose. We stop pretending this isn’t pay-for-play. NCAA 2.0 will be an openly semi-pro endeavor.

Of course, with that will come a players’ union, although the collective bargaining agreements with the schools will not be nearly as complex as professional leagues have to manage.

Players will get 5 years to play 5 in a “3 + 2” contract setup: an initial 3-year contract, with a mutual option for 2 more.

Now, remember, when players were not getting paid, it was unfair to unduly restrict their movement. But not that they are getting paid and are under contract, it is no longer unreasonable to limit their movement somewhat, just like professionals. But we give them an automatic out after 3 years, leaving them 2 elsewhere.

At that time, a player can decide if he wants to sign his option (if offered by his current team), enter the portal, or enter the draft. If his school is not offering him the second contract, he will have the option to stay and finish out his degree without playing football if he so chooses. And if he enters the draft and is not selected, he is free to return to college at any school that wants him.

You will of course expect to have a huge number of players looking to change their situation every year. If we track by traditional attrition levels, 6-10 players from every recruiting class will look to finish their careers elsewhere, and they will be doing it all at once now. To figure out how to place them, we borrow an idea from the medical community...

At the end of medical school, there is a process called “match”. Medical students, in their fourth year, interview with the programs that they’re interested in and rank their top choices. The programs rank the candidates. Then an algorithm places all the medical students in the country with their residencies based on mutual prioritization. Most - but not nearly all - candidates get one of their top three choices. A small percentage don’t match at all and have to do what they call a “scramble” for open spots.

We could do this for all the players looking for a new school after 3 years. If a player and program both rank each other #1, that is where the player will definitely end up. If they both rank each other highly, that’s where the player is likely to land. And remember: no program needs to rank a player they don’t want, and no player needs to rank a program he doesn’t want to play for.

“Match Day” for college football would be a fan extravaganza.

This whole construct accomplishes something significant: the players still have a way out in the absence of the old transfer process, but by consolidating all the attrition into a single window at a predictable time, it keeps coaches and programs from being blindsided. They’ll know what their immediate transfer needs will be going into the spring Match, and can rank prospects accordingly.

Basketball is going to have to work a little differently. While not many football players are ready for the NFL in less than 3 years, most of the elite basketball players are.

So while the 3 + 2 contract setup will also be used in basketball, NCAA 2.0 will need to partner with the NBA on a “draft-and-follow” system.

All players will be draft-eligible coming out of high school. However, a team will not necessarily sign a player until they’re ready to play him. So that means, to use a Michigan example: Moussa Diabate and Caleb Houstan probably would have been drafted last year. However, the NBA teams that selected them would almost surely leave them at Michigan for 2-3 years to continue their development.

What you’ll see is a fair number of college basketball players finishing their seasons and then immediately joining the NBA team that has their rights and is now ready to sign them. We actually see some of this in hockey, with some free agents who finish their college eligibility and then sign and play in the NHL right away.

***

Decades of illicit benefits to talented college athletes may have been evidence of unscrupulous coaches who would do anything to win, but it was also evidence of that fact that someone was willing to pay these athletes, but the NCAA wouldn’t allow it for their own reasons that had nothing to do with the welfare of the player, the sport or the university.

In the latter days of the Soviet Union, glasnost and perestroika were intended to ease things up just a little bit and calm the growing unrest, just as the opening of NIL was meant to do in college sports. But just like the Soviet Union, the NCAA’s legacy governance was already in a terminal state. They were both systems doomed to crumble because they were never just, and once Ed O’Bannon ended the status quo of players as unpaid interns, that was the crumbling of the Berlin Wall for college sports, and eventual dissolution of the NCAA, like the Soviet Union, is a matter of “when”, not “if”.

What followed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union was a period of chaos. The eventual class of oligarchs looted the country and built massive fortunes for themselves. Former Soviet republics and satellites were born as independent states, with mixed economic results as everyone sought to join the global community as best they could.

We have entered into the chaos phase now that college football and basketball, as we knew them, are gone forever. We’re witnessing a power vacuum, as the shape this edifice will take in the coming years hasn’t even been blueprinted yet.

As we would tell the residents of some of the former Soviet republics, if we could go back in time: things will probably get worse before they get better. (And somewhere down the road, they may get worse again...)

But the opportunity is here, with a blank sheet of paper, to design something that could be even better than before. Let’s just hope that the right people get involved and have the vision and skill and wisdom to do it right.

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