College football has embraced the Name-Image and Likeness era which has led to the long overdue change to allow players to get paid. This however has led to some drawbacks that include inequities and distractions among teammates, rampant transferring between programs and the inability of smaller programs to compete. The inequities among teammates can lead to players feeling above one another or players not feeling as valued as others. Additionally, the transfer portal has hurt coaches’ abilities to build programs/cultures and also puts stress on each coach to not only recruit his players to come to his school but also recruit them to stay. This has led to a lot of college coaching talent leaving for lower jobs in the NFL so they do not have to deal with the year-round recruitment of their own players. Lastly, smaller programs don’t have the funds compared to the larger schools and cannot buy their teams the way bigger schools do, and when they do build and find good players many are recruited away from them by schools who will pay them more money.
Each of these downsides has hurt the game but the overall good that paying the players has done are a net positive for the game. However, one way to at least limit the negatives would be to implement contracts from the schools for the players. This would allow schools to sign their recruits to 3-4 year deals which would not allow them to transfer and allow coaches to coach rather than recruit their own players to stay on the team. Also, this would stem from a revenue-sharing model similar to the NFL where teams get their revenue from their TV contracts and split them evenly among teams. This would work through the conferences and would only be reasonable if we went back to regional conferences. Now this is likely impossible as there is just no way teams in the SEC and Big Ten go back to other conferences. The other solution to this is accelerating what is already happening and having two mega conferences of just the Big Ten and SEC.
The addition of contracts for these athletes would lead to the athletes being considered legally as employees. This means that they would be able to unionize, get healthcare or pensions, and enact a minimum salary for players. All of these would lead to an improvement in condition and help to eliminate two major problems that NIL has created. Those are the major inequities among teammates and the constant transfer portal issues. There will still be inequities but these programs will not have a blank check to finance their team so the teams will have a cap to pay players and it will incentivize building a scouting department.
Now ideally going back to regional conferences would be the best thing for college football because it would lead to the Power 5 being re-created which would keep long-standing rivalries and traditions going along with a more even revenue sharing among the conferences. If teams have similar “salary caps” so to say it would lead to fairness within conferences for sure and across conferences. This would put the value back on building programs and culture rather than buying teams. Now since this is likely impossible the more likely scenario would be that the Power 4 conferences essentially merge into the Power 2. This would also lead to equal revenue sharing since the two conferences would likely have very similar TV deals which would set the conferences equal to each other. This would create a level playing field for all major teams. In addition, there could also be a scale similar to the Premier League’s financial fair play rules which allows for a certain percentage of revenue to be spent on a team.
Overall this is likely not the final solution but in my mind it is a step in the right direction and will directly impact and limit the major downfalls of the NIL era. One solution often discussed is just getting rid of NIL altogether and going back to what we had. This in my eyes will never happen just because the players would never allow it and the door has been opened and there’s no closing Pandora’s box.
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