Published: Sunday, July 31, 2022
Football is the tail that wags the dog in college athletics.
Thanks to television contracts, football is the cash cow, ATM and checkbook of most sports on a campus.
Basketball still makes money, and in Arkansas, Eric Musselman has turned the Razorbacks into a year-round sport again.
Under Hall of Fame coaches Nolan Richardson and Eddie Sutton, the Hogs headlined 12 months out of the year, then became seasonal and, at times, barely.
The NCAA Basketball Tournament, the biggest sporting event, is the NCAA’s No. 1 source of revenue.
What the NCAA is now seems to be up in the air, especially now that it’s looking for a new president.
The once powerful organization that controlled college athletics with a tight fist has been stripped of its power because its last leader seemed to lack vision.
He has not been able to get any control over the transfer portal, NIL and conference realignment.
Now as of Wednesday, the NCAA appears poised to allow unlimited transfers for athletes who qualify and transfer for a specific time period.
Both requirements are good ideas. However, the unlimited portion will wreak havoc on college football.
In a recent column by Dan Wolken for USA Today Online, Tom Mars called unlimited transfers “absolute chaos.”
If you don’t know who Mars is, you haven’t been paying attention.
He’s the Arkansas attorney who worked with the NCAA to allow athletes who transferred to be eligible immediately and not have to sit out a year.
Mars is a high-profile litigator who knew little about college athletics until, at the urging of his former pastor, Rex Horne, he took on Houston Nutt as a client.
Nutt was being charged with most of the NCAA violations by his former employer Ole Miss. Nutt had a few, but the majority of the violations were against former head coach Hugh Freeze. Nutt received his apology.
Mars followed that up by securing Shea Patterson’s immediate eligibility at Michigan after transferring from Ole Miss.
Suddenly, Mart’s phone was blowing up with athletes wanting him to represent them. Then the coaches swung into action and at one point the NCAA talked to him about employment.
Meanwhile, conference expansion appears to be in a celebratory pattern, though new Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark has said his league is open for business.
New Pac 12 commissioner George Kliavkoff said he doesn’t expect his league to buy into Big 12 country.
Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren said USC and UCLA may not be the end of his league’s expansion and that it will take a “bold” approach to growth.
The SEC’s Greg Sankey recently said his league would be “agile,” and ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, who has been on the job for a year, said everything is on the table.
None of them are saying it, but the trophy they all want is in South Bend, Indiana, which borders Kentucky, making it a state contiguous to the SEC’s footprint.
Notre Dame, a semi-independent, has to be at the top of everyone’s wish list. He will eventually realize the need to be part of a conference because college athletics as we know it no longer exists.
It’s still good and fun, but it’s going to be different. Southern Cal and UCLA didn’t jump conferences because they wanted to experience a game in a snowstorm. They did it for money.
Until some leadership is found, there will be no normalcy in college athletics. If it’s not too late, the NCAA needs to shoot for the moon or even Mars for a leader who can control NILs, transfers and conference realignment.
