A long long time ago, college athletes didn't get paid for playing the sport they loved. You got recruited to a school, you played there for four or five years and then you either went on to play at the professional level or you moved on with a traditional career.
In fact, many players lived similar lives to many of us who attended university. Ramen noodles, crappy beds, small rooms, the works. Of course, there were a few exceptions where generous donors lavished gifts upon current players. Of course, those gifts didn't go unnoticed and in short time the NCAA was imposing sanctions on those teams or enacting the "nuclear option" effectively destroying their season.
Then several years ago the transfer portal became a thing. Suddenly athletes were moving from one school to another almost at will. Don't like your play time? Just go to a different school. It became that simple.
Then the NIL stuff started. If you aren't familiar, NIL stands for Name, Image, and Likeness and it is basically a way for the university athletes to get paid now. When this was proposed, I think the heart behind it was good, it made a bit of sense that players deserved to be rewarded for their efforts versus punished.
Unfortunately, in a few short years things have went off the rails and we now see a college sports landscape where loyalty means nothing and teams are basically encouraged to buy the best players thus ensuring their success.
Many long time coaches saw this coming and they decided to leave versus dealing with it. Why do you think Saban and that guy from Duke left? I guarantee a huge weight that tipped the scale for them was this whole NIL thing.
My nieces know a girl that plays basketball for Wisconsin. She was a good player and her first season she got a decent amount of play time even as a freshman. Unfortunately, the off season came and all of these transfers came from other schools who were being offered better money to play for Wisconsin than their old school.
Suddenly this year their friend finds herself getting hardly any play time. It's unfortunate too because Wisconsin was her dream school to attend. She is now left with the decision of staying and basically not playing, or leaving her dream school so that she can get some playtime.
This isn't an isolated incident either. I am seeing stuff like this happen all across the country. It's pretty much a daily think for me to see this softball coach or that softball coach post on Twitter about how they lost a recruit they spent years courting because another school was able to offer more money.
That's right, not everyone gets the same amount of money. Sure, there are "caps", but we all know that DI power conference schools have donors with deeper pockets than your local DII or DIII school. Therefore, they are able to offer significantly more money to woo players to their team.
What is going to end up happening is there will be the same handful of schools who have enough money to bring in the best talent and they will pretty much have a lock on the national championship. We are already starting to see this take shape and it isn't a good look in my opinion.
I think we need to remember that many of these players are still kids. Sure, they might be an adult according to the law, but they are still developing and learning. They will have plenty of time to deal with this stuff when they make it to the professional level if they do. For now let's let kids be kids and play the game because they love it not because there is a paycheck tied to it.
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