It is slightly humorous – but above all pathetic – to what extent has changed in what motivates the so -called leadership of university sports.
How the salaries of the coaches and the Nile Bill affect university football
Dan Wolken breaks down the annual compensation for university football coaches to discuss wages and how the zero bill affects them.
Sports pulse
The date was January 15, 2016, long before anyone designed a team of 16 University football playoffs, A transfer portal or seven -digit offers for replacement level basketball players. The place was San Antonio, where NCAA officials and college administrators met for their annual agreement. And the subject; Oh my boy, was it warm.
During the second year of the so -called “autonomy” for Power Five conferences – a takeover that theoretically allowed the dry, Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and PAC -12 to extend the advantages of athletes without being slowed down by small schools – they were already out of large controversial ideas.
But there was a problem creating an important debate in the room: a proposal that would allow schools to pay for accommodation, meals and entertainment for up to four family members during official recruitment visits.
For normal people, without incident by the bureaucracy of boredom that governs university sports, it is common sense. Of course, a sports department with a new figure budget trying to attract the best talents should pay for accommodation, meals and entertainment costs for up to four family members.
But for these people, the brain of university athletics always takes over. So, of course, someone in the room wanted to plead exactly what it meant. After all, if you are at the UCLA, entertainment expenses could mean four seats on the field for a Lakers match that could be worth more than one house in two rooms, for example, Starkville, Mississippi. And would not provide this for recruits simply … unfair?
This is the moment when I realized that most of these people representing the richest schools and conferences – many of which are always able to shape the future of university sports a decade later – were simply unable to govern, even if they had described the ability to govern themselves as necessary to save NCAA.
It is not that people who work in university sports do not have the intellectual capacity to understand that these tiny competitive advantages perceived from school to school at the conference at the conference are ultimately without consequence for their collective commercial interests. Their culture simply does not allow them to see the overview through a constantly concern foam that one of their competitors draws a rapid.
It is slightly humorous – but above all pathetic – how much has changed in what motivates the so -called leadership of university sports, even if everything else has changed enormously during the decade since.
Here is now the SEC commissioner, Greg Sankey, the slim skin pedantic in Birmingham, all in his feelings while the League spring meetings take place this week in Florida because some of his colleagues dared to question the motivations behind Sankey and the Commissioner Big Tony Pettiti Jockeying for four automatic offers.
“I do not need others on the property of the match,” said Sankey on Sunday, meeting journalists before what will surely be intense internal discussions what the next CFP should look like. “I do not give a conference on the good of the game. And coordinate press releases on the good of the game, OK, you can publish your press statement, but I am actually looking for ideas to move us forward.”
Keep in mind that it was Sankey’s answer to a series of questions on a proposal that would attribute four CFP offers each year to the dry and Big Ten before a single game is played, while the ACC and the Big 12 receive only two guaranteed offers. If Sankey expected that his colleagues go up this porridge and leave a five -star criticism, he does not live in the country of reality. You cannot offer a strong arm and expect a handshake in return.
“In our own room, I had directors of athletics directly that we have given too much to arrive at these political compromises, that we move teams from outside (Top 12 in the classification in the playoffs),” said Sankey. “How many of these compromises does it take?”
The extent of the structuring of a 16 team elimination series may not be comparable to free meals during a recruitment visit, but they come from the same place: an endless battle in university athletics between those who have the most powerful power in their favor and those who fear that each recognition of the inherent inequality will be a ticket for second-class citizens.
And the particularly childish part of this debate is that the dry and big ten would be practically assured of bringing at least four teams to the qualifying series in an organic manner almost every year, despite an aberrant value possible here and there. It should be just as clear as the codification of the so-called “4-4-2-2-1-1-1” structure in the CFP format would be a toxic indulgence by dry and big ten, giving no practical value for themselves or greater public confidence in sport.
But the point to remember underlying is the same as when I listened to these debates in 2016 between the really rich schools and the somewhat rich schools on the recruitment visits: if This Will it be difficult for the dry and the big ten to achieve an agreement with the ACC and Big 12 on something that should be motivated by common sense, what luck in hell have they gather and solve problems really difficult to swallow their industry?
Intelligent and well -educated men and women who make seven figures to be managers of a sports league are reduced to children in a fight against the territory of playgrounds, because they have thought about the paranoia as a decision on the sidelines of an annual company of 1.3 billion dollars will be unfair to them.
And you wonder why university sports are in a complete blockage, now in the 6th year of begging of the congress for legislation that will reduce chaos of the transfer and Nile portal.
But what advances progress in university sports is not an ideological battle between the grandes écoles and the small schools on the management of the NCAA and how flexible its rules should be. It is, has been and has always been the inability of the grandes écoles to treat themselves fundamentally as business partners rather than competitors.
The CFP debate is only a symptom of a much more invasive disease, that that the main stakeholders in university sports prefer to make a fault making important concessions to cure.