Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Thu 2024-12-19 8:15PM Cleveland Browns @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sat 2024-12-21 1:00PM Houston Texans @ Kansas City Chiefs
Sat 2024-12-21 4:30PM Pittsburgh Steelers @ Baltimore Ravens
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Arizona Cardinals @ Carolina Panthers
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Detroit Lions @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM New England Patriots @ Buffalo Bills
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM New York Giants @ Atlanta Falcons
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Tennessee Titans @ Indianapolis Colts
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Philadelphia Eagles @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-12-22 1:00PM Los Angeles Rams @ New York Jets
Sun 2024-12-22 4:05PM Denver Broncos @ Los Angeles Chargers
Sun 2024-12-22 4:05PM Minnesota Vikings @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-12-22 4:25PM Jacksonville Jaguars @ Las Vegas Raiders
Sun 2024-12-22 4:25PM San Francisco 49ers @ Miami Dolphins
Sun 2024-12-22 8:20PM Tampa Bay Buccaneers @ Dallas Cowboys
Mon 2024-12-23 8:15PM New Orleans Saints @ Green Bay Packers
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Notes -
I'm glad this is in the news again because it dovetails nicely with something semi-related: James Franklin's complaining about how the transfer portal closes in the middle of the playoffs, meaning his good backups are all out. There was some discussion of this on local sports talk radio where everyone seemed to be in agreement that it was ridiculous that the portal closed on December 28 and shouldn't even open until after the championship game. There was a brief mention that it might be some kind of transfer credit thing that keeps them from moving the dates back, but this was quickly dismissed since everyone seems to understand that the idea of these kids being students is a myth anyway.
But I don't think they really gave the issue proper treatment. The National Championship game is on January 20. The portal, as it is now, is open for almost 3 weeks, so if it opened on January 21 it wouldn't close until sometime around February 7. In the middle of the spring semester. If schools want to maintain the ever-fading illusion that these are student-athletes at all, they can't start accepting mid-semester transfers purely for athletic reasons. If they do, they open themselves up to further lawsuits challenging the entire idea of academic eligibility, or even that a player has to actually be enrolled in the school. After all, if you're regularly allowing athletes to drop out of classes a few weeks in before transferring just in time to be hopelessly behind any classes they can manage to get into (people out of college a while tend to forget how quickly classes fill up), it's going to be hard for the NCAA to make the argument that they even pretend to care about academics.
One possible solution is to delay the effective date of the transfer until the summer semester. This creates an additional problem, though, in that the player wouldn't be able to participate in spring practices, and any coach looking at transfers would like to know what he has as quickly as possible and get the new guy integrated with the team. It's hard to imagine that this policy would lead to any less bitching on the part of people like Franklin than the current system.
Here's where I think this all ties into Klosterman's point: None of this has affected fandom because most of the concerns are academic for the time being. We can bitch about players being paid or entering the transfer portal, but it hasn't really affected the on-field product that much. Middle and lower tier schools aren't able to pay big NIL money like the big schools, but they weren't able to recruit like the big schools, either, and the effect of the portal so far seems to be a wash. If nothing else, I don't see Colorado or Indiana or even Pitt (despite the massive choke job) having the seasons they've had without the recent rule changes. Coach Prime might be a doofus who gets criticized for his way of doing business, but that program was circling the drain before he came, and he single-handedly revived it.
The problems will start to creep in when the economics of the game start to have an adverse impact on the top schools. Take Penn State, for instance. In a normal year, if Drew Allar got injured and they lost a playoff game because of it, it would suck for them but be an accepted part of the game. If Allar gets injured this year and they're forced to start a freshman who has never played in an NCAA game, it will be a disaster. The consensus among Penn State fans will be that the normal backup would have at least given them a shot, while losing him on short notice completely wrecked their season. As a Pitt fan, I would absolutely love to see this happen if only for the number of central Pennsylvanian heads that would explode.
The starters aren't immune to this either. In recent years, there's been a trend of NFL-bound players sitting out bowl games to avoid injury. After Matt Corral got injured in his bowl game, it became common wisdom among commentators that sitting out is the smart move and it's just not worth it to play. How long before this logic starts creeping into the playoff? If you're going to the NFL the next season, the downside of playing greatly outweighs the upside, especially if you've already indicated that you're only chasing money. One or two games might not be a tough sell, but three or four? What happens when starters start hitting the portal before the playoffs when offered more money? Fans begged for a playoff for years and now they've got one. If the whole thing ends up determining not who has the better team but who has the most seniors not heading to the NFL, or the fewest guys entering the portal, or any number of ancillary factors, then it will turn into a farce that even hardcore fans will find hard to accept.
Yeah, it seems if anything so far the NIL has increased the parity in the sport, which has been nice, parity is one thing college football hasn't historically always done all that well.
As to the academic logistics of being a student athlete, I have no firsthand knowledge, but I'd be curious to know what ratio of online classes athletes sign up for these days.
That was barely a thing when I went to school, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the flexibility some online classes provide are fairly essential lynchpins of making the logistics of being a student athlete these days work. I suspect there are a fair number of athletes who are almost never in physical classes. Especially sports like basketball with middle of the week travel (especially in conferences with across the country schedules).
I think it's the portal more than NIL, at least for teams that don't have a ton of money available. You figure every 17 year-old kid who's being heavily recruited thinks he can just walk into Ohio State or LSU or Clemson and prove that he's worthy of being in the starting lineup and on the fast track to the NFL, and the recruiters do little to disabuse them of this notion ("Well, it's competitive but if you work hard..."). Instead, they find themselves buried on the depth chart behind two other guys, and when they think they'll get a chance at a promotion some other guy comes in to take their place. They only get playing time during blowouts, and the coaches aren't paying them much attention. Then they put their name in the portal and Iowa State or Georgia Tech or whoever comes calling and now they're suddenly in demand at a school that's not as big but big enough to get them national exposure if they're good. Or they're tearing it up at Kent State and have a chance of moving up in the world by transferring to Purdue. Schools that can't recruit as well can still compete by getting the big schools' castoffs and the small schools' surprises.
As NIL and soon, direct payments, become involved, I think this calculus changes. Pitt already saw Jordan Addison leave because USC simply offered him more money than any Pitt booster could match, especially in the early days of NIL payments. I was listening to a discussion on the radio yesterday about how colleges shouldn't even waste money on recruiting when you can just buy a team or get it through the transfer portal. The argument was that you can talk about the history and facilities and campus environment all you want, but they're always going to go to the school that can write the largest check. And if you can't afford to write that check, then sit back and wait for the inevitable transfer.
One thing I would add to my above comment is that while the article points out that the ruling isn't final, in reality I wouldn't expect the court to reverse it. One of the requirements for obtaining a preliminary injunction is demonstrating a high probability of success on the merits, and while the arguments probably weren't briefed as fully as the will be later, an appellate court granting an injunction is a strong indication on which way they're moving. This is in line with the general trend that has seen courts striking down any restrictions relating to NIL payment. One article I read suggested that the NCAA needed to settle all of the lawsuits before they were made completely powerless, but this only delays the inevitable. In a sport where there's no collective bargaining and athletes cycle through every few years, any settlement is only going to apply to a limited number of people.
There are some proposals out there by academic types who claim that the problem would be solved if only courts would rule that student athletes were employees, or if the NLRB would institute rules allowing them to collectively bargain. This is a pipe dream. First, the NLRB can make all the rules it wants, but there's currently no incentive for the student athletes to collectively bargain. Even if we limit the unions to single sports, we're talking about thousands of athletes, none of whom are staying more than a few years, so organization is a problem straight away. Classification as employees doesn't solve this problem but creates more, in that now they have to be paid minimum wage (which wouldn't be that expensive under the current system) and abide by all the other HR bullshit that workplaces have to abide by. Getting back to the incentive problem, though, even if you could bargain, why would you? Collective bargaining units are usually formed when employees have grievances with their employers that can only be addressed by power in numbers. What grievances do student athletes have? There were student athletes in the Northwestern case who wanted to form a union, but that was before the NIL ruling. We're in a situation now where athletes can sell their services to the highest bidder on an annual basis, and courts are hesitant to uphold any restrictions. When commentators say that the mess can be solved by collective bargaining, what they really mean is that it would be easier for the schools to impose restrictions if there were a union to negotiate with. But who is going to form a union for the purpose of allowing the boss to implement more restrictions?
The only way I can see this ever being addressed is if the NCAA were to eliminate the student athlete protections from its bylaws. The courts seem intent on eliminating anything else that isn't related to scheduling or rules or officials, so what do they have to lose? The first thing I would drop is the limits on practice time for football and basketball. They're currently limited to 20 hours per week in season and 8 in the offseason, but if they're getting paid like employees they can work like employees. Schools that want to win will start implementing more intense practice schedules, and the athletes won't be able to do anything about it. If they flunk all their classes, well, that's a fringe benefit; if you're here to get an education, you can pay tuition. Stop coddling them with tutors and lounges and multi-million dollar locker rooms (seriously, the difference between Pitt's locker room and the Steelers locker room in the same building is astounding).
Teams that were serious about winning would accordingly practice more, and with the money involved, some would want their teams at the practice facility the 10–12 hours per day that NFL teams expect. There will obviously be some kids who are dead serious about their careers and will want to spend as much time on the game as possible. But few 18-year-olds with no shot at the NFL want that kind of commitment, especially if they're still ostensibly there to get an education. Taking online classes in a cubicle adjacent to the locker room in between workouts probably wasn't what they had in mind. Not having a social life during the season because you have to get up at 6 am for practice every day except Sunday and Friday probably wasn't what they had in mind. The schedule of the average NFL player doesn't have much appeal to someone who isn't playing football for a living. But any program that adopts such practices will probably have an advantage, and in a market where more wins equals more money, few schools will be content to be left behind.
One possible counterargument to this theory is that some schools will adopt less demanding schedules and use that as a selling point to recruits. But I don't see it happening that way. Such a school would attract lazy players, and, combined with the built-in lesser amount of practice, would make it hard for these school to be competitive with the tougher ones. With so many schools looking for a piece of the pie, and so many roster spots to fill on college teams, it's now a race to the bottom to see who can work the kids to the point of diminishing returns. At this point, the only way out for the athletes is to make concessions about payments and transfer rules, and you need a bargaining unit for that. I doubt this would actually happen, but it's the only way I see collective bargaining entering college football.
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Bit of googling came up with this article about athletes and online classes - https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2019/12/23/online-classes-keep-football-players-out-of-academic-fray/40878105/
"Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow is a hero on LSU's Baton Rouge campus, but he hasn't seen much of it because he took graduate courses online. Justin Fields rarely has to step inside an Ohio State classroom building because he also does most of his school work online to accommodate his grueling football schedule.
...
Of the 46 Power Five conference schools that responded to an AP survey, 27 have no limits on how many online courses athletes may take. A dozen others have few online course offerings or limit how many athletes may take. Just six have no online offerings or prohibit athletes from taking them, including private schools Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Southern California, Texas Christian and Notre Dame. Michigan is the only public school among the Power Five conferences that doesn't offer online learning."
(Article is pre-Covid)
I suspect they still spend a lot of time with the academic support tutors, especially the younger athletes.
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