Everybody loves a good fairy tale, and college football has some of the best.
Whether it’s Rudy or Joe Burrow or a student tossing balls into giant Dr Pepper cans, we love to transform football accomplishments into full-blown heroic stories. We all watched a reserve Notre Dame linebacker sack a guy on the final play of his life while we pretended the movie theater’s dry air was irritating our eyelids, didn’t we? It’s legends like these that keep us coming back to college football.
A Useful Origin Story
In fact, the sport of college football — all of college sports, really — was founded on one of the greatest sports fairy tales of all time.
It goes something like this:
Once upon a time, American universities thought it would be fun to compete against each other in extracurricular sporting events. They created mascots and carved playing fields on their campuses and adopted uniforms with special colors. The student-athletes played the games in front of other students, fans and newspaper men.
Soon conferences and rivalries were formed. The biggest games were broadcast on the radio. College sports began to thrive and became an important part of American culture.
The schools recruited promising high school athletes to play for their teams, and even offered them scholarships as an incentive. In exchange, the student-athletes promised their undying loyalty to the institution. They were amateurs, playing for the love of their school and their sport, unsullied by financial influences.
College football fans fully embraced this tale as the unquestioned foundation of the sport. And for years it had some truth to it — a college scholarship is a valuable thing, after all, and it seemed a fair tradeoff for riding rickety buses to play football games in dusty old stadiums with no TV cameras in sight.
Death of a Fairy Tale
Over time the money started to pour in, however, and things started to get a little awkward. Million dollar TV deals became billion dollar TV deals, but the rules restricting the players from making money or changing schools didn’t budge. The players’ share of the pot remained 0.00%.
The NCAA was called upon to do the schools’ dirty work, enforcing a batch of rules that perpetuated college football’s fanciful origin story even in the face of the sport’s newfound riches. And college football fans continued to swallow that story whole.
College football is different, we told ourselves. It needs these rules to keep it pure and unique.
Eventually lawyers and judges had enough of the inequities and ripped the sport apart at the seams. Players were suddenly allowed to make piles of money on the side under “name, image and likeness” deals and to switch schools without penalty.
These changes have been a challenge for the fans to absorb. Most of us are in favor of the players getting more rights and powers, but the sport just doesn’t feel the same. We feel uneasy about the whole thing for reasons we can’t fully explain.
But it’s time for us to let go.
A New World
Any time a fairy tale is exposed as fiction we work through a stage of denial. The first Christmas after a kid learns the truth about Santa Claus is a little sad and wistful; the old way was so orderly and nice.
That’s where the fans are with college football right now. We knew there had to be changes, but did they have to be this drastic? We had bought in to that romantic old fairy tale and our subconscious hasn’t fully let go of it, so we kind of miss the days when forced loyalty and amateurism were part of the fabric of the sport.
We didn’t even realize we were doing it, but we had been tricked into viewing college football through the lens of the bosses — the schools, the NCAA, the coaches — and ignored the interests of the players.
Think about the “problems” you see with the new player freedoms. How will coaches manage their rosters if everyone transfers? What if a rich guy wants to pay players to come to his school? What if a player attends three schools in four years or something?
These might be problems, but they aren’t your problems. The correct answer to each of these questions is simple: So what?
If a coach can’t convince a player to stay at his school, or if boosters can’t pay him what the market says he’s worth, then maybe it’s time for the kid to look at other options. That’s how billion-dollar industries work. In the old days, a backup would be expected to show blind loyalty and stick around to run on the scout team and provide roster depth. Today, he has the chance to improve his lot at a different school.
The better questions are the obvious ones: Why shouldn’t college kids be allowed to receive money for their talent? Why shouldn’t they be free to choose where they want to go to college?
The transfer portal isn’t harming the game, it’s just rearranging the pieces on the board. Every kid who transfers out of a school is transferring in to another one. It’s a zero-sum game, and finally the players have a chance to play.
The following appeared in The Athletic on August 30, 2019, about a year after the transfer portal went live.
August 30, 2019
Dear Faux Pelini,
Can you explain what the transfer portal is and why coaches hate it?
Tom H.
Dear Tom,
The transfer portal is college football’s fancy invention that allows a player to publicly declare his desire to leave his school for a new one and to be proactive about improving his situation and his future.
So of course coaches hate it.
Coaches will tell you that the transfer portal is bad for college football, but what they really mean is that it’s bad for them. The only thing football coaches love as much as money, power and fame is control — especially over their roster and players.
Of course, the transfer portal doesn’t change college football at all, it just rearranges it a bit. But many agree with Toledo/Michigan State/LSU/Alabama coach Nick Saban, who believes a player shouldn’t be able to switch schools without consequences.
Why are coaches like this? Because we make them that way, Tom. We give coaches fame and riches and power, and the portal makes it harder for them to keep those things. So why should they like it?
If someone gave you an ice cream cone and then took it away five minutes later, you’d be mad even if it didn’t make sense. We’re trying to take away the coaches’ ice cream cones. How did we expect them to react?
And that’s why we shouldn’t care what coaches think about the transfer portal any more than we care what a toddler thinks about broccoli. They can whine all they want but they’re going to eat it. Or no ice cream.
I love ice cream.
"Toledo/Michigan State/LSU/Alabama coach Nick Saban"
You have an impressive way of making points without being loud or obvious about it. I appreciate that level of wit and trust in your readers.