Why Should Government Solve This Problem?
Or, Lots of Them
My friend Jeff Minch wrote a good blog on the state of college athletics. He makes a ton of good points. Yesterday, the greatest college football coach in NCAA history Nick Saban testified in front of the Senate. The subject was the demise of college sports because of the transfer portal and the name, image, likeness (NIL) feature that has swept across college sports.
I would agree with anyone on the planet that injecting both of those things into college athletics was an exogenous shock to the system. College athletics had been ruled with an uneven but iron fist of the NCAA, a monopolistic power. When you inject the free market into a monopoly, apple carts get upset.
I don’t blame Coach Saban for stepping down. He is too old to see the changes through as a coach, but because of his experience and wisdom, he is one of the proper people to shepherd the game into whatever it becomes sans the NCAA.
Coaches need to be able to build teams. At the same time, those children who enter college need to decide if they want to take advantage of the college system to better themselves and prepare for a time when they won’t be playing and instead will be gainfully working as productive members of society.
Yes, after the band puts its instruments away, less than half a percent of all athletes in the sports that have pro leagues play in those pro leagues. It’s a minuscule number and if you have the chance to attend college, why become a ditch digger after you are done playing?
Cynics will say Saban stepped down because of competition and control or other issues. I don’t think that’s true. Coaches of his caliber aren’t successful if they don’t have deep heartfelt feelings about the future of the people who play for them. All successful coaches are that way.
Here is my broader question.
The college athletic marketplace is transitioning from a monopoly to free market competition. Why is the government involved at all?
We know from practical experience that the government will not solve this. We also know from practical experience that the free market is very, very messy and never arrives at a solution using a straight linear clean line. The solution that solves the problem isn’t even close to apparent today.
But, there is one.
Let it breathe. Let the market speak. Let the NCAA go away or evolve into something else.
The US government doesn’t need to dictate the direction or the terms.
I grew up in the NC basketball culture. It was a fun thing - lots of schools and lots of cross-cutting rivalries and lots of great games. When I was young, there were walk-on players, a few who were married, deeply rooted local social histories, and it was taken seriously in a way (like knowing all of the stats and history of long-ago players and reciting your own experience of big moments in big games) but not a big money way. The "Big Four" tournament (only on the radio) was the most important for bragging rights. It was killed by big money.
The first thing, which maybe led to all the rest of the things, was "TV time outs". Gradually then completely, what had been for the most part still actually a *game* became disgusting, and damaging. It's all about raking in the most money the fastest, by any means necessary (including ruining kids' lives, and lying cheating stealing). So-called "college basketball" now is unrecognizable in the luxury, corruption, exclusion, and really just un-fun-ness, besides having absolutely no relationship to college.
I'd like to see a farm team system for basketball as there is in baseball, so that college ball might return to relatively obscurity, a bit more wholesome or at least less catastrophic, even ideally for-fun again. I'd also like a pony.
Or maybe my idea is not so unrealistic - after the higher ed crash that has to come, and the sooner the better, maybe schools can be about school, with games only on the side, while big-money big business that peripherally involves young adults on a field or court and a ball of some sort can go off and do their own thing somewhere else. It's the distortion of professional sports frankensteined into higher ed that is the fundamental problem; I'm not sure either govt or markets can do much except make the resulting monstrosity worse.
The governments motivation for getting involved is to grow its power.