College football's next big problem: Parity

To paraphrase Frank Zappa, college football isn’t dead, it just smells funny.

To be sure, it looked like college football as a national pastime could have headed for the grave as the NCAA lost lawsuit after lawsuit in its defense of amateurism. The U.S. Supreme Court lashed out in its summary of NCAA v. Alston, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh condemning the whole system.

“The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America," Kavanaugh wrote in June 2021.

The outcome brings to an end the hypocrisy of amateurism in a billion-dollar game, and the NCAA begrudgingly lowered all of the gates it had used to maintain some facsimile of parity and balance. The output is an anarchic landscape that seems destined to reduce Division 1 participation as competition escalates the cost of doing business.

If only the strong survive, we could be left with whatever arsenal of teams the SEC and Big Ten could acquire.

As NCAA member institutions move forward in the post-amateur era, can college football live on with two-conference dominance?

Football is a game of continuity and development as much as it's about talent acquisition, but roster churn has become the new normal for every team, thanks to the additional burden of the NCAA’s lax transfer rules.

Better-funded NIL collectives mean the rich get richer, allowing elite programs to pick off the best players that other programs invested time and energy into developing. It's turned teams from conferences below the SEC and Big Ten into de facto farm teams.

Defenders of the new system argue college football has never had parity. This is mostly true, but the gap between the top and middle has never been this great. If lesser programs can't keep the players they develop, the path to competing against the giants appears insurmountable.

The SEC in particular is happy to play this zero-sum game. Since the advent of the BCS in 1998, seven different SEC teams have won national championships, 15 total in 26 years, proving again and again that money and commitment to the sport builds champions. With the addition of Texas and Oklahoma, the conference has added two more winners in that time span to their quill. Their fan bases are driven to maintain that dominance, and NIL empowers them.

Read more: NIL, revenue sharing: How did college sports get here?

Arizona State fans have first-hand experience with this, watching players use Tempe as a launching pad to paydays at LSU, Florida and Georgia.

The expanded 12-team playoff was supposed to return hope to the middle of the pack, but the SEC and Big Ten gobbled up six more highly visible programs to vie for those spots, killing the Pac-12 in the process.

Even the programs new to the big conferences seem to understand the stakes of the game.

Newly-minted Big Ten member Oregon has "unlimited" NIL from booster Phil Knight, according to former Washington and UCLA head coach Rick Neuheisel. It's a claim almost impossible to fact-check, but the Ducks have a top 5 recruiting class for 2025 so far. It's hard to imagine a class of that caliber being assimilated in this era without a truckload of financial promises, even at a glamour school like Oregon.

Everyone is spending something, though.

Student-athletes collected a projected $1.175 billion in Name, Image, Likeness spending in 2023-24, with over 70% of it going to football, according to NIL athlete platform Opendorse. The company projects that number to rise to $2.55 billion by 2025-26.

The original concept for NIL meant athletes could chase the same corporate capital as NFL players, but the Opendorse report claims more than 80% of all NIL is provided by university collectives.

If that smells funny to you, you’re not alone.

“Let’s be honest, we’re all money laundering,” an unnamed SEC athletic director reportedly told Sports Illustrated last year.

It was 37 years ago when the NCAA canceled all 11 of Southern Methodist's 1987 football games and four more in 1988 stemming from $61,000 in payments from a booster slush fund to 13 football players.

Turns out they weren’t outlaws after all. They were pioneers who were just four decades ahead of their time.

The NCAA and member conferences are not na?ve to the extracurricular activity, and submitted a full term sheet at the end of July as part of a settlement negotiation for multiple antitrust lawsuits that includes language in hopes of combating this.

In agreeing to athletic revenue sharing, they want NIL deals to be subject to review for, “a valid business promotion or endorsement,” along with language that produces some kind of market control. The proposal includes arbitration for disputes — their hope of ending the parade of lawsuits that continue to trickle in.

The proposal has obvious detractors and could delay any finalized settlement into 2025. Some, like Russell White of the pro-NIL group The Collective, also recognize it as an end-around the crux of the SCOTUS decision in favor of athletes.

“The more I dig into the proposed settlement, the more I feel like the folks at the @ncaa just took every idea anyone in the building could come up with & threw it in. Sort of like a weird stew…,” White posted on X.

While the battle continues, we are left with the distinct odor of uncertainty for a game that's increasingly hard to recognize, but it's not dead yet.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Parity is next big problem for college football