College football now has more money - and more problems
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I want to start by playing some audio of Charles Huff, who was the head coach of the Marshall University football team this past season. Before a game against Ohio State, he jokingly tried to lure in any potential transfers. I would love to have some of those guys from Ohio State, too. So if they want to transfer on down...

We've got a Tudor's Biscuit NIL all-you-can-eat. So if any of those guys that run really, really fast at Ohio State like Tudor's Biscuits, I promise you, all-you-can-eat all day if you transfer here. I had never heard of Tudor's Biscuits before, but, Jesse, it did get me wondering, what, if anything, would be an all-you-can-eat NIL deal that would convince you to go and play for Marshall? Oh, man. Yeah.

Chicken tenders? Just any chicken? I'm sorry. Tell these chicken tenders from Syracuse where I went to school. Well, we've got a 12-year-old with us. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Ava Wallace. I write the Sports Moment newsletter, and I am your guest host today.

It is Friday, December 20th. Today, I'm talking with sports columnist Jerry Brewer and Jesse Dougherty, who covers the business of college sports for us. We're talking about college football. The playoffs start tonight, and the sport looks really different than it ever has before because of NIL deals, because of how easy it is to transfer now as a college athlete, and because of expanded playoffs that mean there are way more games than ever before. ♪

Jesse, Jerry, this is a very exciting weekend in college football. We've got four games. Jesse, where are you headed? I will be covering Notre Dame versus Indiana. Notre Dame being one of the classic legacy college football programs in Indiana. On the flip side, this upstart team this year, 11-1, came out of nowhere, so it should be a really exciting game. Jerry, where are you going?

I am going to Austin, Texas for Clemson at Texas. Battle of the oranges. Do you like knockout orange, which is the orange that Clemson wears? Is that what it's called? Oh. Yes. Knockout orange. Or do you like burnt orange, which is the Texas Longhorns color? Okay. So the playoffs are going to be different this year. First round games are at college stadiums. There are 12 teams in the playoff instead of four. But it's not just the playoff that's different. College football really feels like a whole new iteration of the sport.

Jesse, tell me about NIL and how it's changed things over the past couple of years. Name, image, and likeness. NIL has been this driver of, like, immense change in college sports. So I won't do the whole arc and history of it, but in July of 2021, the NCAA first permitted athletes to capitalize on

make money off their name, image, and likeness. So what that's meant is they can ink endorsement deals. So Nike, or I'm going to send an Instagram post for a local pizza shop for $20.

Athletes are also getting paid by donors, and that's where the real big money is. That's when we see this player is transferring from X massive team to Y massive team. That usually means that donors and boosters are fronting money for these very large sort of de facto contracts and salaries. So that's where NIL has really had a massive effect on player movement, on who wins, who loses, who's in this playoff, and the landscape has really gotten shaken up.

And Jerry, that's not just football. I know that football players and probably men's basketball players are benefiting the most from the NIL era, but it does account for, I mean, your random kind of swimmer at any school can also be profiting. Is that right? Yes, that's right. Any athlete in theory could, but it's a matter of like, what do these collectives, what are these boosters, what are these people who are profiting?

donating to the NIL fund, who do they want to support? And what it's done, however, it's created a greater inequity between the so-called revenue generating sports. And that's men's basketball, football, and in about 15 to 20 programs, women's basketball. And remember the revenue generating sports subsidize women's

all of the rest of the athletic department. And most college athletic departments have to balance their books. They cannot take money, you know, from anywhere else in the university fund. So that's why they pour millions and millions of dollars trying to maximize all of the revenue they can get from having a good college football or college basketball team. So, Jesse, you kind of brought up how the money gets handed out and these donors and collectives.

Why aren't schools just paying these athletes directly? And what do we know about how these kind of collectives and these donor systems work? Yeah, it's a great question. And it's a bit confusing. But the reason why schools aren't paying athletes is because, as of now, they're not allowed. And...

These systems and NIL largely came into place because for so long, schools were generating millions and sometimes billions of dollars over a period of time without the athletes sharing in any of that wealth. But now, in the first three years of the NIL era, so to speak, paying athletes has actually been left to both brands, like we said earlier, and then these booster groups called collectives. And what the collectives do is they raise money among donors.

And then they distribute that to athletes for some sort of service. So a lot of these collectives are actually nonprofits. They're soliciting tax deductible donations from rich alums. And then what they're doing is they're running up these big payrolls. I mean, some college teams are spending 20 million plus 15 million, $12 million on their rosters per season. And the way the money flows is I'm a donor. I give to the collective that supports the athletic program, uh,

on the school at the school I went to or the school I support. And then that collective then sends it out to an athlete for some sort of service. There's odd rules that it actually cannot be for playing football. Now, wink, wink. We know that that's the case. Athletes make money because they're very good at throwing to receivers or running through a hole or tackling. But when they actually get the paycheck, it's for something like a charity visit to a hospital or an autograph session with fans.

And we've seen with this playoff that a lot of the major, major NIL spenders, Oregon, Texas, Ohio State, Tennessee, are right there in the mix. And they're in the 12-team playoff this year. So as far as strategy goes, of course, football matters and culture matters, but cutting big checks is...

pretty good too. Jerry, Jesse just kind of mentioned it right there that the teams that are maybe spending the most are in the playoffs. But other than that, what has the effect of the NIL era been on college sports, on college football in particular? I believe the word would be awkward, cumbersome. Ava, it's made the entire experience weird because we're not used to

this young, having conversations about money. You know, when someone commits to your university that you root for, you expect them to be just as into it as you are and to realize that it's more transactional for them has really upset college fans. College fans

Fans get super upset every year that the transfer portal opens, which is the window in which college athletes are able to transfer, and they decide to go somewhere else. And it's reported that because a school had more NIL money to give them or their coach leaves and they decide, I'm bouncing as well. So it's just we have been led to believe that

our entire lifetime until the last four years in college football and college athletics, that it's all about amateurism. And we have a very strictly defined version of what it means to be an amateur athlete, which is you're not profiting at all. Your education is enough. The fact that that has changed has just rocked people's world. It's not going to affect viewership.

However, I do think that fans are looking at these kids more like the pros and they're they're a lot harder on them as individual kids than they've ever been before. And it's all because of the money. OK, that sounds like a good place to take a pause. After the break, we are going to talk about the other major thing that's shaking up the college football landscape, conference realignment. We'll be right back.

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Of course, the changing landscape in college football isn't all due to NIL. We're also in the first year post-major conference realignment. Jesse, explain briefly, if you can, what conference realignment is and why it came about.

Conference realignment, briefly explained, is the hunt for the last dollar, I think. You're so cynical. But it's teams in the past year playing this sort of maniacal game of musical chairs in an effort to get in one of the four conferences that pay the most television money. And which are those? SEC. Southeastern Conference. Yes, the Big Ten of 18 teams.

They need to change the name. The Big 12 of 16 teams and the ACC. The Atlantic Coast Conference. Yes. So what happens is that those conferences have the most television money, and really the Southeastern Conference and Big 10 have the most, most television money. So teams started to want to get into those conferences, the intuitive reason being that if you're in them, you get more money yourselves. So, I mean, the big changes were Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12 for the SEC and

USC and UCLA leaving the Pac-12, which... The Pac-12, which now does not exist anymore. And then maybe will again, though, because now teams from the Mountain West, so, you know, Conference Alignment is a... I forgot about the Mountain West. Yeah, Conference Alignment is a zero-sum game. So, it's... So, basically what's happening is that it's sort of more of the rich getting richer and it's

Everyone's sort of wanting to be at that big kids table. So, conference realignment has definitely changed the sport in a lot of ways, and you're right. I mean, this playoff is a direct result of that, too. So, if I can kind of summarize it in my mind, it's just everything has been consolidated into these big four conferences, the biggest of which are the Big Ten and the SEC. Jerry, what has that meant for you?

When I'm sitting down and watching college football all day on Saturday and I'm now watching Oregon play Ohio State in a conference game or I'm watching Penn State fly across the country to play USC. How has that affected things? I think let's go back to why the why of these conferences. Right. Like they were set up originally in a regional fashion.

because these are college students, right? Like, and we keep touching upon the tension between what is amateur athletics and what is professional athletics. College sports has become more professionalized. And the reason that we had a PAC eight, PAC 10, PAC 12 conferences so that everyone in the Pacific region would play each other and they wouldn't have much more than a three hour flight. Uh,

Similar. That's why it's called the SEC. It's everyone in the southeast. All of the major universities would play each other and the travel would be made easier. And now what you have is that television executives decided, you know what? We do not want to see nor do we think that our viewers want to see Georgia and Vanderbilt every year.

We want bigger and better matchups. We would rather see Georgia and Texas play each other. We would rather see the best games that we could possibly have. And that was ultimately the reason we, we're going to give you more money for you to tear this thing up and for you to put the best teams out there. It's essentially like the NFL. And, uh, that has, that has just, um,

It goes against everything for a long time that we believe that college sports should be in favor of the almighty dollar. But you talk about that. I mean, I understand what you're saying in terms of the debate between amateurism and professional athletes. But if we are in an era where college athletes are getting paid and also in an era where like

I feel more connected. It is not a big deal. Well, aside from the price of flights, which is a big deal. But like I can get across the country in a day and it's easy and it doesn't nothing feels very regional anymore. As a viewer, yeah, I want to see the best games in the country. Like why is why is that creating so much tension?

I think it's created so much tension because tradition means so much to college sports. And look at what it's done to some of your rivalries. The biggest weekend in terms of rivalries for college sports have always been either the season opener or right after the Saturday, the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving. And that was...

when you would get Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Washington, Washington State, obviously the rivalry that will never be destroyed, Ohio State and Michigan and so on and so forth. And then now some of these rivals aren't in the same conference. I mean, people are used to being able to, yes, you can travel across the country with relative ease, but not

with light expense as opposed to just getting in the car and going. And so everybody has to kind of recalibrate. And it's weird to see a conference that is branded the Midwest to have teams from LA and teams from Piscataway, New Jersey in the same conference. And so people will get used to it because they love and they're obsessed with football. But is it the right thing? I think for most fans,

No. If you claim that your athletes are also students, is it the right thing for the student athlete? No. And then the other thing with college athletics that seems really weird to me, we're doing this for football, but we bring the entire athletic department into this mess.

And so is it right for a tennis player who's not even on a full scholarship to have to travel all the way around the country when they only wanted that partial scholarship to get an education? Is it right to have them do the same thing as a bunch of football players who want to get to the NFL as fast as possible and have no problem traveling the country because they

They're just trying to make enough grades to stay eligible. And as soon as they're allowed to go pro, they're going to go pro. Of course, you know, maybe those football players are collecting some NIL money and maybe they get to fly on private jets and such. But your average tennis player, especially your average female athlete at any school, is not being paid the same in NIL.

I want to look ahead a little bit now, and I know college football is as easy to predict as the weather. But, Jesse, what do you feel like is next for the NIL era? What are you expecting to come down the pike, especially as we have a new administration coming in who President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to kind of focus in on labor unions? I thought you were going to ask for my national championship pick. No.

Probably would have been much easier. Syracuse isn't playing. You can't pick them. Would have been a much easier question to answer, frankly. So what's happening next more broadly is revenue sharing. That's major because that's going to change a lot of the economics. It's going to apply at least some rules to the system. That is still pending a major legal settlement. I will not bore you with more details. But if that settlement is approved starting in July, schools will be permitted to share revenue.

around $20 million a year with their athletes. And that's not just football, men's basketball, that's their whole department. Now, a lot of that money will go to football and men's basketball, which we've typically called the revenue generating sports. So what that means is-

The NCAA is going to attempt to start limiting the spending of these boosters so that the thing we first talked about, collective spending, booster spending, those multimillion-dollar contracts that come from these deep-pocketed donors. The NCAA is hoping as part of this settlement, as part of this revenue-sharing model, to actually put in some enforcement mechanisms around that. So it's a little bit less shady. Yeah.

I think so, but I also – there are a lot of people who are pretty dubious about their ability to do that because what we've seen in the last few years and what actually led to a lot of these legal cases that have reshaped the whole system is that when you try to restrict a free market, you get sued.

And over and over, we've seen the NCAA in this case, when they get sued, they lose. And that's a relatively new trend of the last 10 years or so. But they have not had much luck arguing their sort of emotional case in front of judges of this means a lot to people. And these are amateur sports. And we don't believe that these athletes should get paid. That argument has been struck down over and over and over. So –

While I think that there are mechanisms coming down the pike that could provide some regulation, the trend right now is that without a collective bargaining agreement, which is what provides rules and stability to the NBA, the NFL, the NHL, Major League Baseball, without that, it's really hard for colleges to – or the sort of college sports establishment, whether that's the NCAA or these conferences, it's really hard for them to establish these rules that govern a system. Now, what –

what's required for a collective bargaining agreement is employment. I think that there's going to be attempts to regulate the system. There will be changes with revenue sharing, but there are a lot of things in the way of actually regulating it to the degree of actual professional sports. Okay, so that's kind of the business side of things. Jerry, what about the soul of college football? What do you expect is going to happen there as we kind of get deeper and deeper into the NIL era and people keep suing each other and trying to regulate things? I mean, I think the soul...

of the game has always been about the connection, I think, between athletes striving and just fans who put their whole life into these universities, you know, many of them alums, and they've stuck with them through thick and thin. College football has always been a mess, and it has taken this long before we had

a true playoff of, I mean, this is a 12 team playoff. They never had more than four for the longest time. We can always remember. They just kind of arbitrarily decided who won the national championship. But we have to be smarter about who we want to blame for this mess, because I see as this becomes more professionalized, as kids get more money, that's reported that,

We tend to want to blame them for the decisions to transfer, the decisions to move. And we don't think about the systems in which college athletics has made millions, billions of dollars, knowing that there was an inequity. Yes, we offered you a free education. Yes, that degree in some ways is invaluable. No, that doesn't satisfy us.

what your Heisman Trophy winner brings to your college campus. We have to decide who is responsible in our minds for this system and who is merely just navigating it, trying to get in on the con, and who's responsible for the con. I once talked to a friend who's a really diehard

college football flan just a lifer college football can do no wrong even though it's done wrong for its entire life and I asked a friend a question I said you know what if they ever fix college football and they made it make sense would you still love the sport he looked at me and he said Jerry no I would not love the sport anymore if it was normal

I was going to say college football may be a mess, but it is very much our mess. That's true. I think that's a good place to leave it. But Jesse, Jerry, thank you guys so much for explaining this very straightforward and not at all complicated issue to me. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Anytime. Jerry Brewer is a sports columnist for The Post and Jesse Dougherty covers the business of college sports.

Before we go, here's a schedule of the first round games of the college football playoff this weekend. Starting on Friday night, Indiana plays at Notre Dame at 8 p.m. on ABC. Then on Saturday, we've got three games. At noon, SMU will visit Penn State, followed by the Texas Longhorns hosting the Clemson Tigers at 4 p.m. And both of those games are on TNT. And finally, at 8 p.m., Tennessee plays Ohio State at Ohio Stadium. That game is on ESPN.

And that's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. Today's show was produced by Lucas Trevor. It was edited by Maggie Penman. It was mixed by Ted Muldoon. Our team includes Rina Flores, Monica Campbell, Lucy Perkins, Ilana Gordon, Ariel Plotnick, Bishop Sand, Renny Smirnovsky, Sabi Robinson, Emma Talkoff, Sean Carter, Peter Bresnan, Laura Benshoff, Alison Michaels, Renita Jablonski, and Elahe Azadi.

I'm Ava Wallace. Martine Powers will be back Monday with more stories from The Washington Post.