Welcome to the end of college football as we know it

Mixing sports with education beyond basic PE is a recipe for disaster, as you can pretty clearly see by the underperformance of American high school education.

I grew up in deep football land in Texas, and my experience as a non-athlete was that football consumed nearly the entire budget for non-academics in the district. Everything else was subsisting on peanuts while the football program hired dozens of coaches and built a new $30m stadium. Probably 50% of my high school teachers were coaches who were just doing double duty as teachers for some extra cash.

Men's football and basketball are entirely different stories. Of the North American big four, hockey and baseball have always had robust minor leagues and kids are drafted into them straight out of high school. Football and basketball, on the other hand, have pro leagues that have historically relied upon university competition to develop athletes ready for the big leagues. The NBA (American pro basketball) started up a developmental league something like maybe a decade back or so it now calls the G League, but historical inertia being what it is, there is a much larger following for universities and the best players will still tend to do at least a year there, which I think is still the minimum required. The NFL (American pro football) won't draft you until you're at least three years past high school graduation, so the players there have no choice and need to go to college.

There's a lot driving it. Alumni pride, even regional and civic pride in places without pro teams in the same sport. Often the best school in each state is the flagship land grant public school and maybe a large private school, and these are usually not located in major metro areas that also have pro teams. There are a few exceptions like University of Washington, which played in the national championship game two days ago, is in Seattle. USC has one of the historically dominant teams and is in Los Angeles. But looking at the other top schools from this year, you're looking at Athens, GA, Ann Arbor, MI, Tuscaloosa, AL, Austin, TX, all places that do not have pro teams.

Something people miss is the university athletic department is often, even usually, its own separate non-profit corporation from the school. So, contrary to a lot of takes, it actually has its own revenue stream and its own expenses separate from the larger university. Having a very good football and/or basketball team can draw in enough revenue that the athletic department at the very best schools is typically self-funding. They may as well just be pro franchises, except they don't pay taxes and the athletes nominally have to attend enough classes to not flunk out, though they also don't need to graduate.

It's a farce of a system at the very top, but most athletes at most schools are actually amateurs just looking to do something healthy and competitive while they learn and get some of their school paid for, and the US law requires an equal number of scholarships awarded to men and women, so thanks to there often being men's sports that generate a lot of revenue, and there not being such a thing right now as women's football, the presence of a very successful football program can fund a ton of scholarship for obscure women's sports that give girls a chance to get a free education if they're willing to learn and practice them. Everything from fencing to bowling.

First, while cliques are definitely a thing and kids can be mean to each other, there is nothing like a strict jock/geek breakdown where athletes are never smart and they hate and pick on each other. I'm here now, competed in academic olympics and spelling bees as a kid, got the top SAT scores at my high school, and also lettered in four sports. The honors classes were filled with preppies and jocks. I was tall and athletic and girls liked me, but most of my friends and my now wife were all goth kids and I never bullied anyone.

It's not even remotely true that you needed to be attractive to be in sports or a cheerleader, either. Neither men nor women need to be any good to play in high school. The teams are totally open to anyone, but competitions can only dress so many in a given game and you might never play. Something track or cross-country can usually find room for everyone willing to try. There are plenty of sports for girls and all the athletic or attractive girls are not necessarily cheerleaders.

Universities are an entirely different story. They usually have intramural sports, which means they are not part of any formal athletic association, don't have paid coaches, and anyone can join and play. The intercollegiate teams that represent the school, however, are mostly scholarship athletes. They have limited slots. People can try out and join the team if they qualify without being recruited or getting a scholarship, but you need to be good. "Good enough" is a pretty high standard at the university level except for obscure sports no one plays. I won two state championships at the high school level, not individual but I was on the varsity team, and I never even tried to compete in college outside of intramurals. My niece was a national champion in cheer in high school and didn't play any sport in college.

At no point is sports participation mandatory, but all school systems I'm aware require some kind of "physical education." There is a general class offered where a coach just teaches arbitrary sports and exercise and most students take that. I grew up thinking that competing in a real sport exempted you from this class, because it did at my school, but I guess that isn't universally the case because I found out my wife competed in sports but still had to take the PE class as well. So I guess that depends on the school system. It's different in every state, maybe even every district.

As for "free urban basketball field," we call that pickup ball. It's open to whoever gets there first and often teams are picked on the spot, but usually the same people who up pretty regularly and know each other well. I played a ton of pickup ball as a kid. My summers were often spent going to the park and playing basketball for 14 hours before I came home. There were some people you see there you don't see in school, but at least half the regulars also played for the school and they played pickup ball in addition, not instead of.

I'm still working on my first kid (actually have an IVF appt in two hours), but as far as I understood youth sport these days, the more competitive level has unfortunately become a lot less accessible than it used to be. There are national travel leagues now that get sponsored by rich parents and participation can often be quite expensive between the travel and the equipment, so rich kids can have quite an advantage. Obviously, you need access to ice to play hockey, access to water to swim, things like that. Basketball courts, soccer fields (football, but Americans call it soccer), and baseball fields tend to be available everywhere, but playing as part of a real team will probably cost money except in basketball, where the lower-level amateur leagues will still scout and sponsor kids from pickup courts because the pro stakes are so much higher that pro teams don't just want rich kids to play, they want the actual best athletes. Baseball still has pretty good free little leagues for kids, but you need your own bat and glove at least. If you're into running, you can at least do that anywhere.

This pretty much sums-up college football today: it has no future. When you throw out all of the traditions you're left with a bunch of kids playing football. I can watch that on Friday night for a lot less money - and support my local community.

1) Money: The sports of football and basketball are wildly popular in the US. Our appetite for football is effectively bottomless. Putting that much of it on the air is going to test how bottomless it is. Additionally, the 'lesser' sports that aren't in the TV money making arena are still going to have access to NIL money. This is especially true with Olympic sports, where every four years or so, these elite athletes are going to get a bust of cash from sponsors. For the 'lesser' sports, they will finally have longer term spokespersons that can keep the hype going through the off Olympic years, and the athletes will want this as well. Turning these athletes into money making machines is not going to be something that sponsors want to get rid of.

2) Laws: There are massive Title-9 violations all over the place. Lets look at Stanford students in particular. Their admissions policy is a bit unique in that sports are 'not considered' in admits (who know how true that is for football). The 'lesser' sports' athletes really are there for the education, mostly. Now, with the very long travel distances to the east coast or to SMU, that is putting a de facto undue burden on the women's teams, especially if they aren't flying the same airlines as the men's football team. Combine this with the NIL money that these 'lesser' sports are gong to get, and they can finally hire a real law firm that can go toe-to-toe with the army of lawyers from the university.

3) Banks: There are many schools that have decided to recently re-vamp their fields and facilities. Those are on long term mortgages and other contracts with the various banks of the nation. If these teams start sucking, or are in bad conferences, then there is a huge incentive to change that by the school. Still, there are going to be a lot of teams that just aren't going to do well. And their mortgages are going to start looking like really really bad ideas from the bank's perspective.

4) Governing boards: Some schools are governed by a board of regents. Some are governed by just a president. Some are governed by the state legislature. Some are governed by the Catholic church. All of these petite tyrannies and oligarchies are used to getting their way. Now, they are all going to be competing with each other for giant piles of money. Governing entities that have more legal powers than others are going to be incentivized to use those legal powers to try to grab more of that money. And once one does something galling, all the others are going to be forced to follow suit and try to outbid that gall.

5) Mothers: Mommas don't want their boys playing football anymore. The game is largely seen as too violent and damaging. Yeah, not all the mothers see that, by any means. But the statistics point to a marked and continuing decrease in the number of boys playing. This is a big threat to the pipeline going into football. Other sports aren't really seeing this issue however, outside of women's soccer. But as most of the issues with the conferences are centered around football, mothers end up being a factor.

6) Attention: This is the main issue, I think. The dynamics are pushing schools to have billion dollar programs to survive. These things kinda end up as power law distributions. And as programs get more money, they tend to win more. The system will settle on programs that are very successful and very expensive. To say yet another way, winners will keep winning. Without some sort of balancing factors (player draft, players' unions, salary caps, etc) the winning teams will largely be known before the season starts, just based on expenditures. That's where the attention issue comes in. Who is going to want to watch a game, let alone a season, where you already know the outcomes? Yes, football is uniquely random and therefore exciting. But putting a billion dollars out there on 18-22 year olds is not what 'smart money' wants to do. That kinda gets back to 1) Money, but I hope you see where this goes. Carefully built teams will minimize the risk to the money and therefore the game will be boring. No one wants to watch one of 10 teams play in the playoffs yet again, year after year, with the same heavy favorites again and again. Without some sort of balancing, the same teams are just going to keep on winning as their power law distributed expenditures dictate.

Any one of these factors could easily become the dominate factor in the new college sports landscape, and many will change with time, especially as things wind their way through legislatures and courts. Who knows how things are going to go. All I know is that the action off the field is going to be just as exciting as the action on it.