College athletics turning into money-grabbing cesspool, but be careful who you blame
By Pat Harty
IOWA CITY, Iowa – As was shown with Oregon and Washington both bolting from the Pac-12 Conference to join the Big Ten in 2024, major college athletics is being ruined by these greedy, self-absorbed, and disloyal prima-donnas in the transfer portal.
The days of staying the course and staying committed to those that have shared a long-standing commitment, common goal and purpose are long gone, corrupted by a culture in which the pursuit of the almighty dollar means more than anything else, and it’s all because of those pompous brats in the portal.
Because all they do is think about what’s best for them, and if that means doing what seemed incomprehensible a decade ago, then so be it if it means being better off financially.
If it means turning your back on and betraying the trust of those that used to mean a great deal to you, well, business is business, and you have to strike while the iron is hot.
And right now, the iron is blistering hot in major college athletics, and all because of those darn kids that are now running the asylum.
The transfer portal has taken the good and noble side of college athletics and turned it into a pay-for-play cesspool where only the strong survive.
Okay, enough with the sarcasm.
By now, hopefully, you realize that I’m actually talking about the adults in college athletics that so often want to blame the student-athletes for all the problems.
I hear it all the time how today’s student-athletes are pampered and spoiled because of all the power they now wield.
The transfer portal, with help from name image and likeness, has supposedly turned major college athletics into the wild, wild west, and into a bidding war for the best talent – at least, that’s what so many of the coaches and administrators want you to believe.
And while there certainly are issues and concerns with the portal, and with NIL, namely a lack of structure in both cases, conference realignment has its own problems, and its own stench, because the whole thing is driven by money.
Television with all of its streaming and other advantages has become so big and powerful that college administrators are focused soley on winning the business competition, and to the victors goes millions of dollars.
The student-athletes now finally get a slice of the financial pie, but it’s tiny compared to what is raised through television revenue.
Kirk Ferentz and Fran McCaffery both have called the current environment with the portal and NIL a mess, and they’re right because it is a mess.
But the adults, which mostly in this case is the NCAA, deserves its fair share of the blame for allowing it to happen.
Two things can be true at the same time. The portal certainly has flaws, while conference realignment is a never-ending pursuit of money and power that has now made the silly seem normal.
The adults still want you to believe that academics is the driving force and top priority because that’s how it should be, and that’s the way it used to be.
Those days are long gone, however, erased by the growing influence of television and everything that comes with it.
The Big Ten Conference now has 18 teams that stretch from coast to coast, and from a business standpoint, it’s like hitting the jackpot because of all the television markets that come with it.
But from a practical standpoint, it makes little sense if you can bring yourself to look beyond the financial side of it.
We now live in a college sports world in which Oregon won’t face Oregon State anymore in conference play, but Oregon will now play conference games in Piscataway, New Jersey and College Park, Maryland.
All that remains from the once-proud and productive Pac-12 Conference are four teams: Stanford, Oregon State, California and Washington State.
And all four of them probably would bolt if they could.
The conference of champions, the pre-eminent conference on the West Coast for generations, has been reduced almost to rubble because of the pursuit of money, power and prestige.
The student-athletes from the four West Coast schools that are now headed to the Big Ten face a new reality in which nearly half of their games/competition will be played in the Midwest, or three time zones away on the East Coast.
Family members either will have to spend a lot more money and time to watch their relatives play, or they’ll follow from a distance because there is no turning back.
If anything, the madness will continue as rumors persist about Stanford and California joining the Big Ten.
It could be argued that Fox TV is running the Big Ten, while ESPN is running the Southeastern Conference. And they’re both in business to make money, not to help student-athletes be happy.
Television revenue speaks louder than anything else right now, and to suggest otherwise is disingenuous.
The student-athletes are basically just along for the ride, and will just have to handle everything that comes their way.
If that means Rutgers playing a football game against USC on a Thursday night in late October in Los Angeles, with a 10 p.m. kickoff EST, then suck it up and play ball because there is money to be made in the pursuit of academic excellence.
And remember to get to class at 9 a.m. the next day, even if your flight from Los Angeles landed just a few hours ago.