A System Built for Revenue, Not Students
I love college football. That’s the problem.
I love the bands, the rivalries, the cold Saturdays, and the way a single game can divide a family for three hours and then bring it back together. I love what college football was—regional, proud, imperfect, and deeply tied to place and purpose.
But college football today feels less like an extension of higher education and more like a professional entertainment industry hiding behind a university logo.
NIL, conference realignment, and the transfer portal are framed as progress. In practice, they look more like mechanisms designed to keep money flowing while avoiding an honest conversation about what this system has become.
NIL Isn’t Empowerment—It’s Containment
NIL is often sold as athlete freedom. From where I sit, it functions more like quiet money—just enough to keep players satisfied while conferences, TV networks, apparel companies, and donors continue extracting billions.
The student-athlete becomes a pawn in a much larger machine.
What’s rarely acknowledged is that athletes already receive significant compensation: tuition, housing, meals, medical care, travel, elite facilities, networking, and national exposure. Add the intangible benefits—flying across the country, alumni access, résumé acceleration—and the idea that they’re “unpaid” collapses under even mild scrutiny.
Meanwhile, the brilliant geophysics student publishing climate research with immediate human impact doesn’t get an endorsement deal or a collective bidding war. That imbalance should bother us more than it does.
The NFL’s Free Minor League
Here’s the part we dance around:
College football is the NFL’s free minor-league system.
The NFL doesn’t pay for player development, doesn’t fund academies, and doesn’t operate a true farm system. Instead, it relies on colleges—many of them public, taxpayer-supported institutions—to train, showcase, and physically wear down athletes at no direct cost to the league.
NIL doesn’t change that. It simply shifts some money sideways while preserving the same underlying reality: colleges absorb the risk, athletes absorb the physical cost, and the NFL gets a polished product for free.
If this were any other industry, we’d call it what it is: externalized cost.
Transfers, Contracts, and the Disappearing Student
I don’t begrudge athletes mobility. But hopping from school to school purely for a better deal isn’t education—it’s free agency without guardrails. It erodes continuity, accountability, and development. At some point, the word student quietly disappears.
At the same time, schools pretend they aren’t driving the market while actively benefiting from jersey sales, media exposure, and brand amplification tied directly to individual players.
That contradiction sits at the heart of the problem.
Geography, Rivalries, and Institutional Hypocrisy
Then there’s conference realignment. USC flying across the country for conference games. Stanford in the ACC. Universities issuing climate pledges while keeping students out of class and on planes for days.
It’s hard to take the educational mission seriously when geography no longer matters and rivalries are sacrificed for TV windows.
Once upon a time, Harvard–Yale was the biggest game in the country. Army–Navy still carries that spirit. Those games mattered because they represented something larger than rankings or revenue. Schools fought for conference pride. Champions represented regions, not brands.
Now attention is concentrated on a handful of super-programs—not because they’re more meaningful, but because the system is designed to amplify them.
Maybe This Sounds Naïve
Maybe it does. But realism got us here.
Maybe college football needs fewer loopholes and more limits. Fewer contracts and more covenants. Less talent hoarding and more teaching. Less spectacle and more substance.
I don’t want college football to disappear.
I want it to remember what it’s for.
And I’m not convinced that’s an unreasonable ask.