On Saturday, will you know where your team is?
Events at UNLV and USC show the players taking power.
USC football fans have faced a lot of 5-star betrayal through the years, a lot of can’t-miss recruits who did. From Iman Marshall to Dillon Baxter to Whitney Lewis to Korey Foreman, the folks in Cardinal and Gold have learned to wear shoes while walking the glassy roads of broken promise.
Still, we know what springs eternal, and it’s not disappointment. As soon as the fan base heard about Bear Alexander, the 315-pound demon who was transferring from Georgia, they remembered they believed in love after all.
Alexander had two sacks in limited play at Georgia. At USC he had one and a half sacks in 2023. That was laid at the feet of defensive coordinator Alex Grinch, who was blamed for everything short of high tuition. The Grinch That Stole Defense was fired, so the fans assumed that the defense would improve, which it has. And surely Bear would be chasing quarterbacks up trees with a better coaching staff.
On Thursday, Alexander announced that his road was going to bear left. He is bailing on the Trojans. He said he was redshirting, which you can do before you play four games in a season. He wasn’t starting, and played only 21 snaps at Michigan Saturday, and his guardian, Tony Jones, said that Lincoln Riley and his coaches had “severed” the relationship with Alexander. Riley had assured everyone that Alexander’s status “is not a story” earlier in the week, which was true, until it was.
This is the latest item flying out of a bottomless Pandora’s Box in college athletics. It was opened by Name, Image and Likeness stipulations and has ballooned into million-dollar offers for all kinds of athletes. Colorado football teammates Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter are making a combined $8.2 million. North Carolina basketball star Armando Bacot made $5 million last year on various TV commercials. Quinn Ewers, the Texas quarterback, is the latest active player to grace Dr. Pepper’s “Fansville” campaign, a couple of years after Alabama’s Bryce Young did it.
That’s the sunny side of the street. The clouds arrive when a player is benched, or he’s underperforming, or if he’s overperforming and decides he’s been underpaid, or shortchanged.
Matthew Sluka’s slick runs and leadership had spurred UNLV to a 3-0 start, including wins at Kansas and Houston. The Rebels hadn’t been relevant in football since Randall Cunningham was quarterbacking. Now the team had moved into Allegiant Stadium and was beginning to ride the general Las Vegas sports wave, with the champion Golden Knights and champion Aces and the nationally-branded Raiders and the en-route Athletics. Then Sluka, who had transferred from Holy Cross, announced he was redshirting, specifically because he thought UNLV had welched on an offer. If you’ve seen any Scorsese flicks, you know how dangerous that can be in Vegas.
Sluka claimed that UNLV had promised him $100,000. Head coach Barry Odom said he knew nothing about it. Bob Paulos, head of UNLV’s NIL operation, said it didn’t happen because he would have known. Sluka’s father said the offer came from Brennan Marion, the offensive coordinator. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the most UNLV said it could offer Sluka was $3,000 a month.
The school also said the alleged $100,000 offer would have violated state law, and Paulos said there was no contract involved. In any case, the Rebels are riding with their backup quarterbacks, but these are Cases Zero and One in what might become an epidemic.
The issue is not whether the players deserve to get paid. They do. The issue is whether the college game should resemble the pro game, at least in football, and if it does, whether it should have the same guidelines and boundaries. The key to that is the contract, as Paulos said, and that might be a difficult thing until it is finally resolved that players are employees and college athletic programs are employers. But that is the inevitable destination.
Colleges will eventually see themselves offering three-year contracts to 5-star players. There could be opt-outs after two years, perhaps. There could be incentive clauses, or maybe an escape clause in cases a college fires its coach.
There could be some players who would reject the contract altogether and count on getting a better deal the next season. But if that player flames out? Then he could be introduced to an old baseball term: Designated For Assignment. The schools could release him back into the market.
Heck, there could even be trades. Alabama sends a cornerback to Penn State for a quarterback to be named later. Romance and loyalty and academics? Those went out when somebody forgot to close the portal one night.
Or a smart general manager, the kind the colleges are hiring to supervise roster construction, might spot a developing player in high school and offer a one-year contract, which could either morph into a long-term deal if the player indeed develops, or expire if the player doesn’t.
Contracts would allow the second-tier conference teams to keep the players in which they invest, not lose them automatically when an SEC or Big Ten team deems them worthy. Toledo coach Jason Candle said teams like Mississippi State “recruit our players right off our roster.” Of course, he said that after Toledo won at Mississippi State, 41-17. “It’s a message that you can succeed here,” Candle said.
This would put the colleges in an entirely new realm. To equalize the competition, there would have to be a salary cap or some kind. And not just one. Each of the SEC schools got $51 million in the 2022-23 year. Their salary cap obviously would be far different from the Sun Belt’s, where the 10 members were asked to split up $17.2 million.
A salary cap would force schools and players to make tough choices. Schools would have to live with recruiting mistakes. Players would have to go with one-year deals or forget the lure of transferring. Or perhaps a player could be allowed to transfer before his deal expired, as long as he took his salary-cap figure with him.
There’s all kinds of possibilities. In a perfect, faraway world, the money will be so vast that the top 90 or so football schools would finally form their own super-league. At that point, they would have to fall back into conference matrixes that might return some geographical common sense to the game, unless you think Cal vs. Boston College is a logical ACC matchup.
As we’ve seen already, teams with continuity have a September edge over those who slap together their rosters from grocery store aisles. And Matthew Sluka will surface. But without structure, the term “returning starters” becomes an anachronism. All a coach can do is coach whoever shows up. And, unless it’s really necessary, don’t feed the Bear.
I’ve never been a college sports fan - I grew up in NYC, which has always been predominantly a pro sports town, and neither I nor anyone in my family went to a Division 1A school - and so to I’ve always viewed the college game as the minor leagues with pageantry. Still, one might have been able to sustain the illusion that this was competition among student athletes following long-standing traditions. At this point, though, one would have to be willing to suspend disbelief beyond reason to see big time college sports as anything but an aggregation of second rate professionals stripped of all tradition, loyalty or continuity.
When you say players deserve to be paid, I have to disagree with you. Nobody is twisting their arms, making them play.
They got their education paid for, meals, room and board, and a daily stipend.
Plus they had the advantage of choosing their classes ahead of all the other students, had constant tutors, and professors that were flexible for them, even though there was no flexibility for non-athlete students.
I know player payments are here to stay, but fans that used to be here to stay, are going to start ignoring college football or at least just become casual fans. I have.