Historically speaking, the way college worked was you would go to school, and after four or so years, you’d take that knowledge and go out into the real world and find a job. And that job would pay you more than any side hustle you could manage in-between classes. Which is why you hope to go from a broke college student to someone on their way to independent financial living.
It seems that in a few cases, this model is doing something of a 180. And no, I’m not talking about the contested value of a college degree, or people going back to school for retraining.
I’m talking about football.
That in itself seems odd, because if there’s one place you could reliably leave school and make way more money than you ever imagined, it was by heading from college to the NFL, where rookie contracts start with a minimum of nearly $900,000. Who would possibly try to enter that field only to return to campus?
It turns out, quite a few folks.
That’s the most current unintended consequence confronting big time Division I college football, where the dam has broke and athletes can earn all kinds of money inconceivable just a few years ago. Which means that in some cases, the job of college football player may actually be better than that of professional.
That was the premise of several recent NFL hopefuls, players who spent time in training camps in hope of landing a roster spot - then decided to head back to campus - any campus.
Which in any past version of college sports was an absolute no-no. But a series of court rulings, including a recent one from a Louisiana court giving Cleveland Browns hopefully Dae’Quan Wright the chance to reenter the college transfer portal - which led bombastic LSU head coach Lane Kiffin to immediately recruit him to the Tigers, has changed the game. Which led the Big Ten and the SEC, the two most powerful conferences in college sports, to ban former professionals from coming back to play. This is all playing out in a matter of days and hours, not months and years. And if it feels like the rules are being made up as we go, that’s because they are. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
There’s obviously a lot going on here, and it combines both the larger philosophical questions about college sports with the administrative realities of the enterprise. So things that sound good in theory – like people should be compensated for their value - that often falls flat when you’re trying to maintain a fair and safe system of operating a sports league under the umbrella of higher education.
For example, while it sounds nice that an athlete can explore the professional world before returning to school - which you can do in most any career field - that sounds less appealing to the high school senior that just lost his scholarship to a guy who tried out for the Denver Broncos. And makes even less sense if you realize that same guy is allegedly going to be enrolled in a full slate of academic classes for the semester.
Therein lies the problem.
Every ruling on the state of big-time college sports, the majority of which expand the professionalization of its apex participants, makes it less feasible to exist in anything near its current form. It used to be something of a stretch of the imagination that star college football and basketball players could still live in the university academic ecosystem. But now it requires an impossible level of disbelief. Meaning either courts need to be overruled, or college sports as we know it, is over.
That existential question aside, should athletes who go pro be able to come back to play in college? I say no. And not because I don’t care about athletes. But because at some point, there has to be some reason for why universities play sports in the first place. And if it’s literally just another pro league under a college banner, then it seems like it’s time to shred the façade and spin off the enterprise. I know how naïve that is, given how interwoven big time football is with the entire business model of higher education. But at this trajectory, the cart may start to wonder why it’s attached to the horse in the first place. And maybe we can all get back to the idea that you leave college to get a job, not the other way around.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.