'A million percent broken': college football is at a breaking point.

quote:

---

Major college football exists in a state of unprecedented evolution as it shifts from an amateurism model to a professional entity, a move further complicated by its tether to higher education and academics.

As the expanded College Football Playoff arrives this week, the sport’s chaotic realities are on full display.

---

quote:

---

- And, perhaps the wildest of them all, schools and their affiliated NIL collectives are promising prospects millions of guaranteed cash in an effort to distribute a large percentage of their pay before a new enforcement arm is implemented next summer.

---

quote:

---

At the center of much of this is the NCAA’s settlement of the House antitrust case, which will usher into the sport direct pay from schools to athletes under a quasi-salary cap of at least $20.5 million annually per school.

While the move is expected to both stave off lawsuits that threaten to bankrupt the association and bring a level of regulation, the transition period between now and its implementation on July 1 is messy. In a competitive recruiting environment and with little real enforcement of rules, institutions are front-loading athlete contracts as a way to circumvent the impending salary cap next year and avoid being subject to the new settlement-related enforcement mechanism.

Deals executed before the settlement’s presumed approval in April are not expected to be subject to the new NIL clearinghouse, a Deloitte-run operation that is expected to police the many phony booster-backed compensation agreements so prevalent in the industry over the previous three years.

“Right now, it is absolute bedlam occurring across college football,” said Jere Morehead, the president of Georgia who chaired the NCAA Division I Board of Directors during the settlement’s approval in May.

“We should be definitive that we will go back and unwind these deals that are not legitimate third-party NIL transactions. We should not accept the notion that institutions, coaches or players can agree to anything they want until July 1. These deals, if not legitimate third-party NIL agreements, would be in violation of the settlement we all agreed to going forward.”

At its highest levels, major college football is at the center of a great divide happening within the NCAA: For years handcuffed by rules intended to legislate competitive equity among the hundreds of schools in Division I, the revenue-generating football powers are breaking free. Through court rulings and state laws, these programs, and their boosters, are afforded the ability to spend their riches recruiting and retaining athletes — without many or any limitations.

While most agree that power conference football players deserve to earn some of the billions their schools generate, the situation, in this period of accelerated change, has created uncomfortable, awkward and perhaps painful moments — many of them the result of a professional entity working without a professional structure.

There are no real binding contracts; there is no players association; there is zero collective bargaining; and there is no punishment for rule-breakers as many of the rules themselves are the target of legal scrutiny.

For example, the NCAA and conferences are somewhat handcuffed in enforcing their rules around both transfers and athlete compensation because of court rulings and state laws.

---