re: LSU bowl game roster might be awfully thin

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Transfer portal should not open up till after bowl games

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The NCAA was more than happy to accept the hundreds of millions in revenue generated by the sports through huge medial contracts, licensing deals, etc while saying the players deserved little to no share of that massive revenue. 

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Andy Coats loves telling his classes about it. It’s one thing to teach antitrust law. It’s quite another to tell his Oklahoma students there once was a case, one that went all the way to the Supreme Court, that involved the school they attend — and it was about football.

Then Coats, almost 90 years old and still sounding as sharp as he was half his life ago, looks at his students and makes the big reveal.

“I’m the guy who screwed up college football,” he says.

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It was about the chase for television money. And it happened because nobody is in charge: The NCAA is powerless to tell conferences what to do. The conferences and schools are free to chase all the TV dollars, and in turn the courts and lawyers are free to demand the players get their fair share, their name, image and likeness money, their unlimited transferring.

It all stems from one lawsuit, 40 years ago, when Oklahoma — joined by Georgia, long before they became conference mates — teamed up against the NCAA to challenge its stranglehold on television rights. When it ended, the NCAA lost control of football, and the financial floodgates opened.

It was the case that changed everything.

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As television caught on, Byers, who became executive director of the NCAA in 1951, simply added TV rights to the NCAA’s area of control, giving it the power to negotiate contracts and determine which games were televised. And for NCAA members to be in good standing, they had to agree to the NCAA’s rules.

The NCAA had three official objectives regarding football on television, per a handbook of the NCAA Television Committee, located in the archives at Georgia’s special collections library:

To reduce, insofar as possible, the adverse effects of live television upon football game attendance.

To spread television among as many NCAA member colleges as possible.

To provide football television to the public to the extent compatible with the other two objectives.

Essentially, the NCAA wanted the bigger brands to take less for the greater good. This NCAA handbook, published in 1982, noted that those plans “remained remarkably similar as to their essential features over the past 30 years.”

But discontent among the bigger brands had been brewing for years. The top schools complained that they weren’t on television enough. They were the ones pulling in the viewers, yet everything was shared equitably by NCAA member schools. And by the late 1970s, there was more financial pressure: Title IX, which passed in 1972, pushed schools to add women’s teams, driving costs up. Big schools saw the NCAA’s television deals as an untapped source of revenue.

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There was also the NCAA’s rule that limited teams to one or two national games per year, and then only one more regional game. During the 1981 season, No. 1 USC beat No. 2 Oklahoma in a classic, down-to-the-wire game … and it was only a regional telecast. Ditto for the 1966 classic between No. 1 Notre Dame and No. 2 Michigan State, which ended in a 10-10 tie. In 1980, when Georgia won the national championship, it was on national television only twice, with one regional appearance.

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During question-and-answer arguments, White said that antitrust law was never meant to apply to college athletics. Another justice sympathetic to the NCAA, William Rehnquist, asked Coats whether the NCAA was meant to be a profit-making organization.

“It wasn’t intended to be, but it certainly is,” Coats replied.

That argument won out. The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Georgia and Oklahoma, in a decision handed down in June 1984. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority opinion:

“The court found that by fixing a price for television rights to all games, the NCAA creates a price structure that is unresponsive to viewer demand and unrelated to the process that would prevail in a competitive market. And, of course, since as a practical matter all member institutions need NCAA approval, members have no real choice but to adhere to the NCAA’s television controls.”

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Of course, the most tangible result of the case was the NCAA losing control of football, essentially, because it lost control of TV rights. The NCAA president isn’t in charge of college football. It’s not like pro sports where the buck stops with commissioners, even if they work for the owners.

That is what led to realignment, with television deals the most important draw for conferences. It ended the Pac-12 as we knew it. It led to the Big Ten and SEC being the two richest conferences, the Big 12 behind, and the ACC with a very uncertain future.

“The chaotic state of college athletics today was not in our vision,” Neinas said. “It is beyond any control.”

He was talking also about NIL and the transfer portal, which came into being after court cases and state legislation. And those happened in large part because of the money pouring into the sport, and an awareness that the players should share in it.

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As with almost every team. Face it. The bowl games are basically useless now except for the extra practice you get.

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They weren't meaningless until college football started its demise . Now they are pointless and no one cares. NCAA has ruined the fricking game. sons of bitches..

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LSU bowl game roster might be awfully thin

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