MINNEAPOLIS — College sports officially ceased to exist on the evening of Friday, June 6, 2025. At least in the form that existed for more than a century.
Amateurism is dead. Schools are now free to pay athletes directly, meaning they will receive a salary just as in any other profession, though technically athletes will not be employees of universities. Not yet.
Will you still love college sports in this new version? Will you still cheer for your alma mater or embrace your favorite sport with the same passion, same enjoyment, same endearment as if nothing has changed?
I vow to try.
I make that statement knowing that everything has changed. I remind myself that I fell in love with college sports back when I was a kid and had no clue whether college football players got paid money to wear the uniform or not.
I became engrossed in it because of state pride. That was our team, the Tennessee Vols. Everyone else was the enemy. Especially Bama.
I loved it because of the orange uniforms. The traditions. The rivalries. The marching band. The way a college campus feels electric on a football weekend. Seeing 100,000 people cram into the stadium and sing “Rocky Top” at full throat. The voice of John Ward on the radio, telling us “it’s football time in Tennessee.” Hearing it still gives me goosebumps.
Our romanticism has been bashed over the head with endless cynicism in this new era. Are we supposed to throw all of that away because a federal judge in California approved a settlement that essentially turned college sports into professional sports?
Resolution of the House v. NCAA settlement allows schools to distribute $20.5 million to athletes. This is the first time schools have been permitted to pay their athletes direct compensation.
Name, image and likeness (NIL) initiated the (legal) flow of money, but this ruling extinguishes the antiquated amateurism model.
If you’re still arguing that a full-ride scholarship should be enough incentive for college kids to represent a school, that mom-and-pop operation on main street no longer exists. It has been steamrolled by an enterprise that generates billions of dollars, and yes, the people who supply the labor and the entertainment deserve a cut of that ever-expanding pie.
I hear a familiar complaint often. That college sports have been ruined. That the free-for-all created by NIL has made things out of control. That they are done being fans.
Believe me, I feel that frustration and have concerns about how things will look and function, say, five years from now. Schools have a lot to sort out, starting with how they plan to pay for revenue-sharing every year.
The transfer portal has created more disruption to my passion for college sports than financial exchanges, though, obviously, athlete movement and money are intertwined.
I became a college basketball devotee in the 1980s and ’90s. Familiarity was part of the charm. Players stayed at one school their entire careers. Whether you loved teams or despised them, both emotions stemmed from the fact that we knew them.
The transient nature of college sports today has altered that sense of attachment. Rosters undergo wholesale makeovers from one season to the next, especially in basketball. Here today, gone at season’s end.
The frustration gets compounded when a school loses a talented player or promising recruit because another school offered him or her more money. It’s easy to criticize the athlete, but truthfully, it’s probably also hypocritical. If presented that same circumstance when I was a college student, I would be lying to suggest I would’ve made a different choice.
This version of college sports is complicated and messy and … just fundamentally different. The House settlement model for revenue-sharing and NIL provides more guardrails designed to eliminate the wild, wild West nonsense that has created so much chaos the past few years.
News flash: It won’t entirely. Schools and boosters will find ways to skirt the rules or just outright ignore them in search of a competitive edge. They always do.
Like a lot of fans, I tend to complain about the state of college sports right up until kickoff. Then I forget about the chaos and all the changes that have taken place and just enjoy the spectacle that has sucked me in since I was a young kid. I want that to continue.
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