CoLlEGe fOoTbAlL iS iN cRIsIs!
The talking points from the fat cats who want to hijack a plutonium-fueled DeLorean and return to the good ol’ days of players not getting paid (or not getting paid their fair share) often yield to the cold, hard fact that college football continues to thrive.
Monday night’s title game averaged 30.1 million viewers. It was the biggest crowd since 2015, when 33.7 million watched Ohio State and Oregon. The Indiana-Miami game also outpaced the January 2025 game between Ohio State and Notre Dame by 36 percent.
Are there problems with the sport? Yes. Do those problems flow directly from the collapse of a web of rules that blatantly and brazenly violated federal antitrust laws? Yes.
Should college football be expected to clean up its own mess without begging Congress for a legislative license to violate federal antitrust laws? Absolutely.
Don’t fall for their shenanigans. The long-overdue reckoning arrived, and they’re still reeling from it. Not because there’s no way out of the maze, but because they reject the most obvious solution: A nationwide union of college football players.
That’s the path toward an antitrust exemption that would be identical to the one the NFL has. College football doesn’t want the collective bargaining that goes along with it, however.
They want it both ways. Rules that restrict money and transfer rights, with no rules limiting practice intensity or “voluntary” offseason conditioning drills that seem to never end or whatever else allows the emperors of Tuscaloosa and Tallahassee to keep the players under their thumbs.
