The starting quarterback at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) quit on an undefeated team just over a week ago. He wasn’t injured and wasn’t disgruntled with a lack of playing time. He quit over a contract dispute. In college. Seriously!
Matthew Sluka transferred from Holy Cross after being named the 2023 Patriot League Player of the Year. He claims he was offered $100,000 to play for the Rebels.
The assistant coach who Sluka claims made the offer, denies it was ever made. There was no written agreement and Sluka walked with the intent of taking the rest of the year off to seek his next destination.
Sluka’s transfer is just another symptom of a big-time sports culture run amok. Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) legislation now allows athletes formerly termed as amateurs to receive financial benefits before turning professional. College athletes are delaying their transition to the professional level in fear of being forced to take a cut from the payouts they receive as collegiate athletes.
The relaxation of transfer rules has worked together with the new court-ordered NIL rules to turn big-time Division I athletics into a version of the Wild Wild West. The NCAA has moved from too rigid in its transfer rules to extremely lax. It is not hard to justify athletes moving on for better opportunities. It is difficult, however, to see the benefit of an athlete transferring multiple times in search of better compensation when the movement is between similar institutions that were intended to be the bastions of higher education.
And where is the big-time college athletic culture headed? The Big 10 now has 18 schools. Only two of them are private universities. The conference recently added Oregon, Washington, UCLA and USC. Football coaches at these universities all have seven-figure salaries and their buyouts total $400 million as of the end of the 2023-2024 season. Buyouts are the money that would be paid if the universities decide they no longer want them to coach.
The Atlantic Coast Conference followed the Big 10 expansion with growth of its own, most notably adding Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. Yes, the Atlantic Coast Conference now includes two schools that lie within a few miles of the Pacific Ocean. The geographically challenged conference now has three of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world in Stanford, Duke and Cal-Berkeley. It is difficult to see how the Duke-Stanford mid-week athletic event will enhance the academic mission of either university.
Athletes are now being granted five and even six years of eligibility, a far cry from the days when freshmen were denied the opportunity to play varsity sports so they could become acclimated to college life. Will Senior Day soon be replaced by retirement celebrations for these exiting athletes and is the four-year college degree becoming a thing of the past for big-time athletes?
Of course, this madness is being driven by football dollars. March Madness money from men’s basketball is close behind and with the Caitlin Clark-inspired hysteria around women’s basketball and pockets of the country providing strong support for wrestling, the financial largesse resulting from the shuffling of athletic conferences and TV exposure is impossible to ignore.
Packed stadiums, TV money, merchandise sales and parking/concession revenue make it easy to rationalize and justify the changing Division I culture. The implementation phase is upon us and adjustments are being made. Is it sustainable, however?
With an additional legal settlement mandating $2.5 billion in payments by the NCAA to former athletes and a pool of $20 million per year in payments to current athletes at big-time schools, will public universities break under the financial stress?
Penn State and Ohio State pack the stadium weekly and win at least 10 games a year, but Northwestern doesn’t and neither does Wake Forest. Rutgers loses millions each year on athletics. Stanford recently discussed dropping all “Olympic sports” in a cost-cutting measure before a massive outcry led to a reversal of that decision.
How long will it take for these losses to lead to the connection of the fiscal dots when public entities are cash-starved while big-time public universities show operating losses?
With the loss of natural rivalries, will TV money stay steady in times when several Major League Baseball teams have had their deals terminated or renegotiated?
Big-time sports are enjoyable but are becoming less so every year. Maybe every college president should be made to attend a Division III contest before voting on anything that is not in the true best interests of the universities and their students. Seeing the sport in its purest form may change the perspective of people who seem to have compromised their mission in search of the almighty dollar.
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