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To me, the most surprising thing about the Matthew Sluka scandal at UNLV—whatever happened there—is how little money it revealed these mid-major programs have. $100,000 is a lot of money. It’s a great salary for a person Sluka’s age. But it’s five percent of what multiple coaches have said it costs boosters to land a solid transfer quarterback, a Riley Leonard. That’s before considering Leonard’s actual NIL deals, the Rhoback sponsorship and whatever else he has going on. There are roughly thirty programs in the country whose boosters will shell out multiple million dollars for a quarterback alone. Go down the list, and the drop is steep. By the time you get to UNLV—someone we would have pegged as well-off compared to the rest of the Group of Five—six figures is evidently out of the question.
In the wake of Sluka’s departure, a lot of UNLV people spent time working the rumor mill. Some of what was leaked was probably true. Most of it was false. One rumor held that UNLV head coach Barry Odom mandates all NIL payments be spread uniformly across position groups. There are a lot of funny things about this rumor, one of which is that this sort of mandate might be illegal. Because of that, I think we can assume it’s not true, just as we can assume with many of the rest of them. We don’t need to lionize Sluka here or say with purported certainty that he and his family are one hundred percent in the right. But we can acknowledge that a lot of people tried to lie on UNLV’s behalf, muddying the waters to save some face. Among those lies was likely this one, which held that Barry Odom is treating his quarterback room like a commune.
This instinct—the instinct to lie on UNLV’s behalf—interests me. I suppose I’m psychoanalyzing, but it reads as a reaction rooted in shame. I’d imagine most of that shame’s associated with a fear that UNLV did screw over a college senior, baiting him to move to Las Vegas with a false promise. But I wonder if part of it is over what the report implied, that piece we mentioned above, that angle where Holy crap UNLV does not have ANY money. As though to confirm this perception, UNLV’s athletic department made the odd decision only a few days after the Sluka news, passing up membership in a stronger conference with a stronger reputation in exchange for a one-time bag of cash from the Mountain West. Whether shame or something else provoked the panicky, lie–through–the–teeth reaction, it’s hard to deny: There is very, very little money at UNLV. Not no money—they do have an NIL collective of some sort, maybe more geared towards basketball, where returns per player are higher—but a small amount of money.
A common reaction to this is indignation. How is it fair for UNLV to compete with schools like Notre Dame, Ohio State, and Miami who can throw seven figures at transfer portal quarterbacks? In a sense, it is in fact fair. Nobody in South Bend or Columbus or Coral Gables did something nefarious to UNLV to put them in this position. But even if it’s unfair, I fail to see what’s wrong with it. It’s not a bad thing that UNLV has so little money. It would be better for them if they had more, but the thinness of their wallet doesn’t say something terrible about college football as a whole. Contrarily, it highlights one of the sport’s greatest attributes.
That “college football super league” proposal made the rounds again this week. The group behind it went public with the idea. It’s a slimy proposal, one which promises to “fix” college football by chopping off mid-majors, eliminating traditional (and still meaningful) conferences, and giving handouts to struggling programs like Syracuse and West Virginia, schools whose presidents are coincidentally the ones most associated with the concept. In a shameless follow-up, those presidents—Gordon Gee and Kent Syverud—had the gall to write an associated op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed drumming up fear of…a super league. Out one mouth, they fearmonger about a 36-team super league. Out the other, they say the solution is a 72-team super league. Their fear is not a super league. Their fear is that they won’t be included if a line is ever drawn.
A line doesn’t need to be drawn, and the SEC and Big Ten are not the ones trying to draw it. The SEC and Big Ten want to throw their weight around and extract concessions from lesser conferences. That is true, and as far as playoff access is concerned, it’s bad behavior. But the SEC and Big Ten aren’t trying to blow up college football. That’s what people like Gee and Syverud are trying to do. They’re the ones trying to draw a line. It’s what a lot of people sympathetic to UNLV are trying to do as well. They praise suggested NIL salary caps and cry foul at the College Football Playoff as a governing body. They ask for college athletes to make less than their market wage in the name of helping the little guy.
The great error people make when they try to “fix” college football is attempting to unify the sport into one giant league. One super league. This is not how college football works, and thank goodness for that. The current parity in the 30-team MLB and 32-team NHL has contributed directly to the declines of baseball and hockey in America. There are reasons every MLB league executive is praying the Yankees eliminate the Royals next week. Baseball is struggling. Parity in a 134-team FBS or even a 72-team FBS would have a lot of the same effects on college football.
Games featuring Oregon as a 50-point favorite over Kennesaw State might not be that interesting. But a world where Oregon can only be a 14-point favorite because of mass regulation is paint drying on a wall. Sure, each game might be closer, but there are plenty of opportunities to watch close football. In power conferences alone, 22 games this week feature a spread smaller than 14 points. What college football gives us, in addition to fun individual games, is juggernauts and dynasties, larger-than-life coaches and the kinds of Davids toppling Goliaths which can only happen in a world where 50-point underdogs exist. College football is a story of Nick Saban’s Alabama and Chris Petersen’s Boise State. Boise State got a raw deal in those days, and steps have been made to rectify similar situations. Cincinnati did not get a raw deal in 2021. It didn’t require a super league or asking the federal government to stop payments from Tennessee boosters to Tennessee players. But rectified or not, no one can take away what Boise State became. The Boise State story is a good one because nothing was handed to them and they nonetheless went and took everything they could.
College football functions best when it features big powers and little guys. It functions best when there are monsters in the SEC and little engines that could in the Mountain West. It functions best when a team like UNLV, one who can’t even find five percent of the price of a high-level transfer quarterback, earns itself an even better playoff chance than USC. UNLV might not have any money right now. Win tonight against Syracuse and win later this month against Boise State and that will start to change. It will be a beautiful story, an inspiring story, the kind of story you get when you don’t euthanize every underdog in the name of fairness. Syracuse’s chancellor wants to kick teams like UNLV out of college football so his school doesn’t reap the failure that he’s sowed. He says murdering UNLV will save the sport from a super league. That is shameful. UNLV not having money? Nothing to be embarrassed about at all.
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Shoutout to Sam Houston, who rolled UTEP last night in El Paso to improve to 5–1 on the year. The Bearkats aren’t really a playoff contender, but they’re a Conference USA contender, currently only a three-point underdog in Movelor’s projection for their regular season finale against Liberty. In their second FBS season, Sam Houston could end up being the ones to deal a reigning conference champ its first regular season loss in two years. To belabor a point: You don’t get that kind of rise with a super league.
Resources for the weekend:
- Week 6 Preview
- College Football Playoff Bracketology
- Movelor’s rankings and our model’s latest playoff probabilities (will be updated later today to account for last night’s games)
- Movelor’s spreads for Week 6
Bark.
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