President Trump is reportedly assembling a presidential commission on college sports, a commission to be led by Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell and former Navy defensive assistant Nick Saban. Its purpose? Yes. That is the question.
The reporting says the commission will research NIL, the transfer portal, and revenue sharing. This is why Campbell and Saban are heading it up. The reason every other attempt to save college sports has failed (as evidenced by every college sport but men’s basketball growing massively in popularity lately) is that the committee was never subjective enough. Surely a president who views the world through a quid pro quo framework will take these findings—findings from a coach who retired because of free transfers and a booster who’s building an NIL empire—and assist Congress in passing nuanced, restrained legislation which sands off the industry’s dangerous edges while allowing enough leeway for nature to guide markets to a steady state. Surely there will be no special treatment of special interests. Surely there will be no federal executive overreach. Surely all of this will be done competently, with wisdom.
I do hope that the committee approaches this diligently, because I think there’s an angle here which could help out the NIT. If you ask a specific question in a specific way, you find that people think they were happiest with college sports in the mid to late 2000’s. Were they? Of course not. As we say often around here, college sports have always been a mess, with pay-for-play blowing up the Pacific Coast Conference in the 50’s and organizational upheaval in the 70’s and conference realignment boiling on in every decade college sports have ever been played, ever. But people think college sports were best at the exact moment they started getting into college sports. As our population ages, that’s getting us to an era where a lot of fans came of age knowing a 32-team, merit-based NIT with no competition from other tournaments and no opt-outs. If you squint, the answer to “What’s wrong with college sports?” is that a bunch of loser college basketball administrators, coaches, and TV executives have been dumping on the NIT.
We do think the NIT’s a canary in college sports’ coal mine. Not that the industry’s about to inhale a bunch of deadly gases and die a tragic death, but that the NIT’s a good measure of how committed college basketball players and coaches are to their current team. That’s the thing we want in college sports. In the 40’s, we wanted players to stop colluding with gamblers to rig games. In the 2020’s, we want college athletes to care about their teammates and the name on the front of their jerseys. No college sports event is more about personal pride than the National Invitation Tournament.
Anyway, if you don’t see me for the next few months, it’s because I’m going Watergate on this presidential commission’s Zoom meetings. Except instead of bugging them to listen in, I’m bugging them to play a soft, almost imperceptible voice repeating, “The NIT is the answer!” until every committee member and no shortage of administrative assistants is convinced the thought came from their own head.
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