NIL and Void

The rich get richer, and the poor have kids.
-- My Pappy (1915-1991)/often

The name, image, and likeness moolah parade has been going on for some time, and I guess it's high time for these missives to address it.

Before it became real, only a glint in the eyes of atheletes who are uneducable, and don't care that they are, and hoop and foobah teams, it was clear to Your Humble Servant that the tenuous notion of student-athlete was finally shredded. One stated positive was that this would allow student-athletes to move school about as easily as coaches. Another was that said student-athletes had been treated as Plantation Negroes by the NCAA and schools for far too long, and NIL amounted to just reparations; never mind that regular Plantation Negroes never were so treated. Finally (so far as this essay is concerned), that non-Power Conference schools would have a better shot at getting elite student-athletes, since they could, indirectly by regulation, pay them for their sporting skills.

Doesn't seem to be working out that way. The Power Conference schools have more moneyed Booster Groups over the years, and still do. The notion that Boosters at Power Conference schools were the only ones making sub rosa payments is nonsense.

The rich will still get richer. College athletics, at least in the important sports of hoops and foobah, will continue to coalesce into an eventual oligopoly of a handful of conferences, which will eat up 99.44% of teeVee moolah.

Bomani Jones, who was outspoken enough to get minimized (and mostly off the teeVee part) at ESPN, has an op-ed piece in today's (dead trees version) NYT slamming the whole NCAA/NIL fiasco. Worth reading, I'd say, but he doesn't ponder the ultimate result. That's what this essay is for.

As an example, here's a report on Nebraska foobah from the horse's mouth. So to speak.

Despite winning 19 games in the past five seasons, Nebraska football posted a profit of more than $60 million last school year.

Student-athletes? My dirty sphincter. Except for USC, the rest of this top 10 are all Red state, aka taxpayer subsidized, schools.

[update 26 March]
Just saw the interview with the Chuckster on "60 Minutes", likely on youTube or wherever soon. He was asked about the state of college hoops, and said it was awful and the problem is that NIL, in a few years, will winnow college hoops to 25 schools that have locked up the NIL money. I think he's correct.