For any college football fans old enough to legally drink, the current landscape of arguably the second most popular sport in America is a strange and unfamiliar one.
That’s because, to many traditionalists, college football is slowly but surely turning into the most popular sport in America, professional football à la the NFL or any number of attempted spring leagues.
How is college football doing this? It’s thanks to two key factors that have exploded in ubiquity over the past few years:
- The transfer portal
- The 2021 policy change to the NCAA’s name, image and likeness, or NIL, rules
The transfer portal has long existed in college football, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Disgruntled players seeking more playing time can enter this “portal” to transfer to another school.
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Recently, it’s become something of a “free agent” hub for college football programs. University of Colorado Boulder football coach Deion Sanders took great advantage of the portal when he left Jackson State — and took swathes of his best players with him to the Centennial State via that portal.
But the NIL change? That’s where “amateur” sports begin stretching the term to its breaking point, because it effectively allows college students to be paid for their name, image and likeness.
You’ll have to remember: For fans of a certain age, paying your college football team may be the most unpardonable of NCAA sins, and can lead to ominous punishments like the infamous “death penalty” levied against the Southern Methodist University Mustangs football program back in 1987.
“It’s like what happened after we dropped the [atom] bomb in World War II. The results were so catastrophic that now we’ll do anything to avoid dropping another one,” former University of Florida president John Lombardi described SMU’s death-penalty verdict in 2002, according to Time magazine.
Do you think the NIL deals have helped improved college football?
“The death penalty—part of the ‘repeat violators’ rule in official NCAA parlance—wiped out SMU’s entire 1987 season and forced the Mustangs to cancel their 1988 campaign as well. So, when Lombardi compared the punishment to the nuclear option, in 2002, the analogy seemed like an apt one,” Time wrote in 2015. “For years, scorched earth was all that remained of the SMU football program, and of the idea of paying players.”
Fast forward six years from when that Time piece was written, and all of a sudden, the “idea of paying players” wasn’t just accepted — it was fervently embraced by the masses, thanks to the NIL deals.
Case in point: Arch Manning, the nephew of legendary NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning, has completed all of two passes as the backup quarterback at the University of Texas last year.
Those completions are apparently worth about $1.5 million each, according to football pundit and content creator Chris Law — and that means Arch Manning has made more money in NIL deals than one of the top MVP candidates in the NFL, Brock Purdy, is earning.
Arch Manning made over $3.2 Million in NIL money this year as the Texas Longhorns backup QB
Brock Purdy, the QB of the No.1 seed #FTTB & the #NFL’s odds on MVP favorite made $870,000 for the 2023 season
— Chris Law (@ChrisLaw) December 20, 2023
“Arch Manning made over $3.2 Million in NIL money this year as the Texas Longhorns backup QB,” Law posted to X.
He then added: “Brock Purdy, the QB of the No.1 seed #FTTB & the #NFL’s odds on MVP favorite made $870,000 for the 2023 season.”
Law’s point could have dramatic effects on the NFL draft in coming years, given that the NFL has a set rookie scale for rookie contracts (hence why Purdy is making a relatively paltry $870,000).
If you can make more money as a college backup than an NFL starter … what’s the rush to go pro?
According to ESPN, one of these lucrative NIL deals Manning has signed is with one of the premier sports trading cards publishers, Panini.
Think about how radically different things are in college football now.
SMU was handed the most severe NCAA punishment imaginable because it paid its players to keep up with the Alabama-and-Texas-tier college football programs of the world.
Nearly four decades after SMU’s “death,” those Texas-tier college programs are now able to pay their backup quarterbacks millions of dollars.
What a time to be a college football fan.
