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Franz Beard
"Advisory Group" Signals the End of the NCAA Isn't Far Off
“I’m the one telling you the way it is.” – Chili Palmer, played by John Travolta in the movie “Get Shorty”
It was called an “advisory group,” this announcement that the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten have joined forces to study the direction in which collegiate athletics are heading. Do you think for one nanosecond that Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the SEC and the smartest man in any room he’s physically present, doesn’t already know that college sports under the direction and guidance of the NCAA is going to break apart like space junk re-entering the atmosphere?
Greg Sankey, the most powerful man in all of college sports, didn’t really need Big Ten commissioner Tony Petiti to issue a joint, 259-word statement that is the equivalent of (a) telling the world that the NCAA is about to swim with the fishes and (b) in the very near future college sports will be operating under a new organization that operates on the gold standard.
You know the gold standard, don’t you? If you’ve got the gold, you set the standard. The SEC and the Big Ten understand something only the geeks and bureaucrats that run the NCAA don’t, which is the socialist model on which the organization has been running for more than 117 years has long outlived its purpose. Now it’s time for a brand new organization and the people at the top who run it will be the two richest and most powerful conferences.
They will make the rules. They will set the standard. Everybody else stand in line, hat in hand, and pray that there will be enough crumbs to sustain them.
This was not a spontaneous move. If you have followed the meteoric rise of Greg Sankey as the godfather of college sports, then you know he thinks things through before speaking and acting. Sankey knows both the current NCAA model and the one Charlie Baker has proposed are unsustainable. He also understands that the three big lawsuits the NCAA has to answer to are likely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Lawyers are smelling blood in the water and there is no end to the number of schools and athletes with grievances to bear.
Sankey may not have all the details necessary to secede from the NCAA and start a brand new organization, but if he doesn’t already have a plan in place, he has a number of models from which he can choose.
Bringing in Petiti wasn’t necessary, but the clout of the two richest, most powerful conferences united essentially kneecaps the NCAA. The NCAA has absolutely zero in the way of leverage when – not if – it chooses to fight back and it will. The NCAA is like the late Chuck Wepner, the “Bayonne Bleeder.” Chuck knew he was going to lose but he felt compelled to get in the ring to take one more beating. The NCAA, in its infinite wisdom, could elect to battle a new organization in the courts, but it has won almost as many important legal cases as Vanderbilt has won Southeastern Conference football championships.
It can also attempt to divide and conquer, but if other conferences elect to stick with the NCAA, so be it. The SEC and Big Ten don’t need anyone else. If the SEC and Big Ten elected to form an NFL model and hold playoffs and a Super Bowl, do you think the NCAA could come up with anything capable of competing? The financial windfall of an SEC/Big Ten football alliance would dwarf anything the NCAA could negotiate. Maybe the NCAA would choose George Kliavkoff, the same guy who negotiated the Pac-12 out of existence, to come up with a network deal for a championship involving all the other conferences.
Bet the ranch that the other leagues would stand in line, hats in hand, begging for a chance to join a new organization headed by the SEC and Big Ten even if it meant the two leagues with all the gold take a hefty percentage of the revenue generated. There is an old saying: Ten percent of a watermelon is more than 100 percent of a grape.
We won’t see a replacement for the NCAA spring up overnight. First things first, the replacement will require a strong leader. The ultimate demise of the NCAA was a lack of leadership, starting with the bully Walter Byers and all the geeks who followed in his footsteps. Byers scared the hell out of NCAA membership but ideas were held prisoner in his head, forced a life of solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water. Myles Brand, Cedric Dempsey and Mark Emmert were nothing more than the scarecrow, tin man and cowardly lion from “The Wizard of Oz.”
Current NCAA prez Charlie Baker? We should have known he was impending disaster when he outlined a case to have the United States Congress come up with long term solutions for the problems of the NCAA. They can’t balance a budget or figure out a way for the post office to keep bleeding money even though they keep getting more money.
The new president or commissioner of the replacement has to be a strong leader with unmatched integrity and the vision to build a sustainable business model that can save college sports. It may very well take ceding college sports over to corporate sponsors. We giggle at the thought of Georgia football uniforms with Chico’s Bailbonds emblazoned on the uniform but corporate money might be required because at some point in time, athletes are going to be paid and the money will have to come from somewhere, especially for schools that lack a huge endowment, gozillionaire boosters or a big enough and loyal fan base like Clemson’s IPTAY.
The new commissioner/president also has to understand that while the new organization is incapable of accommodating everyone that wants to join, it can’t crush the other divisions out of existence. Baseball, for example, has its minor leagues that not only funnel talent to the top, but fulfil a vital function among the alumni/fan bases as well as the communities from which they operate. Let the lower divisions continue to operate but with a different set of rules. Give them championships. Not everyone is cut out to play at the highest levels.
Enforceable rules will have to be put in place along with fair but harsh enough punishments that take away the incentive to cheat. Each conference will have to set its own salary standards and athletes will have to be given employment contracts.
It will all have to start with football. For years there have been calls for football to break away from the NCAA. There has been talk within the NCAA for football to become an autonomous division, but any plan that keeps football under the umbrella of the NCAA is not going to work. After 117 years of the NCAA running things, we should have learned our lessons. If the NCAA is in charge, it will burden it with endless rules and regulations and layer it with bureaucrats who are clueless. The NCAA can claim until it is blue in the face that it would truly give football total autonomy, but someone remind us when has the NCAA proven itself trustworthy? Someone also remind us why should we trust college presidents to run a sports organization? The new organization has to be NCAA-free and free to put business people who actually know sports in charge. Otherwise it will fail.
Millions of years ago dinosaurs roamed the earth. They were huge, powerful creatures but for reasons we don’t know, they ceased to exist. The NCAA hasn’t been around as long as dinosaurs inhabited the earth but we know why it should cease to exist. Just like there was a time and place for the dinosaurs to go extinct, we are approaching the time when the NCAA should go belly up, their fossils displayed in museums as a reminder of what once was."
Franz Beard
"Advisory Group" Signals the End of the NCAA Isn't Far Off
“I’m the one telling you the way it is.” – Chili Palmer, played by John Travolta in the movie “Get Shorty”
It was called an “advisory group,” this announcement that the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten have joined forces to study the direction in which collegiate athletics are heading. Do you think for one nanosecond that Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the SEC and the smartest man in any room he’s physically present, doesn’t already know that college sports under the direction and guidance of the NCAA is going to break apart like space junk re-entering the atmosphere?
Greg Sankey, the most powerful man in all of college sports, didn’t really need Big Ten commissioner Tony Petiti to issue a joint, 259-word statement that is the equivalent of (a) telling the world that the NCAA is about to swim with the fishes and (b) in the very near future college sports will be operating under a new organization that operates on the gold standard.
You know the gold standard, don’t you? If you’ve got the gold, you set the standard. The SEC and the Big Ten understand something only the geeks and bureaucrats that run the NCAA don’t, which is the socialist model on which the organization has been running for more than 117 years has long outlived its purpose. Now it’s time for a brand new organization and the people at the top who run it will be the two richest and most powerful conferences.
They will make the rules. They will set the standard. Everybody else stand in line, hat in hand, and pray that there will be enough crumbs to sustain them.
This was not a spontaneous move. If you have followed the meteoric rise of Greg Sankey as the godfather of college sports, then you know he thinks things through before speaking and acting. Sankey knows both the current NCAA model and the one Charlie Baker has proposed are unsustainable. He also understands that the three big lawsuits the NCAA has to answer to are likely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Lawyers are smelling blood in the water and there is no end to the number of schools and athletes with grievances to bear.
Sankey may not have all the details necessary to secede from the NCAA and start a brand new organization, but if he doesn’t already have a plan in place, he has a number of models from which he can choose.
Bringing in Petiti wasn’t necessary, but the clout of the two richest, most powerful conferences united essentially kneecaps the NCAA. The NCAA has absolutely zero in the way of leverage when – not if – it chooses to fight back and it will. The NCAA is like the late Chuck Wepner, the “Bayonne Bleeder.” Chuck knew he was going to lose but he felt compelled to get in the ring to take one more beating. The NCAA, in its infinite wisdom, could elect to battle a new organization in the courts, but it has won almost as many important legal cases as Vanderbilt has won Southeastern Conference football championships.
It can also attempt to divide and conquer, but if other conferences elect to stick with the NCAA, so be it. The SEC and Big Ten don’t need anyone else. If the SEC and Big Ten elected to form an NFL model and hold playoffs and a Super Bowl, do you think the NCAA could come up with anything capable of competing? The financial windfall of an SEC/Big Ten football alliance would dwarf anything the NCAA could negotiate. Maybe the NCAA would choose George Kliavkoff, the same guy who negotiated the Pac-12 out of existence, to come up with a network deal for a championship involving all the other conferences.
Bet the ranch that the other leagues would stand in line, hats in hand, begging for a chance to join a new organization headed by the SEC and Big Ten even if it meant the two leagues with all the gold take a hefty percentage of the revenue generated. There is an old saying: Ten percent of a watermelon is more than 100 percent of a grape.
We won’t see a replacement for the NCAA spring up overnight. First things first, the replacement will require a strong leader. The ultimate demise of the NCAA was a lack of leadership, starting with the bully Walter Byers and all the geeks who followed in his footsteps. Byers scared the hell out of NCAA membership but ideas were held prisoner in his head, forced a life of solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water. Myles Brand, Cedric Dempsey and Mark Emmert were nothing more than the scarecrow, tin man and cowardly lion from “The Wizard of Oz.”
Current NCAA prez Charlie Baker? We should have known he was impending disaster when he outlined a case to have the United States Congress come up with long term solutions for the problems of the NCAA. They can’t balance a budget or figure out a way for the post office to keep bleeding money even though they keep getting more money.
The new president or commissioner of the replacement has to be a strong leader with unmatched integrity and the vision to build a sustainable business model that can save college sports. It may very well take ceding college sports over to corporate sponsors. We giggle at the thought of Georgia football uniforms with Chico’s Bailbonds emblazoned on the uniform but corporate money might be required because at some point in time, athletes are going to be paid and the money will have to come from somewhere, especially for schools that lack a huge endowment, gozillionaire boosters or a big enough and loyal fan base like Clemson’s IPTAY.
The new commissioner/president also has to understand that while the new organization is incapable of accommodating everyone that wants to join, it can’t crush the other divisions out of existence. Baseball, for example, has its minor leagues that not only funnel talent to the top, but fulfil a vital function among the alumni/fan bases as well as the communities from which they operate. Let the lower divisions continue to operate but with a different set of rules. Give them championships. Not everyone is cut out to play at the highest levels.
Enforceable rules will have to be put in place along with fair but harsh enough punishments that take away the incentive to cheat. Each conference will have to set its own salary standards and athletes will have to be given employment contracts.
It will all have to start with football. For years there have been calls for football to break away from the NCAA. There has been talk within the NCAA for football to become an autonomous division, but any plan that keeps football under the umbrella of the NCAA is not going to work. After 117 years of the NCAA running things, we should have learned our lessons. If the NCAA is in charge, it will burden it with endless rules and regulations and layer it with bureaucrats who are clueless. The NCAA can claim until it is blue in the face that it would truly give football total autonomy, but someone remind us when has the NCAA proven itself trustworthy? Someone also remind us why should we trust college presidents to run a sports organization? The new organization has to be NCAA-free and free to put business people who actually know sports in charge. Otherwise it will fail.
Millions of years ago dinosaurs roamed the earth. They were huge, powerful creatures but for reasons we don’t know, they ceased to exist. The NCAA hasn’t been around as long as dinosaurs inhabited the earth but we know why it should cease to exist. Just like there was a time and place for the dinosaurs to go extinct, we are approaching the time when the NCAA should go belly up, their fossils displayed in museums as a reminder of what once was."
