ALTOONA, Pa. -- College football is a professional sport. Can we all finally agree on that? Well, you had better agree, because if you're still trying to romanticize college football as some glorious amateur endeavor, then you gotta stop living in the past.
These are athlete-students. That's right. I have made a vow to stop calling them student-athletes, because that phrase is a total misrepresentation at best, and at worst it's a flat out lie.
At the highest levels of the sport, teams are filled heavily by kids who are in college to be athletes, not students. Playing football is their job, and being a student is the necessary evil they must deal with in order to keep that job.
When the double-edged sword of the transfer portal and name, image likeness were introduced over the past couple years, it opened a Pandora's box of chaos upon college athletics -- chiefly football, which produces the vast amount of money.
Players could get theirs -- finally -- by getting paid whatever the free market would pay them through NIL deals.
It was heralded as a wonderful thing for players, who now finally had some leverage.
And players could go anywhere they wanted to go through the transfer portal, without penalty of sitting out a year.
That, too, was heralded as a wonderful thing for players, who now had even more leverage.
But sometimes, when you combine two things that are thought to be good, the end result can still be something very bad.
It shouldn't have taken a genius to realize that when you mix those two things, the results eventually would lead to a wild, wild West level of anarchy -- including shady deals, loss of loyalty, lying, million-dollar handshakes, lost opportunities and whatever other salacious nonsense you can imagine.
Nobody seemed to care when Alabama quarterback Bryce Young got a million-dollar NIL deal before he had ever taken a college snap.
Nobody seemed to care that Quinn Ewers, the No. 1 QB recruit in the country last year, got a $1.4 million deal at Ohio State (he has since transferred to Texas).
Nobody seemed to care that 16 percent of Division I college football players entered the transfer portal last year, or a whopping 31 percent of DI college basketball players.
But it certainly should have been obvious to everyone -- even though it wasn't -- that while all that was happening, it was inching us closer and closer to a very real, very bad tipping point in college athletics.
Lo and behold, the tipping point seems to have abruptly come last weekend, all in the name of Pitt star wide receiver Jordan Addison.
Oh my goodness, Addison could get $3 million to jump ship and take his talents elsewhere!!!!
And surely there must be tampering going on here!!!!
This is all preposterous!!!!
Actually, it's not. Not if you've been paying attention each step of the way along the transfer portal-NIL circus of trickle-down effect.
What happened with Jordan Addison was always bound to happen.
ALWAYS.
As in, 100 percent inevitable, based again on the two elements in play here:
1. A free market
2. The ability to transfer anywhere you want
But ... but ... there was tampering! How can that be allowed?
C'mon, folks. Tampering had already been going on with transfers. Does anyone really believe that several thousand football and basketball players just decided willy nilly to enter the transfer portal without having some idea of what the market could be for their services? Sure, a lot of mid- or low-lever players have entered the portal and never found a home, which is unfortunate for them.
But the top-level guys, the stars? You're kidding yourself if you don't think there were often talks between officials from other schools and the AAU or high school coaches, or parents, or uncles, or cousins or whatever of star players before they entered the portal.
I do feel for Pitt fans, because it sucks what happened with Addison. He was the best receiver in the country last year, winning the Biletnikoff Award (for which I am a voter and did indeed vote for him).
And I don't blame Pitt fans AT ALL for feeling like something really shady went down between Addison and USC, leading to claims of tampering by Trojan coach Lincoln Riley.
We may never know if indeed there was tampering. And if we do find out after some years-long investigation, it won't matter to Pitt because Addison will be well into his NFL career by then.
No, I don't blame Pitt fans for being ticked off if Addison does transfer, which he has not made official yet (he is in the portal). You folks got hosed.
I blame the system here, because the system -- as I laid it out step by step above -- made it all too easily possibly that there eventually would be superstar players being enticed to leave for huge money at richer programs.
Nobody should knock Addison if he can indeed get $3 million to play football for one year, at USC or anywhere else. If Pitt couldn't come close to matching that with whatever NIL deals he had in place, then Addison had every right under the current system to seek out more money somewhere else.
It has happened before, it happened in this high-profile, watershed moment for college athletics, and it absolutely will happen again -- over and over and over.
Unless we fix the system or come up with a new system altogether.
Good luck with that. Because now that the Pandora's box has been opened, the realist in me believes there will never, ever be a good way to close it.
There have been a number of stories and columns like mine written in recent days all across the country, because the Addison situation has blown the door open on the loophole to chaos that always existed here. A number of those stories are proposing things such as making college athletes employees, paying them salaries, allowing them to unionize and the like.
On the surface, those might seem like good ideas. And honestly, I do believe college athletics -- at least football and basketball -- will take steps toward doing those things. It may not be too long before football players are getting salaries from the schools, and perhaps then being able to form unions so that they can collectively bargain for rights.
But I'm here to tell ya, I don't see any of that solving the problems that have been created by the double-edged sword of transfer portal and NIL.
If you paid attention at all to the recent Major League Baseball lockout, surely you understand that it didn't fix the sport in any way. That sport is still very much broken from a financial standpoint, and Pirates fans know it all too well. Goodness gracious, the Oakland A's are as broken as it gets in professional sports from a financial standpoint, and that's after an extended lockout was supposed to have fixed things.
No matter what, there will always be haves and have nots in MLB because the sport has no salary cap and, more importantly, no salary floor.
And no matter what, there will always be haves and have nots in college football, where some programs can spend insane amounts of money, while others simply cannot.
At some point, the haves will break apart from the have nots, and there will be a 40-50 team college football league -- one that operates entirely like a professional league, without the romantic guise of even pretending to try and be amateur.
Financially, Penn State will always have a place somewhere near the top of the haves in college football. Not the very top, but at worst in the second tier. And yet Penn State doesn't have a particularly strong NIL setup just yet -- it's working toward that goal, but Drew Allar and Nick Singleton didn't get million-dollar deals as elite recruits, and the Nittany Lions certainly could lose one of them or any other star player to another school that offers much more money.
Just like Pitt may lose Addison -- which isn't a done deal yet -- if indeed there's someone out there willing to pay him $3 million.
Should pay for play be allowed? If players are getting salaries from schools as employees, could that somehow end another school's ability to shell out a ridiculous amount of money to poach away a player?
Again, I just don't see that happening, since the Pandora's box of NIL has been opened, and these athletes now can finally see how much they might be able to get on the free market.
Look, I'm for players being able to get everything they can get. I used to think that them getting a scholarship and free education were enough, but it's laughable to think that now.
James Franklin just got a new 10-year contract worth $85 million, and that's after going 11-11 the past two years.
You don't think that the players see all that money and think to themselves, I want to get mine!
The Big Ten is in negotiations for a new broadcasting rights deal worth more than a billion dollars a year -- that's BILLION with a B. Split evenly, that would be $71 million for each of the 14 member schools.
You don't think that the players see all that money and think to themselves, I want to get mine!
I discussed a good bit a year ago that, if this were 2017 season when Saquon Barkley was the face of college football, could he command $1 million a year in NIL? That figure is laughable now because, if Barkley were coming back to Penn State as the star in 2022, the figure he could command in a free market would be at least $5 million and maybe close to double that.
Why? Because somebody, somewhere would have paid that crazy figure. And as long as you've got people out there willing to give out blank checks to college football players, then you will have a system that is absolutely a professional sport -- one where everyone has their hand out trying to get what they can.