Money, it’s a gas

[High Uintas]

The number of scholarships is about to increase markedly. This new expense, combined with revenue sharing is going to make running an athletic department prohibitively expensive for most schools not in the P2.

[Utah]

One of the rules is that there are now a maximum number of players on a team. That’s a good thing.

Also, teams don’t have to give out all 105 (or whatever the number is) of scholarships and I do believe you can do partial scholarships now.

[High Uintas]

Can you imagine the depth a Georgia or Oregon will have with 105 scholarships? The SEC and Big Ten teams are already signing most of the 4 and 5 star recruits. Now they can horde more talent.

[Charlie Foxtrot]

I don’t see how that is a benefit if you don’t ever see the field. It’s great to get a 4* rating, but if you don’t get to play how are you going to make it to the NFL? I can see a lot of that talent looking outside of the P2 just so they get a chance to play.

The insanity and constant change that is currently college football right now has all but done away with any kind of long term stability. It wouldn’t surprise me if everything boiled down to players getting whatever they can where ever they can each season until things consolidate and stabilize.

[Central Coast Ute]

Doesn’t matter. Even with the current 85 limit you can use the same argument, yet those kids always choose those schools. Now they can have even more of them and they javelin more room to pick off the best players from the B12/ACC, and G5.

[AlohaUte]

But there’s still just 11 on defense and 11 on offense at a given time. There will be a lot of talent that don’t sniff the field for those teams and will transfer.

I think it’s an awful development for the Boise State’s of the world, but I think there will be plenty of transfer talent available. There are going to be a lot of players who will have a better shot making the league playing for Boise State than they will playing for Ohio State.

[SOWhat]

Yes, you are probably correct on the 4 & 5 star recruits to the P2. But, that also means the number of transfers from that group will also go up. As has been mentioned, there are only 22 starters, there are going to be some very good players getting but-hurt for not starting.

[Central Coast Ute]

As of right now. But one day, in the not so distant future, the players will be university employees. Meaning they will sign a contract and won’t be able to transfer willy nilly. The coaches in the P2 will keep the best players on the 2 deeps and cut the rest. So I guess their 3rd and 4th string will be available, but I’m not sure that’s really what you want.

[RedUte14]

like scholarships really matter compared to NIL

[High Uintas]

Which would you rather be, the team that got the first chance at a 4/5 star talent or the team that got the players that washed out and transferred? Yes, there are some talented players that never got to show what they could do because they were buried behind someone better but the coaches see these players every day in practice and and they have a good idea of their talent. The players who transfer were probably overrated to begin with. Moving to 105 is just another step in the Big Ten and SEC pulling away from the rest of college football in talent. Combine that with the large, and growing, monetary gap and it doesn’t take a genius to see where this train is headed.

[Central Coast Ute]

High Uintas hit the nail right on the head.

[OmahaOmaha]

But it’s terrific news for baseball and softball student athletes. It’s a significant increase in scholarships and they become head count sports now. All scholarships are at 100 percent. Basketball and volleyball get a modest increase in scholarships as well.

[The Miami Ute]

I’ll refer to a comment I’ve mentioned several times on this website across the years… college football is regional, while professional football is national.

Yes, all of this is about money but the real big money only flows in if people pay subscriptions and tune in to watch the games.

Does anyone really think that the vast majority of college football fans, who have no rooting interest in either the B1G and SEC, are, all of a sudden, going to change their viewing habits?

This, especially, when those two conferences might be the reason for the demise of college football as we all knew it? I highly, highly doubt that.

The networks/media companies cannot pay these massive fees if the average football fan only tunes in for the CFP or the CCG. It’s just not financially feasible.

Minor league sports in the USA, which is what college football has become, are not really big money entities. And the talent level there is greater than anything we see in college sports. Again, FOX, ESPN, CBS, and ABC really need to be careful that they don’t disenfranchise the 80 percent of football fans that don’t regularly watch the SEC and B1G with the hope that they’ll come around. They might end up very disappointed.

[2008 National Champ]

forgive me for piggybacking on your thesis.,, but there’s a part of me that believes that a P2 (or superconference, or whatever you want to call it) may not fail spectacularly but it will fail.

I imagine I’m somewhere around median age for this board (56) so I believe many of us can remember the 3 network days where you were lucky if you got 3 college games a weekend on TV. As fans, if we weren’t at our local/favourite teams’ game, we were stuck with whatever the networks chose to give us on that weekend. We got used to believing that whatever the networks showed was important, but the networks also started to believe that their opinions mattered more than their viewership. fast forward to now and it’s easy to see why the networks have continued to believe that their opinion of content matters more. but there’s always a tipping point where the pendulum starts to move in the opposite direction.

So here we are in 2024 where as long as someone has a camera(phone) and an internet connection at an event, it can be streamed to as large an audience as are willing to find it. My own personal sports viewership has declined over the years to the point that Utah football is the only thing that I will set aside my time to participate (view). And while I may be in the minority of college football fans, I think I’m getting closer to the average every day. So if you can’t get someone like me to buy multiple packages I don’t want to watch something I have no interest in, how long until people like me prove that the business model is flawed and the networks have killed the golden goose? And all you are left with at that point is minor league Baseball, with about as much interest.

It may be a decade or two, but I believe that we are witnessing the death knell for college athletics in real time. I just haven’t decided whether that’s a good thing or not.,,

[High Uintas]

I agree with you that the NFL-Lite concept will eventually fail. But it will take 20 years and by then it will be impossible to resurrect the traditions and rivalries that made college football great.

[2008 National Champ]

oh, those traditions and rivalries are already gone. it’s just taken us a long time to realize that they only really mattered to us.

It started with the breakup of the SouthWest Conference and Penn State joining the Big 11 but that only affected a couple of fanbases so the rest of us ignored it. Once the Big East became a revolving door of participants and started wooing teams on the west coast, red flags should have gone up everywhere. Arkansas, Texas A&M, Missouri and Nebraska leaving decades of traditions and rivalries for brighter pastures finally started people noticing.

At the end of the day, we’re the frog on the stove that realized the pot was boiling too late to do anything about it.

[The Miami Ute]

I think that it’ll fail and eventually get back to some formula that makes sense. If you’re dealing with students cum athletes, it makes no sense at all to have a bicoastal conference.

[Utah]

I’ll say this again:

This is actually good. This limits how many players a team can have. Right now, Nebraska and Georgia have way more players than 105. And ALL are scholarship or equivalent paid players.

They will have to cut those players and get down to 105. Which means those teams will lose talented players they could keep before this rule.

All things considered, this is a good rule that keeps the talent somewhat spread out.

Don’t miss the forrest for the “more scholarships” tree.

[2008 National Champ]

I haven’t read the full proposal. Are you saying that walk-ons, if over the 105 roster limit will not be allowed?

[Utah]

Yes. You can only have 105 players. No more. You can give them all scholarships or not. It’s up to you. But you can’t have more than 105 players. Total.

Scholarship and walk on combined cannot be more than 105.

[2008 National Champ]

thanks for the clarification

[The Miami Ute]

I read a piece a couple of days ago where Dabo Swinney, himself a former walk-on at Alabama, went nuclear on the issue. Here’s the link:Dabo Swinney irked by proposed roster changes, impact on walk-ons

[2008 National Champ]

I’m not Dabo but as someone who walked on, I agree with his sentiment. Cutting the rosters down to 105 does nothing more than take chances away from 20 kids every year (I believe the roster max is currently 125). And these are kids who were/are willing to pay their own way to school and endure everything that goes along with being part of the team without really being part of the team just for the chance to fight their way into getting a couple of practice reps and hopefully earn a spot on the team.

[Utah]

Eh. It’s not that big of a deal. You used to have 85 scholarship players. Now you have 105. That’s 20 more.

Yeah, there are now less walkons. BUT everyone at Alabama will get a scholarship now. Sure, 20 previous walkons won’t be able to go Alabama, but they will still have a scholarship offer somewhere.

This isn’t the horrible story Dabo wants to make it out to be. Now, instead of saddling up some poor kid with student loans with lies of coming to Alabama or Clemson and being a star, the kid will have to go play somewhere else and not have student loans and be fed better and housed better and better taken care of.

Cry me a river. Dabo is mad because he can’t hoard talent like he used to.

And remember, the SEC and ACC was firmly against NIL and paying players. They were all for making money off the players until California passed laws making it legal for players to get paid.

Once the writing was on the wall, the south jumped in on paying players. But before then, they did everything they could do to do the wrong thing.

And this is the same. Dabo isn’t looking out for the little guy. He’s looking out for himself.

[Author]

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