You are claiming the demise of college football because it is moving outside of lines you deem appropriate. You can justify lowering academic standards to allow athletes access or giving them a $100k education the less physically gifted people pay for but now you see a problem rising. I’ll tell you my friend “in for a penny in for a pound”.
So where does all this end up? A lot of folks who are concerned about where this is going can't answer that question. Look down the road a bit and tell you don't see potential problems.
I agree that sometimes folks suffer from old timer syndrome. I was curious about when scholarship limits were placed and dug up this quote:
When scholarships were cut from 105 to 95 in 1978, former USC coach John McKay reputedly said, “Mark this day on your calendar. This day is the ruin of college football. It will only go downhill from here.”
However the argument being made here is that the imbalance of money... not just the money itself... but the imbalance of money is going to cause problems across all of college football. It's going to cause problems in conferences and most likely amongst players on teams themselves. The NFL has worked out most of these issues through player agreements. College football is jumping headlong into this new era with zero direction.
State schools are run by politicians. You don't think there's going to be issues when teams who can't afford to pay $25mil to players start banding together? There's a lot more schools that don't have deep pockets than ones that do.
Some players on teams get paid and others don't. Are they going to strike and demand they make the same money as well? The portal relieves some of that pressure right now, but it won't be long before the imbalance is keenly felt among certain groups.
If college separates into the money league (looking like the SEC) and everybody else is that really going to feel like college football when it separates into stratified levels of conferences... created based on how much each can pay their teams? It won't be long before even the teams in the SEC demand that a salary cap is put into so the league doesn't get imbalanced. Will it still feel the same when the SEC only plays itself and there's no singular college champion?
Will that pressure be contained within conferences or will it be applied to college football as a whole? Remember that just a handful of teams can really afford to spend millions on a yearly basis. Will there be a national push (like the original Title IX) to restrict how much teams can spend on their teams?
These aren't just concerns in a vacuum but based on events that have actually occurred both in college football and decades of player/owner money struggles in the NFL. At least when NCAA players weren't getting (legitimately) paid the whole field was more or less equal. Whether that was right or wrong what's going to happen is a Pandora's Box that no one knows where it will lead. You can't tell me that you aren't concerned about any of that just a little.
