For years, the sport of college football seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut, but a viral pandemic has exposed some glaring weaknesses.
Baseball may be called America’s pastime, but college football has become America’s passion, especially over the last 30 years. The sport has grown exponentially not only in popularity but also in revenue generated, making it one of the most powerful sports in the world.
A sport run by millionaire coaches and administrators profiting off the sweat and work of amateur student-athletes has long been a point of contention, but the strength of the conferences and guise of leadership by the NCAA have kept the target moving and sidestepped any attempts to splinter the sport.
Until now.
In 2015, when the Power-5 conferences declared autonomy, many saw it as the beginning of the end for the NCAA. At the time, it would have appeared to be a small step towards improving the sport, with a long road of gradual changes that would have or could have phased out NCAA oversight.
The big-money armor of college football still seemed impenetrable, but all of that changed swiftly in March of 2020.
With the coronavirus pandemic came the cancellation of many sports and sporting events. One by one, the dominoes fell from the NBA, MLB all the way to a complete kill of the 2020 NCAA Basketball Tournament. Once March Madness fell, heads began to turn towards football.
Surely we’d be through this in time for the college football season. The powers that be in college football marched ever forward, confident that the virus would be under control by the time kickoff weekend arrived.
How wrong they were.
College football being canceled isn’t the problem.
In and of itself, the cancelation or postponement of the 2020 college football season would have been an uncomfortable but manageable problem to deal with, and as the clock ticked down towards the start of the season two things became apparent to college presidents, athletic directors, and head football coaches.
This season wasn’t going to start on time (if at all), and they were going to have a lot to answer for — not so much to the fans, but to the players.
One of the byproducts of the impending doom in the 2020 college football season was the players’ desire to not only play, but to play while in control of their own fates and to have a voice in the decisions that affected them.
Every Power-5 conference began making their own roadmap to survival, with combinations of canceling non-conference games, shortening schedules and delaying opening week. In the wake of these decisions, many smaller schools were left behind, with the “money games” that helped to support their complete athletic department budgets now disappearing without a trace.
When you have 130 FBS schools, and 127 FCS schools all at the financial mercy of what 65 of those schools decide, it’s a recipe for disaster … a kind of collegiate version of trickle-down economics.
All of this sparked something in some high-profile players, and the bonding of players within their individual conferences and then reaching across the nation had begun.
As the players unified and began to flex their own muscle — realizing they were the most important part of the game — the hierarchy of the game began to break off and crumble like chunks of the arctic shelf, and they scrambled to find a foothold without any real leadership.
This was the Achilles heel in the body of strength that college football had built. No one was prepared for a unification of the players challenging their rights to play with assurances for their health and long-term welfare.
When the Big Ten and Pac-12 made the decision to completely cancel their football seasons, things became desperate and it was clear that without some sort of chancellor or commissioner to keep things together, college football was in trouble. It didn’t take long for the narrative to change from “looking out for player safety” to “union-busting”.
The rumors began to surface. Nebraska may search for another conference. Justin Fields may transfer back to Georgia. Jim Harbaugh may return to the NFL. When chaos begins, those who have unity are the survivors. Those who cling to only self-preservation are least likely to come out of it intact.
As the powerful schools and conferences struggled to present a unified front, the players found their own voice.
College football players will no longer be voiceless.
The masquerade of amateurism that has carried the sport of college football to becoming a gigantic ATM machine for everyone but the players seems to be no longer tolerable to those most affected, and this time it’s not going to just go away simply with the swing of a gavel from the National Labor Relations Board.
The student-athletes, now aware of how much power they actually have thanks to the voices of players like Trevor Lawrence and Justin Fields as well as former greats like Herschel Walker, will not give up the fight this time, and it will go far beyond #WeWantToPlay.
It will become the epicenter of yet another national debate, drawing battle lines between those who long for keeping things “just the way they are” and those who have a different view of amateurism in college sports.
For fans who are waiting for the COVID-19 flags to be lowered so that their beloved sport can move forward, it couldn’t come at a worse time with a general election just months away. For the first time in history, you may see a general strike in the United States by a group of people who aren’t paid at all, with both major parties trying to figure out how to stump for these things in their favor.
An even worse fate for college football fans than a pandemic is for the sport to be embroiled in politics, a disease that never ends.
Losing a season was going to be bad enough. Losing what seemed to be an iron grip on how the sport is run is becoming devastating for those in charge. The soft underbelly of college football has been exposed and now it’s going to be an even bigger fight to get things running even after the blight of the pandemic has passed.