It should surprise exactly no one that players, who were out of eligibility under NCAA rules, going through NFL training camp and filing lawsuits to play college football for another year was the last straw.
A week later, the Protect College Sports Act, dead in the water a month ago, is close to passing the Senate because the chaos finally got to be too much. It is, according to Team Chaos, bad for athletes.
This is what happens when you make everybody despise you.
When your position is that you have to have megaconferences, more hoarding of revenue by the conferences at the top, a stupid college basketball Thanksgiving week event in Las Vegas backed by all the worst people in existence (the Emiratis and David Ellison chief among them), more private equity backing, more helmet games, unlimited transfers, unlimited tampering with mid-major rosters, unlimited college eligibility and freedom to go back and forth between college and the pros as you please, all so that athletes can maximize their earnings…
…ultimately, fans decided that they didn’t want athletes to be allowed to maximize their earnings. People who liked ten-team regional conferences, the Maui Invitational, four-year players who stayed at their school long enough for fans to know who they were, marching bands instead of DJs and light shows, and mid-major Cinderellas in March Madness learned that the athletes and their Sports Law Twitter advocates were fighting to destroy all of that so that they could make more money.
Advocates complained that athletes didn’t have a seat at the table. The thing was that athletes did have a seat at the table, in the form of constant lawsuits and injunctions to handcuff the NCAA from enforcing any rules. That they used their seat at the table to completely turn public opinion against their position is the fault of the hubris of people who saw the NCAA unable to enforce the most basic of rules and decided to go for the jugular, assuming that they could hold the system hostage until they could force a new social contract on the sport. They were betting on Congress being so hopelessly divided that it could not wrangle enough votes for a bill. They were hoping Greg Sankey and Tony Pettiti would pressure Senators who represent the states in their conferences could go to bat for them, since of course the SEC and Big Ten share some (though not all) of the athletes’ interests.
Instead, they flipped public opinion against their cause. Whatever Darren Heitner doesn’t like about the PCSA is included because Darren Heitner doesn’t like it. Congratulations, nobody likes you. Fans won with the PCSA, and now if we can get the maximum conference size down to 10…
