So there’s a working group coming to tackle the “issues” in college sports, and you can tell how serious this is just by looking who is and isn’t invited.
Invited: All four power conference commissioners plus the commissioners of the American and Mountain West, Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Mack Brown, Tiger Woods, Tim Tebow, Charlie Ward, Adam Silver, the people running ESPN and Fox Sports, some athletic directors and university presidents, that Cody Campbell guy, and Ron DeSantis for some fucking reason
Not invited: The President of the NCAA, any currently active college athletes or coaches
In other words, the NCAA’s issues are going to be fixed by inviting a bunch of people involved in the money side of college sports and absolutely no one involved in the actual competition side at present. I’m sure Nick Saban has thoughts on why he’s no longer a college football coach, though the reason mostly seems to be that he’s old and tired of this bullshit. There are also reasons why Urban Meyer is no longer a college football coach, though those aren’t directly relevant to anything that they’d be discussing, to say the least. I don’t know what athletes who competed in college in the 1990s and 2000s have to contribute to anything about the current state of college sports.
If you ask the people constructing 18-team conferences that run from coast to coast what the problems with college sports are, you’re probably going to get very different answers than if you asked the athletes and coaches flying across the country for a conference game, is the point, and to include one group and not the other is going to give you skewed answers on the fix. Like everything else in life, if you start from the premise that we can’t have the 1990s back… oh, is that why we invited Charlie Ward to this?
But never mind that. The most notable thing the NCAA has done this year is approve commercial sponsor patches, because fuck it, we’re going to monetize everything we can. Oh, yeah, and the Big 12 came up with a fucking LED court for its conference tournament, which the same crew of dipshits that spend most of my time convincing me that AI will do my job for me (spoiler: I will continue to not use AI to write articles for Anchor of Gold) took time out of doing that to tell me is “sick” and “the future.”
These same people are excited about sponsor patches, for reasons that I cannot begin to understand. (But you have to admit the new logo is growing on you, don’t you, Tom? NO I DON’T.)
But I do not understand how you have a “working group” to address issues in college sports THAT DOES NOT INCLUDE THE PRESIDENT OF THE NCAA. Unless, of course, getting rid of the NCAA is the goal.
In which case: this is yet another reminder that if you don’t like the NCAA, you’re really not going to like what comes after the NCAA. That’s especially true if you care about the athletes, who are decidedly going to be worse off under the post-NCAA private equity nonsense unless you’re the kind of person who genuinely believes that making the athletes get an actual education (even if it’s just an HOD degree) is actually bad for them.
