For decades the National Collegiate Athletic Association — hereby called what everybody knows it as: The NCAA — acted as a minor league system that paid slave wages to the athletes who generated massive amounts of dollars annually to their conferences and institutions. Television contracts with major media networks, merchandise sales, ticket sales, concession sales… none of this money ever made its way into the hands of the players.

In July of 2021 the NCAA, due largely to pressure from the public, allowed players to begin receiving endorsements based on their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL). This opened the door for high school athletes to receive from boosters and sponsors hundreds of thousands of dollars — and for the best players even millions — which in turn made the NCAA, for the first time, a free market.

No one will deny that over the last five years college sports have turned into a runaway train: Whereas college athletes once made nothing (unless you count the scholarship they received), and were forced to sit out and lose a year of eligibility whenever they transferred to a different program, college athletics quickly became the wild west where athletes became, effectively, year-to-year free agents. If another school offered more money, or if the athlete simply did not like his playing situation, he could now transfer to another school without losing a year of eligibility.

It goes without saying that since 2021 the power dynamic of college athletics, which for so long belonged only to coaches and the institutions themselves, shifted dramatically in favor of the players. Every year roughly 15-to-20 per cent of college football players enter what is known as the Transfer Portal, roughly 22-to-30 per cent of college basketball players enter the Portal, and the rate of players who successfully transfer schools hovers north of 50 per cent.

Seemingly forever the NCAA couched its refusal to paying players or allowing them sponsorship deals because it would somehow spoil their ‘amateurism,’ although in the meantime the schools continued to rake in record profits. Coaches netted larger contracts, and for longer durations. And whenever they (the coaches) found a better gig — for more money, or at a more prestigious college, or in the pros — there was never any penalty levied upon them.

Protect College Sports Act

Because of this recent shift in power — from the coaches and colleges to the athletes — bipartisan legislation has been introduced by the federal government to put limits on NIL and how frequently players are allowed to transfer schools. As with most bills, such as The Patriot Act (which allows the government to spy on you), or Citizens United (which allows billionaires to use unlimited sums of money to buy elections), the Protect College Sports Act is ironically named. It has nothing to do with protecting the sports, which are doing fantastically well, or the players people pay to watch.

Instead it’s about protecting the schools, and preventing the players they are paying from leaving elsewhere. It’s about protecting the coaches from having their investments jump ship on them. It is about restoring order. It is about taking back the power from the players and giving it back to the coaches and the institutions that have benefitted completely from the free labor they have always enjoyed.

If there was any doubt about who this bill was about, look no further than the individuals sponsoring it. Former National Championship head coach, Nick Saben, who now works for ESPN, went to congress to testify for it. Current Arkansas basketball coach John Calipari supports it. ESPN, who in recent years has purged multiple Black voices (such as Michael Smith, Jemele Hill and most recently Ryan Clark) who are a little too vocal about politics, literally had Republican Senator Ted Cruz on College Gameday to voice his own support.

They say you can learn a lot about a person based on his or her enemies, and the Save College Sports Act sort of brings out all the villains. Per Forbes, Nick Saben earned around $120 million from the University of Alabama in his 17 years as head coach. John Calipari earned in his many collegiate stops roughly the same amount. And it ought not require much cogent analysis whatsoever to recognize Ted Cruz, who is one of the most pro-business politicians ever to exist in the American government, and which side of the isle he represents.

In other words: You don’t need to know much to know which side to be on in this struggle. I have not seen a single college athlete clamoring to make less money, or have fewer choices regarding their eligibility. I have not seen a single politician I trust — which, to be fair, are few and far between — assume their place to die on this particular hill.

Perhaps the most disappointing voice in this ongoing publicity battle belongs to arguably, at current, the most prominent sports media figure on the planet: ESPN’s Pat McAfee. McAfee played college football at the University of West Virginia (2005-’08) — well before NIL was a thing — and went on to be an all-pro punter for the Indianapolis Colts (2009-’16) before finding his true calling and reaching stardom as a jack-of-all-trades media personality.

I’ll be honest: When McAfee had a little rinky-dink YouTube show I was a very regular watcher and listener. There was something almost wholesome about a guy hanging out in a makeshift studio with his buddies and telling the truth about sports generally, ands football specifically. He had the freedom to say ‘Fuck,’ and ‘Shit,’ and ‘Cocksucker,’ among other things, whenever he felt like it. He spoke the language of America. When there was nothing to talk about he would take phone calls from random listeners. He would take commercial breaks just so he could smoke weed.

And he always portrayed himself as the every man. That was the biggest thing. He was proud to support West Virginians and Indianians and hard workers a nation over. He also did what few others with such vast platforms had the courage or stomach for: Mercilessly shitting on ESPN. Nothing was off limits, because he was not responsible for expressing, or protecting, anyone’s interests other than his own.

Unfortunately McAfee got his mind right, as they say, when in 2023 he signed a five-year, $85 million contract with the same company (ESPN) he trashed publicly for so long. He tried to maintain his image as an every man, and he tries still to present himself as a truth-teller, but at this point it’s impossible. One such as I would never fault a guy for securing his bag — because that’s not my business — but then again it very much is the business of current and future college athletes that McAfee is trying to deny with his support of the Protect College Sports Act.

So when he, while interviewing Ted Cruz, said that college sports are in ‘absolute chaos,’ he was really only following the company line. After all, ESPN and the Southeastern Conference (SEC) — objectively speaking the most popular and dominant conference in college football — are currently in the midst of a 10-year contract where ESPN is paying the SEC $300 million per year. Put another way: It means a lot to ESPN that the SEC remains extremely relevant.

Because what with the current climate of collegiate sports, it is entirely reasonable for the SEC to be on a significantly leveler playing field (which they obviously don’t want) as every other conference/school.

The best example of this is private equity coming into the fold. Per The New York Times: ‘In one model, schools/conferences create a new company to share with outside investors. Utah’s pending nine-figure arrangement with Otro Capital will give the private equity group a stake in a new, for-profit arm that will handle Utes business items like ticketing and NIL sales.’ In June the deal with The University of Utah went through, effectively opening the door for private conglomerates to make college athletics a not-so-insignificant piece of their stock portfolios.

If it can be done at Utah — which is neither part of the SEC nor is it a school any reasonable person would consider a national (or even regional) powerhouse — it can be done anywhere. Any run-of-the-mill hedge fund manager who graduated from Central Connecticut State, or where the fuck ever, could one day wake up and decide to pour tens of millions of dollars into his (or her) alma mater, and only then would it be an elementary financial decision for a high school athlete.

How it was/How it is

The academic standards have historically been lower in the SEC. One could argue the relevancy of the Southeastern Conference, and its meteoric rise in football talent (and thus popularity over the last couple decades), is tied directly to the fact that many players who did not have the academics to attend schools such as Notre Dame, or Michigan, or Southern California — power football programs who could not take on just anybody — went instead to places like Alabama, or Florida, or Georgia.

The disparity in talent allowed the SEC to procure multibillion dollar (that’s billion with a B) contracts with various networks such as CBS and ESPN. Before athletes were allowed to garner NIL deals out in the open, they had to rely on the immense exposure that national networks presented to them. And if a prospect played three or four years with the majority of their games in prime-time on premium networks, there isn’t any doubt the TV time was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per game (if not millions). It was a major part of the allure for choosing the SEC.

Of course, the worst-kept secret of college sports for as long as they have existed is that the best players were always paid under the table. Sometimes the payments manifested directly in cash, other times it involved cars or houses, other times it was about getting a job for a family member on staff, or a sibling to get a scholarship and play alongside their brother. Anything you can imagine was part of the pay-for-play agreement that coaches and/or universities once made a staple of the recruiting process.

And so historically it was easier for schools in the SEC to navigate through these unspoken loopholes. If only they could manage to get such and such athlete through the doors of their university, the boosters would handle the rest. They would feed them and clothe them and house them and, if the player was valuable enough to the program, they would even pull some strings for their parents and/or brothers and sisters.

It is thus how since the turn of the 21st century the SEC has won an astounding 14 National Championships in football: Alabama (with 6), LSU (3), Georgia (2), Florida (2) and Auburn (1). Despite there being 138 schools in the FBS — the top tier in college football — just four schools in one conference have won more than half of the sport’s National Championships since the clock struck midnight on the 1900’s.

Over the last three seasons, however, NCAA Football’s National Champion came from the Big 10 Conference. Indiana (2025) took it most recently, following in descending order by Ohio State (2024) and Michigan (2023). It is impossible for an outsider such as myself to know for certain if there is any relationship whatsoever between the support coming from the SEC and ESPN for the Protect College Sports Act, and the fact that the conference has not fielded a National Champion since Georgia in 2022.

But what I do know is this three-year gap without a National Champion is the longest the SEC has endured since the year 2000. One might argue that NIL isn’t working out so well for them. One might argue also that ESPN — as the SEC’s main partner and propaganda arm — is not making a business mistake by giving a platform to Republican Senator Ted Cruz on College Gameday, nor is it an accident that its most popular personality, Pat McAfee, is in agreement with the Senator despite his wishes to remain apolitical ostensibly.

I suppose from my outsider perspective it only reinforces one idea: That politics are unavoidable. Whether you like it or not, everything is political. When dealing with ten-year, $3 billion contracts between network and conference, you can bet that the network is going to do everything at its disposal to protect the investment. And what is good for the SEC is good for ESPN. It only makes sense that ESPN is going to push Protect College Sports at high volume.

Labor v. the Establishment

I’ve written about it with Major League Baseball. I wrote briefly about how it impacts everyone in the workplace. But this is it, guys. The shit that gets the headlines is always gay v. straight, or I guess now it’s transgender v. straight, or Black v. white, or Mexican immigrant v. white… But the real struggle all of us are facing is not the culture war. It is about class. It is class warfare that is the beginning and the end of every true issue we as Americans are confronted by.

So I apologize: I wish I could just stick to sports, but I can’t. I can’t stick to sports because sports themselves can’t stick to sports. Sports are politics, and politics are a sport. Major League Baseball roped me back in because there is an ongoing labor war. College sports I believed were doing incredibly well, because I still watch them, and most Americans still watch them, but apparently the most popular sports network and the most popular college football conference did not think that was good enough. They made it political, not me.

As with anything else involving the ultra-wealthy, ultra-conservative, ultra-believers in the status quo, what we are dealing with vis-a-vis the Protect College Sports Act is a binary proposition. It is heads or tails, yes or no, one way or the other. Do you support the capitalists, or do you support the labor? I could make it more complicated than that, but it’s entirely unnecessary to do so. Everything boils down to that one singular question.

Up until 2021 college athletes were not allowed to earn money for their labor. The universities themselves took everything. The players played, the money came in through every available avenue — ticket sales, parking, concessions, merchandise, etc. — and inevitably football fields were renovated, buildings were constructed, coaching contracts ballooned, bonuses were paid out to administrators and athletic departments, and all the while the players played for free.

The era of NIL has obvious issues, but one thing I can’t shake when it comes to the Protect College Sports Act is that the establishment — the money, in other words — does not appreciate the lack they have in control. Where once they had their athletes by the balls in terms of capitalizing off free labor, and draconian policies regarding players having to sit out a year if they wanted to transfer schools, now they have nothing. Players have choices now. That’s what the establishment cannot stand for.

The Future of College Sports

I submit that my outlook on this issue is both rudimentary and simple-minded. My biases I quite openly acknowledge and at no part of this blog do I pretend to have any journalistic integrity. On the one hand you can fact-check me yourself and see that I am not lying to you; on the other, you’ll recognize that I have priors, and I make clear my point of view. We all can walk and chew that gum at the same time.

If you want a more detailed synopsis of the Protect College Sports Act I can refer you to what Fox Sports wrote a couple days ago. I can refer you to the implementation of the NCAA’s propaganda. I can tell you that it is not only supported by Donald Trump, but also virtually every other major conference in college athletics (including the Big 10, ACC and Big 12). I can tell you all of these things, because I am a fair sort of guy.

But also I do not exist in this particular space called Future Bets to pretend as if I am smarter than I am, or that I know more than I do, or that I am fluent with regard to the ins and outs of litigation. People far smarter than me who get paid to explain all that bullshit are all over the Internet, and over the course of this blog I have offered as many references as could be expected.

Instead my job — or lack thereof, I suppose, since I do this for free — is to pitch my own form of propaganda. The way I attempt such an endeavor is to bring this issue and every other back to its rightful bare bones form. The wealthy and the powerful and the pro-business political establishment, all the way up to the very conservative Donald Trump Presidency, are on one side of a very specific (and in many ways unnecessary) federal bill. On the other side of that bill reside essentially every current and every future collegiate athlete who have hopes of earning every dollar they can while they have the opportunity to.

Because as has been discussed on here ad nauseam over the course of the last decade, the labor has, in the grand scheme of time, an extremely short window to maximize their earnings. The establishment, meanwhile — the capitalists, the multimillionaires and billionaires, the owners of industry — have nothing but money and nothing but time. They die out, eventually, and then their sons and daughters rule the world after they’re gone.

My voice may not resonate loudly, in terms of access to the masses, and it may not be delivered with the strength that it necessarily ought to, in terms of my lack of knowledge on certain topics, but god damn me as a working man if I am not punching upwards, always, at those with nothing but the time and the money, in lieu of punching down at the labor in the midst of their perpetual struggle.

Unlike Pat McAfee, I will never get my mind right. I will never get my mind right because I never want to get my mind right. I will never forget where I came from, who my parents were, who my friends were and are and where their parents came from. Money never made me happy in that way. The more I made and continue to make the more I wonder how the fuck other people are able to survive making so much less. It will never be my place to side with those who already have it against those who are coming for it.