Opinion: College football begins 2021 season with a dark cloud over its future

The first full weekend of college football is an annual celebration of its pageantry and possibilities. But this year, the start of a new season carries with it a nagging feeling about the future of college sports, a concern felt deep in the gut of so many coaches and administrators across the country that they are no longer in control of their own destiny.

For the longest time, people involved in college sports have understood that fundamental changes were necessary, that the foundation of their system was crumbling under the weight of its own largesse. But in the months since Alabama beat Ohio State 52-24 for the national championship on Jan. 11, the upheaval has come with such a furious punch that even the start of a new season can’t push the larger stakes to the back burner.

“We’re in the proving ground of what college football will look like in the next 20 to 30 years, so it’s that time of unrest,” Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz said. “We’re just in the formative stages of what the future’s going to look like.”

On their own, any of the pertinent issues swirling around college sports this calendar year would have been significant disruptors to an industry that typically evolves with the speed of a three-toed sloth. Instead, they’ve been hit with the motherlode: A transformative loss in the Supreme Court, a chaotic beginning to the name, image and likeness era, granting one free transfer to every college athlete, the potential expansion of the College Football Playoff, the NCAA essentially abdicating authority on a whole host of issues to the conference level and Texas and Oklahoma announcing they were leaving the Big 12 for the SEC.

“It’s just so much,” ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit said. “It’s just an avalanche of stuff that’s coming down right now on the sport.”

Herbstreit loves the game so much that he’ll just dive into what happens on the field beginning this weekend and put everything else aside. If college football delivers the way it usually does, the product can carry it beyond the politics of the moment and the dark clouds ahead.

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“We just want to see football,” Herbstreit said. “We want to see competition and games and crowds and storylines develop.”

But that only lasts for a moment. The reality is that college football’s fun quirks and absurdities are being swallowed whole by real problems that aren’t being adequately addressed by the current leadership structure. Even more jarring for those in the industry is that some of the suggested solutions may be too late.

Breakdown in leadership

“We have a lot of things that are confusing, and if we don’t get a handle on some of these things fairly quickly, they’ll get out of control where the only option is not to have any rules at all. I think that would be sad,” said Todd Berry, the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association.

“We need to have some direction, and without direction there’s concern. While we love college football and I’m as excited as anyone to watch the games this weekend, there’s some other things out there that are brewing that are getting worse every day rather than getting better.”

It’s not Monday morning quarterbacking to say that college sports finds itself in this position largely because its leadership stalled on obvious issues and misfired on its legal strategy once cases challenging amateurism rules began to mount.

The Ed O’Bannon vs. NCAA case, which completely changed the debate on college athletes being able to earn money off their name, image and likeness, was filed in 2009. It did not take any unique foresight to see that snowball rolling downhill, and yet the NCAA — largely at the direction of college presidents — chose to do nothing until state legislatures started to get involved.

Now, instead of an orderly implementation where everyone understands the rules of the road, the NCAA stared down the point of a legal bayonet and essentially walked away. College athletes have always deserved the opportunity to make money off commercials and autographs, but it has inevitably turned into a free-for-all where the interpretation of what’s allowed varies by state and by school.

“I had a coach call me a couple weeks ago that said he had a booster promising all these high school kids NIL to encourage them to pick State U, so to speak, and these are guys he didn’t even want to recruit,” Berry said.

“We saw it happen in the 1970s and where you’ve got some boosters saying, ‘I can’t afford to buy an NFL team, but I can afford to buy a college team,' and they’re puffing out their chest right now like they’re the wheeler-dealer and they could have significant control over a program.”

Meanwhile, the one-time transfer — again, something that should have been done long ago — has put coaches in a bind with their roster numbers because it’s simply impossible to predict how many are leaving in a given year. Particularly in the current cycle, where the NCAA granted players an extra year of eligibility due to COVID-19, it’s actually high school players who bear the brunt of the damage because a lot of schools just aren’t going to have the room to take full recruiting classes.

“It’s there in the background all the time because you’re worried about things you can’t control,” Drinkwitz said. “There’s competition that some people’s rules are different than your rules, and there’s always comparisons, and you’re not quite sure what’s going on in your own locker room with NIL and in recruiting. There’s a lot going on right now. You’ve got to recruit your own team, recruit 2023s, figure out how to manage egos with NIL, so it’s a big job, but it’s the job.”

Meanwhile, two legislative subplots will unfold on parallel tracks during this college football season. One of them is the NCAA’s so-called constitutional convention where a group of administrators will attempt to essentially rewrite the rulebook in hopes of keeping the organization together. The other involves a potential standoff over College Football Playoff expansion.

SEC's power rattles industry

Not only did Texas and Oklahoma bolting from the Big 12 change the conference landscape — instead of five power conferences, there will functionally only be four in the immediate future — but the SEC’s concentration of power has completely rattled the industry.

Though the announced “alliance” among the Pac-12, Big Ten and ACC was light on specifics, it was a natural reaction to the perceived threat of the SEC ultimately luring more high-profile schools and essentially breaking off to form its own entity apart from the traditional college sports structure.

Even if the alliance has stopped that threat for now, Texas and Oklahoma going to the SEC essentially means the eight remaining Big 12 schools will be knocked down a tier in terms of financial strength and prestige.

Over the long haul, that will mean people losing jobs and less relevance on a national scale for proud institutions and athletic departments that had ambitions of winning championships. In the short term, it means the proposal floated in June for an expanded 12-team playoff is likely to be slowed down considerably as the three alliance commissioners work together to tilt the structure of the playoff toward their interests rather than handing a gift basket to the SEC.

It’s hard to argue any of that works to the benefit of the sport. And yet, it’s very much where we are as the 2021 season begins.

“At some point for the fans and all of us who follow it, they’ve got to knock these walls down and work together,” Herbstreit said. “If they’re not going to have one voice as the commissioner, they have to figure out a way to put their personal feelings aside and come tighter and lead this sport.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College football starts 2021 season with dark cloud over its future