Cleaning Up The Dirtiest Sport in America

Steroids in baseball? Weak. Doped up Olympians? Yawn. Colluding NBA superstars taking their talents to South Beach? Not even close. The dirtiest, most egregiously corrupt sport in the United States is college football.

Of course, it’s easy to say right now. Miami was recently smashed upside the head by Yahoo! Sports’ investigative team, laying out allegations made by former booster Nevin Shapiro. Using funds from a near billion dollar Ponzi scheme to fuel his over-the-top rock star lifestyle, Shapiro allegedly provided illegal benefits to what seems like every relevant University of Miami Hurricanes football player from the past decade.

Let’s not forget some of the other schools to get in trouble to various degrees recently: Alabama, West Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, LSU, Georgia, Tennessee, Boise State, North Carolina, Auburn, Ohio State and the school that started this latest series of crackdowns, University of Southern California (USC).

The media is now presenting and discussing arguments to fix the game (paying players, eliminating amateur status) which are valid but they only present surface arguments. They don’t go in-depth and nobody offers up a full solution. There are holes in those arguments that need to be fleshed out. My argument is no different because this is obviously a very complicated situation, but these are the key changes: pro status, multiple players unions and collective bargaining agreements.

Firstly, the new NCAA pay system will need to work within the new super-conference format. For the sake of argument, let’s make four super-conferences (16 teams each, 48 teams total) using the SEC, Big Ten, Pac 12 and ACC. (The conference alignment doesn’t matter but we can all make our own assumptions about who would play where.)

Each conference would then decide upon “salary cap” for every team in-conference and in order to be fair, there would be minimum salaries, maximum salaries and different clauses concerning playing time, players’ rights, health insurance, practice rules and everything else involved with a collective bargaining agreement. Just like every professional sports league, players’ unions are a must. These kids are being exploited physically, financially and professionally, without any legal recourse. Each conference, not school, also must provide a thorough and detailed orientation detailing for prospective students, parents and guardians the full complexities of the conferences’ CBA.

Independent teams like Notre Dame complicate this matter, but I don’t have all the answers. The details provided here are only ideas, but the one thing to take away from this is that college football players currently have no rights and no protection. They deserve these things. There is simply too much money involved for them to be kept out of the loop. Plus, as professionals, they can then receive sponsorships, promote products and do anything else a superstar athlete can do. They too have a right-to-work.

So what about the other 56 schools? Well, they can form their own new conferences of varying sizes and determine whether they want to pay or not. If it results in 10 different college football leagues, then so be it. Four super-conferences would also make a college football playoff much easier to construct and there’s no reason there still can’t be bowl games.

As a final thought, it doesn’t make sense that a school like Western Kentucky University is competing for a championship in the same league as the University of Texas. It’d be like asking your local high school football team to beat the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl.

Something has to change.