When University of Southern California wide receiver Jordan Addison takes the field this fall, he will be the highest-paid player on a team of young multi-millionaires. Addison is the reigning Biletnikoff Award winner, given annually to the best player at his position. And he recently became the most expensive free agent in college football history when BLVD, the media agency with which his new college has partnered to procure “name, image, and likeness” deals with its players, assembled $3.25 million in sponsorships to convince Addison to leave the University of Pittsburgh, which could offer nothing comparable. USC, an even more storied program reeling from a disappointing 4-8 campaign, now had the first critical piece of what could eventually become a $75 million sponsorship payroll, according to the agency.
Addison’s move to USC may seem like a small episode, but one day, it will be the first chapter of the story of the epic downfall of a great American institution of college athletics as we have known it. In a Washington Examiner column published last year, I predicted that college athletics were in for some fundamental changes that would make them cease to even sort of resemble a league of amateur student players engaging in sports on the side of their studies, something that has always been a bit of a charade — but a charade that, by keeping it up, keeps college sports honest and, importantly, different in their nature from pro leagues.
There are two drivers of the changes that are now about to crash over NCAA sports like an avalanche, wiping away the traditions of amateurism. The first of these is the aforementioned name, image, and likeness deals, which mean that by using nothing but a winking accounting fiction, college players are getting paid sums that are pro-like. The other is the recommendation by an NCAA task force on “racial equity” to remove the extremely low standardized test minimums for incoming athletes — still not implemented but gaining momentum among the most powerful universities. Together, these changes would combine to efface the greatest marketing advantage that college sports still had: the illusion, however tenuous, that athletes were students and future alumni, at least theoretically still sharing an experience with the hundreds of thousands of fans who gathered to watch them. Soon, if you are watching a college sports team from your alma mater on TV or in a stadium, you will be watching kids who “go to the same school as you went to” only in the most nominal sense.
The thoroughly rational pursuit of the bottom line by both star athletes and the mere handful of universities with athletic programs generating profits for their institutions — only 25 of the nation’s 65 largest universities have athletic departments that don’t lose money — is rapidly creating a landscape consisting of roughly two dozen programs that can compete financially in a sponsorship-funded, quasi-professional minor league, along with hundreds of universities that will forgo revenue-generating sports and be left with empty arenas, coliseums, and other vestigial pieces of the campus physical plant.
It’s easy to imagine that the public has already priced in “shamateurism” given the innumerable pay-for-play, grade-fixing, and points-shaving scandals that have occurred over the past century of college athletics. In fact, until the 1940s, players at universities like Pittsburgh, under legendary coach and pay-for-play proponent Jock Sutherland, were actually paying their players salaries, though nothing on the order of the dough Jordan Addison is now receiving. However, when I interviewed Michael Oriard a decade ago, the now-retired Oregon State professor and former NFL player emphasized that periodic NCAA reforms as well as occasional punishments of wayward universities, half-hearted though all of it might have been, rebuilt public faith in the student-athlete fiction that served as the college game’s critical marketing asset.
While predicting that the NCAA would allow small living stipends and then stop there, Oriard compared the student-athlete fiction to belief in a higher power: Churches can remain well attended in a society not yet overwhelmed by atheism and indifference, even if many people have their private doubts, while societies in which atheism and indifference predominate will have empty churches as people find other outlets for their time and energy.
Such faith, even when occasionally undercut by suspicion or doubt, sustains college athletics. Fans attend college basketball and football games not because this is the highest form of either sport — the NFL serves that role for football, and even the caliber of play in the NBA’s G League developmental system is higher than what’s on offer from college hoops — but because these teams and their games constitute the living history of imagined communities brought into being through shared traditions. Remove those traditions, and one is left with glorified minor leagues and lower-level circuits and tours of the sort that have long prepared athletes for careers in baseball, hockey, golf, stock car racing, and countless other sports. Even in instances in which the colleges offer their own forms of the product, as with baseball, hockey, and golf, the professional product is so far superior that it cannibalizes nearly all of the media revenue and ticket sales. Almost no universities have profitable baseball, hockey, or golf teams.
Jordan Addison will earn more in 2022 from playing football than JuJu Smith-Schuster, a former Pro Bowl wideout for the Pittsburgh Steelers who received only $2.49 million in guaranteed money for signing with the Kansas City Chiefs. In both cases, football fans in the city of Pittsburgh lost a top player — but losses of college personnel were supposed to be different, with stars departing only after four years of glorious play. The University of Pittsburgh, which finished the 2021 season ranked 13th in the Associated Press college football poll, entered the poll this year ranked 17th, with fan enthusiasm already much diminished after Addison’s departure cast doubts on what was shaping up to be the school’s first top-10 finish since 1982. Beyond that, the uncertain nature of athletic conference realignment, and Pitt’s middling position in the college sports landscape, foreshadows darker days to come for the school’s supporters.
The history and traditions of college athletics have been preserved not merely for their own sake but because, as sports reporter and former Northwestern football player Rick Telander argued in his book The Hundred Yard Lie, they are what actually drive fans to expend money on apparel, tickets to sporting events, and donations to the alma mater — and they’re now being sacrificed for short-term gain. Marx and Engels weren’t writing about college athletics, but they recognized the implications of unfettered capital flows: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.” They were, of course, rooting for this destructive process, but we should not accept the profanity of deals like the one that bought Addison away from Pitt. Keep college sports sacred.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
