For over 100 years, college football managed to accomplish something remarkable — it became America’s most popular sport tradition at colleges across the country. Then, apparently, being enormously successful wasn’t enough. The latest example comes from LSU, where head football coach Lane Kiffin has pushed to bring former NFL players back to college football. A few years ago, the idea of pro players returning to school would have sounded ridiculous. Today, a new debate has evolved around court rulings, conference rules, lawyers and questions about exactly where “college” athletics ends and professional sports begins. Is there a difference anymore?
While it’s easy to blame Lane Kiffin for trying to expand what “amateur” means in this moment, it might be more appropriate to blame us. Human beings have an interesting relationship with success. We say we want it, but once we achieve it, we rarely seem capable of simply enjoying it. Success quickly establishes a new baseline, and before long we begin asking the inevitable question: What else can we do? The success we enjoyed with college football apparently wasn’t enough, so here we are today exploring ways to tweak the game yet again — this time, with pro players coming back to college.
Why can’t we leave a good thing alone?
College football offers a fascinating case study — for generations, Saturday afternoons gave us packed stadiums, marching bands, historic rivalries, regional traditions, exciting bowl games, and athletes representing universities they actually attended. As college football grew, players certainly deserved a greater share of the enormous revenue they helped generate, and some longstanding rules clearly needed modernization. Unfortunately, modernization became complete transformation.
In just the last 10-15 years we have witnessed massive change in college football, including NIL, the transfer portal, non-geographical conferences sometimes stretching across the country, expanded playoffs teetering on absurdity, and transactional rosters. In fact, college football today looks like pro football, with a burdensome university attached.
And still we keep tinkering.
Today’s debate started by Lane Kiffin is whether athletes who signed NFL contracts should be able to return to college. LSU’s controversy became so significant that the SEC adopted a rule against adding such players, and the dispute has escalated into litigation and an extraordinary confrontation between LSU and its own conference.
The guess here is that former players will be allowed to return, and before too long it will seem normal to see a carousel from college to pro back to college football again. The bigger question is what comes next? Could eligibility eventually become unlimited? Could the academic component become increasingly irrelevant — and possibly removed entirely? Could college athletes eventually become university employees who barely resemble traditional students? With gambling already surrounding sports culture, what other boundaries that once seemed obvious will eventually be reconsidered? Is there anything that college football wont consider that could add to their revenue?
The fan experience, while important to a degree, really pales in comparison to the money to be gained thorough more television revenue, more playoff games, more NIL opportunities, more roster flexibility, and more content. Today’s college football decision-makers seem to hardly care about tradition, and they appear quite determined to not leave a single nickle on the table of potential future revenue. Is this type of leadership good for the game? Is it good for fans?
Hedonic adaptation describes our tendency to adjust to improvements in our circumstances. What initially feels extraordinary eventually feels normal — then we want something more. Perhaps college football is experiencing this right now. Instead of enjoying what had been created, everyone began searching for the next opportunity to make it bigger, richer and supposedly better.
Final thoughts
Not every change in college football has been bad, as some were long overdue (i.e. paying student athletes in addition to scholarship money). But change often produces unintended consequences, and when you fundamentally restructure an institution in a remarkably short period, you shouldn’t be surprised when previously unimaginable ideas suddenly become imaginable.
Lane Kiffin didn’t create this new world of college football, but instead looked at the new college football landscape we’ve created and asked how far he could go. Is the current controversy around pro players coming back to college a Lane Kiffin issue, or instead a reflection of a much bigger picture of greed, instability, shortsightedness, and an inability to ever be fully satisfied if there is another dollar to be made?
drstankovich.com
