College football is the big dog and the tail its wagging is the ivory tower.
That’s the reality, higher ed fans. I know, I know. Football is not higher ed’s raison d’etre. At least, that’s what all the purists keep telling themselves.
It’s just hard to keep up the traditional downplaying of college athletics, specifically of football, when for many schools it is such an important revenue source providing millions of dollars to an institution’s budget. College coaches routinely are the highest paid members of any university, public or private. Alabama’s Nick Saban has been reported for years as the highest paid public employee in the country, as the university’s head football coach. At an annual salary around $10 million a year, he leads a list of other public employees, the top 30 of whom are college athletic coaches at public universities.
So if you really want to know the big news, consider the exchange involving millionaire coaches Saban, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher, and Jackson State’s Deion Sanders. Saban publicly lamented that Texas A&M was “buying players” to fill their rosters. I say publicly lamented because he was speaking specifically to the best kind of alumni a college has:football boosters. Saban didn’t like being out-recruited by Fisher even though “buying players,” though sounding unseemly is totally legal now under what college sports calls the NIL.
Emil Guillermo
The NIL?
It stands for “names, image, and likeness,” the provision under NCAA rules that allows students to profit from their play, essentially making them professional athletes. Under NIL, schools are allowed to recruit high school prospects and promise the moon. Or at least cars, cash and other valued assets that locks up a prospect to a school, until the student is allowed to enter the transfer portal and go to another school bidding for his services through NIL.
