This year’s college football season began with the usual lopsided season openers, a hotly disputed Hail Mary, and new this year, political ads that aren’t about candidates, but the sport itself.
An ad televised during a number of games over the weekend features one of the few people still able to influence a broad cross section of Americans.
“Sports are built on tradition, the pride in our schools, the rivalries we pass down, and the way they develop the character of tomorrow’s leaders,” legendary coach turned commentator Nick Saban says. “That tradition is worth defending.”
He’s endorsing the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan bill — yes, they still have those — hammered out by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington State. It passed the Senate Commerce Committee in June and awaits a vote by the full Senate.
The bill is an attempt by the senators to get their arms around the changes that many sports fans feel have eroded that sense of tradition and pride Saban refers to.
In other words, the bill’s all over the place, from putting caps on sports agents’ fees to setting scholarship levels for women’s sports. Most importantly, it regulates the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals through which college athletes are now compensated, limits the times an athlete can transfer schools in a five-year period to one, and gives the NCAA and athletic conferences a limited anti-trust exemption to set their own standards and rules without fear of lawsuits.
The most outspoken critic of the bill has been Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who used a modern weapon of choice, the Twitter stream, to push back at the claim that the sport is in “absolute chaos” because of the new rules. In reality, he wrote, college sports is booming financially.
“The ‘chaos’ is that (mostly Black) athletes now have bargaining power and white coaches and sports industry execs hate it,” Murphy wrote.
The Senate failed to take up the measure before adjourning for its five-week August recess, allowing time for opposition to the bill to grow. The Senate returns next week, but with other matters competing for attention, time is no longer on the bill’s side.
Murphy has said that the rules regarding things like compensation and transfers need to be fixed, but it shouldn’t take an act of Congress to accomplish that. And Saban has said that the bill he endorses doesn’t solve all the sport’s problems. In other words, neither side views this bill as a total cure for what troubles college sports, and everybody agrees there are troubles.
“Tell me something better,” Saban said at a recent event in Birmingham. “This bill is not perfect, but it’s better than everything else, and it’s certainly 100 times better than what we have now, and it probably solves 80 percent of the problems. We want to stay focused on 20 percent of the problems that it doesn’t solve.”
As if to further inflame fans angry over how the sport has changed, LSU, under its new bad boy coach, Lane Kiffin, beat Clemson 51-10 in Baton Rouge Saturday night.
LSU, which was in court days before the game fighting to be allowed to play to athletes who have already been on a pro team roster, is seen as an avatar of the changes that have come upon the college game. Clemson, whose coach, Dabo Swinney, was slow to adapt to the new world of transfers and NIH after his team won the national championship with a perfect season in 2018, is seen as a demonstration that the old way of doing things doesn’t work anymore.
None of these symbolic associations are as important as the way the two teams played Saturday night, but that’s the special power the game has: it can become the vehicle for all kinds of meanings.
Gov. Brian Kemp clearly had his gaze turned toward Baton Rouge Friday when he posted this Friday:
“Without Congress acting, it’s the responsibility of coaches, universities, conferences, and everyone who loves college sports to start acting with some damn common sense. If we don’t, one of the greatest American traditions will cease to exist.”
Maybe that’s the other 20 percent Saban was talking about.
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