On Sunday, a college football coach who was under contract at one school boarded a private jet and took off to another school to sign another contract.
That new contract will pay him roughly $12 million per year for seven years. That contract for $84 million was executed by a university that just a few weeks ago agreed to pay more than $50 million to fire its former football coach.
This was one of the many, many coaching deals that were executed over this weekend, as gainfully employed coaches bounced from job to job, raking in tens of millions of dollars each, as they go to work for (primarily public) universities that will earn hundreds of millions of dollars from their programs, much of it coming from apparel companies and TV networks that will also earn hundreds of millions of dollars.
The top executives at each of these institutions will, like the coaches, earn tens of millions annually. And their top assistants will earn into the millions themselves.
I bring all of this up because every single day, I keep hearing about how players—and their recently-obtained rights to earn money from their name, image and likeness (NIL)—is “destroying” college sports. Primarily, the complainers say, this is due to the lack of loyalty and team spirit.
And honestly, I don’t know that I could ever create a more perfect metaphor for the economic inequality in America than that ridiculously stupid mindset.
It is absolutely spot-on perfect.
Everyone all around the sport of college football is making buckets upon buckets of money—just like in the American economic system. But the players making a fair and decent wage—a wage that people are quite eager to give them, by the way—is a huge problem that’s disrupting the system.
Doesn’t this sound familiar to you?
In this metaphor for life, you, the working folks of this state and nation, are those college athletes that many of you have spent the last couple of years calling greedy and disloyal, because they had the nerve to finally, finally stand up for themselves and fight to be paid.
They, like you, had been toiling away forever with criminally low wages that had been artificially depressed by a system that is controlled by the wealthy executives and CEOs. They are the ones who have sacrificed their health and happiness for the benefit of the brand and told that they should be happy to get what they’ve got, and then painted as ungrateful and prima donnas for demanding anything close to a fair piece of the pie.
How many times have you heard that at your job? As the company continues to post record profits? As the CEO continues to get raise after raise? As the do-nothing execs and general managers keep getting raises?
Think about all of the college coaches who have bounced from job to job. Never a care in the world about the contracts they sign or the promises they make to the players.
That’s just good business, you see. That’s just guys taking care of their families. That’s just “the way things are.”
In so many ways, college sports are the perfect microcosm of the economic inequality in America right now. It’s the perfect microcosm of a system that continues to come up with ways to reward the wealthiest at the expense of the workers.
And with the way so many people have been convinced to denigrate the players, it’s also the perfect explanation of how we got in this shape.
I want you to truly think about why you believe college athletes are the villain in this. Out of all the people involved, why do you blame them for … anything? Why do you believe that they’ve ruined the game?
They didn’t fight for years to not share the profits. They didn’t jack up your ticket prices and realign conferences. They didn’t monetize literally every aspect of game day—from the parking to the tailgating to the transaction fees for breathing. All while still maintaining with a straight face that this is “amateur athletics.”
And yet, a whole bunch of people are siding with the management in this.
This is how America ended up with one of the worst wage gaps in the world, and with a system that is consistently pricing everyday Americans out of everything. Because the folks benefitting most from this system are really good at dividing the rest of us—by convincing us that our enemies are really transgender athletes or welfare queens or illegal immigrants instead of the rich jackasses who keep taking our money before it ever trickles down.
The college players should be your heroes. They should be the example that we hold up to show people that there is a pathway forward, that there is a just reward if we take a stand and fight for ourselves.
Because those players … they’re you.
