The crazy future of college sports, Phil Martelli with a word of caution, and other thoughts

First and final thoughts …

Huge week ahead for college sports, and a potentially crazy one. A settlement is reportedly expected within the next few days in an antitrust lawsuit, House vs. the NCAA, that promises to pave the way for revenue sharing throughout college athletics. If and when it’s completed, the settlement will result in the association paying $2.7 billion in back damages to players who weren’t allowed to earn Name, Image, and Likeness compensation in years past.

To cover that mind-boggling cost, the NCAA will draw on $1.1 billion “from reserves, catastrophic insurance, new revenue and budget cuts,” according to ESPN. As for the remaining $1.6 billion, one would think that the Power Five would be responsible for most of that sum. After all, football generates so much more revenue than any other college sport — than most college sports put together.

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Nope. The association sent a memo to its 32 Division I conferences explaining that the Power Five, through cuts, would cover roughly $640 million of the remaining $1.6 billion — just 40%. The other 27 conferences, those without the biggest of big-time football, would handle the remaining 60%. In other words, even though the vast majority of the back-pay recipients are likely to be football players, the schools that don’t or can’t prioritize football are likely to be on the hook for more of that money.

You have to hand it to the NCAA and the Power Five conferences: They know how to make a buck — a few billion, actually — and to pass it.

Phil Martelli likes to tell a story: In 2019, not long after his tenure at St. Joseph’s had ended and he’d become an assistant coach at the University of Michigan, he was driving near the school’s gigantic campus in Ann Arbor and saw a football field. He thought at first it was a recreational youth field, the kind he was familiar with growing up in Delaware County. Then he saw that the field had bleachers and a coaches’ box. Must be a high school field.

He drove a little farther, noticed a sign, and read it. The field was where the university’s marching band practiced.

That’s the difference between where Martelli had been and where he now was. That’s the difference in resources between those Power Five schools and everybody else. The Big East straddles the line between the two strata, because it is such a basketball powerhouse and its identity is centered on that sport. But as NIL threatens to widen the gap between the haves and have-nots, how will the schools within that lower tier compete?

“I believe in my bones that you can still do it built on trust — trust that we’re going to help you toward your degree, trust that we’re going to make you a better player, trust that you’re going to chase championships,” Martelli said in a recent interview on WIP-FM (94.1). “And then the final trust will be this: I’m going to look at you, and I’ll say, ‘I’m recruiting you. I’m going to get you every nickel I can get you. But if this is about you having a bottom line — ‘I have to make $30,000′ — then I’m going to go recruit [someone else]. I know that you can get 10 guys who are committed to pursuing a degree, becoming a better player, chasing championships, and trusting that I can get you every nickel I can get you. But if there’s a bottom-line figure, I’m going to have to walk away.”

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For Martelli, there’s an even deeper, more troubling issue at the core of all the upheaval in college athletics. Few players in the sports that promise life-changing wealth — football, men’s and women’s basketball — actually end up thriving in those pro leagues and earning that wealth. Now it feels like colleges and universities are less concerned than ever with preparing these athletes for what life will be like without their meal tickets.

An athlete who sours on a coach or a school, whether over playing time or academic requirements, can transfer. Then transfer again. Then transfer again. And there will always be another program to accept him or her. But the lily pad hopping has to stop at some point, and what then? Do the institutions themselves care? Do the players?

“Every coach is going to say the same thing, and I’m going to join that chorus: I’m not against the players getting anything, getting something,” he said. “I get Name, Image, and Likeness. They’re the show. I get it. But I just have a lot of questions.

“If we’re giving a 19-year-old, a 20-year-old, $150,000 — let’s be conservative and say we’re giving them $150,000 — and then they graduate from our institution and they’re not the 1/100th of 1 percent who can play professionally and they want to be a bank teller, and somebody says, ‘We’ll give you $65,000,’ how do they go from living on $150,000 to $65,000? We haven’t educated them. We’re setting this up where there is going to be some long-term damage done to these kids’ psyches and to their value system.

“In a lot of ways, we’ve done this to ourselves because we’re part of the NCAA. I feel like we’ve put people in a car. We’ve told them to drive as fast as they can. ‘But I just want to remind you: There are no brakes, and there are no seat belts. Good luck. I hope you get to your destination.’”

It was one thing for the NFL to schedule two games on Christmas Day, which falls on a Wednesday this year. But it was an almost admirable display of arrogance and one-upmanship for the league to line up a doubleheader — Chiefs-Texans and Ravens-Steelers — on Saturday, Dec. 21, the same day of the first round of the College Football Playoff.

Two NFL games. Three college postseason games. Two greed enter. One greed leave. There can be only one Gridiron Gekko.