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College football has slowly but surely morphed into a professional sport as an unprecedented amount of money has started to flow into the pockets of players who’ve finally earned the right to get paid. It’s fair to be concerned about the impact that will have on the pastime, but Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz ignored decades of history while sounding the alarm about a level of equality that has never really existed.
It’s been close to five years since the Supreme Court decision that ushered in the NIL Era and forced the NCAA to abandon its longstanding tradition of amateurism virtually overnight. Most college sports have been impacted by that change, but football stands out as the one that has undergone the most dramatic transformation.
The country’s biggest stars were already making millions of dollars a year from endorsement deals prior to the advent of the revenue-sharing arrangement that allows schools to personally hand out a little over $20 million a year to student-athletes.
Those changes have created an unprecedented amount of chaos, drama, and roster turmoil that every coach in the country has to grapple with. That includes Eli Drinkwitz, who does have some valid concerns about the current state of affairs but missed the mark while trying to call attention to them.
Eli Drinkwtiz warned that a new influx of money could lead to the massive talent gap that has defined college football for decades
College football has come a long way since its inception close to 160 years ago, but there are a number of central themes that have remained consistent throughout its history.
That includes a general lack of parity, as there has traditionally been a pretty big disparity between the best and worst teams in the country. There’s obviously been some turnover when it comes to the specific juggernauts that dominate the sport (one that essentially ran through the Ivy League until the 1910s), but there are usually at least a few elite programs that firmly sit multiple tiers above the ones that are down bad.
That was the case well before name, image, and likeness agreements arrived on the scene. An influx of money may have the potential to create an even bigger gap between the haves and the have-nots, but it’s not a huge pivot for college football fans who are already very accustomed to that divide.
However, Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz tried to frame that cash infusion as an existential development during an interview with On3 where he warned the landscape of college football could soon look…well, a lot like college football has always looked, saying:
“I do think that a lot of what’s going on out there is a great threat to college football, to be honest. College football has always been defined by our ability to operate, within reason, by the same rules.
But if you’re going to have teams that have 45-million-dollar rosters competing against teams that have 15- and 20-million-dollar rosters, you’re going to run the risk of turning into Major League Baseball, where you have the LA Dodgers and the Florida Marlins.
And that’s a professional league that’s not growing, that’s struggling in their TV deals.”
I understand the point Drinkwitz is attempting to make here, as there’s little doubt that the schools that can afford to compete with the best of the best will widen the preexisting gap with the ones at the bottom of the barrel. With that said, at the end of the day, it’s really just going to be more of the same.