I think most fans have come to accept the fact most head coaches and ADs are in it solely for the money and will jump to the next job for a raise of a million or two. So, Kirby Smart is probably only as loyal to Georgia as the money he makes. He'd probably go to rival Alabama, were a vacancy to occur, for a mere $9 million.
[/QUOTE]Agree completely here. In the context of you and I's conversation here, you posted an article that "briefly touches on the aspect of fan interest, and how that might wane over time as a result of the repercussions of the new paradigm."
To the extent the article did so, it was Kirby Smart flagging this concern. This, to me, is a good illustration of how the Supreme Court that can't agree on anything unanimously came down 9-0 on the NCAA. There's no other business model in the world that insists that a segment of it's "workforce" not earning wages is central to the business model itself.
People like Kirby Smart and yourself may well be right that fans will lose interest going forward. But that doesn't make the Supreme Court's assessment any less right, and it doesn't make the NCAA's model any less illegal. Given that, it's not really an option to just view this through lens of the impact on the "product" of college sports and consider the fan's perspective first.
What's new and upsetting to some of us who are not Adam Smith capitalists is that now the same seems to apply to what was once known as the student-athlete. I know you'll say that the evil NCAA invented that term, but it was at one time a fairly accurate description. It's now been replaced by the mercenary, semi-pro, athlete who has the same level of allegiance to his or her school as the head coach or AD.
You see all of this as great progress and as a leveling of the playing field to a more equitable distribution of wealth.
That's not exactly what I see. It's a small part of it.
I also see the weighted, biased language of "mercenary" with a lack of allegiance and it's very unclear to me how accurate that description is for a huge percentage of college athletes. It's also very unclear to me why that's bad and why there's so much negativity associated with a person who is doing what they think is necessary for them to be most successful. If a Physics major whose lifelong dream was to work for NASA felt like School A's Physics department wasn't up-to-snuff decided to transfer, would anybody hold it against them? I think NCAA athletes and decades of NCAA marketing has resulted in people applying a moral standard to athletes that nobody else really has to meet.
My sense of it is that this is almost purely an emotional issue for most folks and they're pretty irrational about it. I think people have (for obvious, valid reason) fond feelings for their alma mater, and project their own fond feelings for college onto athletes as a necessary standard they have to meet. They've created a convenient narrative around their own fandom that I think's quite detached from the reality of the last couple of decades, and seem to focus their ire on athletes when the narrative's not maintained. Despite a system that has been inconsistent with that narrative for a long, long time.
Practically speaking, all that's changed is that players have gained more freedom in the last couple of years due to transfer rule changes and the NIL. It's convenient to think that those things fundamentally changed athletes and turned them into "mercenaries", but the much more logical explanation is that nothing about the players' attitudes have changed, and the only change is to the system itself.
From a moral standpoint, I just don't see how one supports a system that's so restrictive. That 50% of scholarship basketball players are exploring the option of a transfer indicates that the demand was there, but the old system was too prohibitive. And that the old system only applies to scholarship athletes -- and not scholarship students -- just lays bare that academics never actually factored into the policy. It was a policy that existed to ensure the product of college sports remained strong because men's basketball/football are a cash cow for the NCAA.
[QUOTE=OhioCatFan]
l see it as a further indication that our institutions of higher learning are taking on even more of a corporate versus an educational paradigm. To me this is not a healthy direction for our educational system.