Why not? It's the Wild West, and unless a state enacts restrictions specific to NIL, what parties can agree to is limited only by background contract law, which is to say it basically isn't limited at all.
and yet here we are 32 years later and it hasn't happened yet.
I wish I could just pretend bad things weren't happening but to me it feels almost futile worrying about beating LSU in basketball this weekend when there are such huge issues standing in the way of Wake's future in this dumpster fire of a sport. I'll be watching and super locked in from tip to the buzzer, but I can't just shut out reality. Winning 20 versus 16 basketball games this year is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic in the context of what is going on in college sports.
Then just stop watching
I would argue you learning to deal with the bs is worse than me refusing to. If more people were willing to protest these changes they could have been avoided. When the NCAA failed to step in to prevent conferences and rivalries from being destroyed, there should have been a boycott of the NCAA tournament by fans and schools. When the NCAA refused to stop illegal (illegal by NCAA rule, not law in most cases) pay from play and player poaching, there should have been protest and boycott by fans and schools should have threatened to pull out of bowl games. Instead, we have this attitude of "Whatever, it'll be fine", and that's how we get to where we are, with freaking Boston College in the ACC, Rutgers and UCLA in the same conference, and Sam Hartman being offered millions of dollars as a 23 year old to play collegiate football somewhere else 7 months after graduating.
This isn't LOWF at all. It has nothing to do with Wake Forest. It's about Fox/B10, ESPN/SEC, their insatiable desire for money combined with the inability of the NCAA to protect the sport from bad actors.
It's obviously (I assume) rooted in the idea that WF, and similar teams I guess, will be relegated to a lesser division of athletics (or at least football) in the future. And that the ACC will break up/disband. People have been fretting about the latter since the early 2000s, and here we are.
Not relegated. We have no problem competing and if college sports stayed the way they were supposed to (regional leagues based on size/type/location of school) we would have no problem making big bowl games even in the world of pay for play as we have our own mega boosters too. It's not like we lose so we will be relegated to a lower level. That's not what I'm saying.
Yeah, enough with the hand wringing about the end of college sports. Enjoy it for what it is or move on from it. I enjoy it for now but there will probably come a time when I'm done with it and find something else to do with my time.
Most people want parity in college sports. People will grow tired of the same 5 or 10 teams dominating year end year out. It is getting that way with college football now in my opinion. That's probably some of the reason for expanded playoffs (that and more fucking money).
yeah it was gonna be cool to have some new playoff blood this year, but nope we got 3 of the 4 mainstay teams
I'm not against players being paid at all, just think it needs to be in a regulated and most importantly HONEST way, not hidden behind NIL and as part of a free for all. I also don't subscribe to the argument that college sports were immoral before athletes were paid. I think it was immoral to prevent them from using their success to make money in advertising and such, but not at all that they weren't paid. I went to college and worked hard for four years and our family paid for them to work me hard, knowing my hard work there provided the opportunity for future earnings. They had the same arrangement of learning their trade and earning the opportunity to monetize it after school. That's perfectly fair to me and if they didn't want to participate they could have gone down a number of different paths. However, now that we have decided to pay them, I just want it to be fair and honest, because that decision will never be undone.
