College athletics currently lives in the same world as a middle aged man with fantastic genetics and horrible habits. The naive optimist in him is quick to remind himself that no doctor has ever seen a problem with him, and that was true for his father and his father before him. Meanwhile, in addition to poor diet and lack of exercise, he just went from occasionally smoking in secret to firing up multiple packs a week out in the open.
The strong as steel relationship between fans and their alma mater, local school or childhood favorite team has never wavered for well over 99% of fans in the lifetime of college sports. It's a bond that in many parts of the country is stronger than the connection to a professional team, religion, or even a spouse. And even for the most pessimistic of fans, they will still come crawling back after walking away a few times before they can truly cut out the addictive connection. Try as you will, there are legendary, joyful, and painful moments that will always stay with you. From the Kick Six to Kemba Walker's ankle-breaker, Kris Jenkins' shot to Ezequiel Elliot's run.
As the current landscape stands in 2025, it remains a relatively favorable situation. The twelve-team playoff in college football revived my rapidly dissolving passion, thanks to 2024 being the most compelling season in well over a decade. The game-to-game tension of the thirty-one-game college basketball regular season has easily surpassed the NBA's eighty-two-game snoozer in this century. The talent may be better, but the clearly lessened effort and player absences can't compete with the life or death feeling swirling around every game in the conferences capable of getting at-large bids, but not just by waltzing to a .500ish record (ACC, Big East, A-10, Mountain West and PAC-12 again soon).
Traditionally smaller sports are growing in fan engagement as well, especially volleyball, baseball and softball. Television ratings are up across the biggest events as well. Many dismiss this as a consequence of expanding gambling (that is certainly contributing), but more people are indeed watching. At the same time, struggling attendance figures away from the biggest programs tell us that diehard fans are not developing at the same rate. Ultimately, it will be those diehard fans who will determine whether this enterprise continues to thrive.
Meanwhile, problems that threaten to destroy the very essence of college athletics are creeping in with a Dementor's darkness and speed. Fans have made it clear that much more than a super majority does not want athletes playing for four schools in four years, or a college football playoff with a certain number of auto bids for certain conferences, or seeing more teams with losing records in conference play in the NCAA Tournament.
The old world of paying players under the table at the biggest schools was the secret cigarette of athletics. Everyone knows it's going on, but the need to hide kept it under reasonable control. All of the boundaries are gone now and while that short term rush is hitting everyone, something awful is silently building up beneath the surface.
Blotting out of those issues is the constant whisper of a threat that twenty to forty of the biggest schools could always form their own league with the unlimited ability to pay players who likely wouldn't even enroll in the school. While the massive fanbases of these teams would support them in any format, the big schools seem to underestimate that becoming an independent minor league would quickly place them a lot closer to the UFL than the NFL.
There is nothing in America that social media loudmouths are more united on than a desire for college athletics to refrain from continuing down a path of completely unregulated and unlimited payments to players, all the while those players have absolutely nothing preventing them from leaving their current team just a few minutes after arriving. Yet, everyone is resigned that this is how it will be. A giant wall of water is bearing down, and their foot is stuck right in its path.
That powerless feeling stems from the one unanswerable question in college sports that encompasses all of the other problems. You can better regulate NIL, begin to restrict transfer rules again and maybe even get conferences realigned closer to geographic reasonability. None of that will matter without a fundamental shift in responsibility.
Is there a future in which the major stakeholders in college athletics begin to care about the medium-to-long term again?
One great year is all that is needed now to get a promotion. Players get bigger paychecks to transfer. Coaches get hired for higher-profile jobs. Athletic directors and school presidents get promoted to bigger and richer institutions. Even conference commissioners can step up to higher-regarded leagues, or find a high-paying private sector job.
All of this constant movement has created a singular pressure for success in each year. Plans for future development, whether it's a player growing his skills or a coach building a program, are now moot. Take new Iowa basketball coach Ben McCollum, for example. He was a four time National Champion at Division II who couldn't generate any interest from Division I programs until Drake took a chance on him. One singular 31-4 season at the top level was enough for him to land a power conference gig. That would have been preposterous just a few years ago.**
Athletic directors are basically running legal Ponzi schemes now. If they can bring in a lot of money in one to three years at the helm, they get to carry a big bag of cash with them on the way out. Who cares if that short-term gain is a long-term detriment? The person who's signature is on the document will long gone by the time that ramifications come.
It runs entirely counter to what happens in professional leagues, where owners desire to continue building up their franchise values, rather than just maximizing their single-year income. The NFL and NBA make decisions with the next ten years in mind. Many in college couldn't care less about the end of the next twelve months.
Some of the lack of foresight in college athletics comes with greed, some comes from teenagers not having their priorities straight, but it all has the same damaging effect. How to fix it is a multi-billion-dollar question, one that I will pose without much of an idea of the right answer. How do we bring the importance of long-term building back into the minds of the major stakeholders of college athletics?
**Do not put it on the record that I slandered Ben McCollum. It was an extremely aggressive hire by Iowa, but I'd bet that he is a good enough coach that they will get away with it.