Full disclosure: I am a holder of Navy football season tickets for 52 years; I have seen great teams, and I have seen dogs. But Navy is my team if for no other reason than it is a college football team in the truest sense of the words: no redshirts, no NIL, no transfer portal, no graduate seniors – pure, unadulterated college football. Plus, they’re having a great year here in 2024.
This missive begins with the tale of a senior [citizen, in college football parlance] quarterback who played for Wake Forest for five years before going to play a sixth year at Notre Dame. In actual fact, Sam Hartman graduated from Wake, so he was at Notre Dame as a so-called “graduate senior” – although Notre Dame’s website listed Hartman as simply a “senior”. Misleading? To say the least – draw your own conclusions as to why. Hartman was not a legitimate college football player; he was a “ringer” – a grown man playing against college-aged players who are legitimately in their respective class years.
Pretending otherwise is blind ignorance.
There are things that need to be changed in college football in order to pull it back from the precipice of destruction; these include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
Age limits – restrict the entry of players by ages commensurate with their class – for example, restrict the freshman class to players 17 to 18 years old, restrict the sophomore class to players 19 to 20 years old, etc. If I must clarify this point, so be it: establish age limits to prevent situations such as Sam Hartman being a so-called senior so that a school can bring in a ringer.
Require ALL players to be UNDERGARDUATES. ZERO exceptions.
Require all players to graduate in four years; no repeating years just to remain on the football team (though to me it seems that repeating a year is grounds for dismissal from a team for academic reasons). College football is supposed to be played by student athletes, not athlete students. Put the focus on the college part of the sport experience, not the sport part of the college experience.
Eliminate redshirting – obviously it’s bad when a player sustains a season-ending injury, but – 24at the risk of sounding heartless – that’s a risk of the game. It’s not like they didn’t know the risks when they signed onto the team.
And eliminate “Name, Image, and Likeness” (NIL). Frankly, I now avoid doing business with any company that uses a college football player in their ads. I couldn’t care less about some snot-nosed kid from a big-name school whose only claim to fame is being good at playing a child’s game telling me how great something is.
Unless the NCAA is going to completely recreate the farce known today as “college football”, it must rebrand its football segment as the National Football League Farm System in order to keep NIL. NIL is clearly not the only problem in college football, but for the purity of the amateur status required of college football players by the NCAA it must be eliminated (oddly, the NCAA still bestows the rank of “amateur” upon players who are being compensated under NIL, allowing these professional athletes to compete in college football). It should be understood that college football players are – or at least should be – playing for the sport, not for the money; if a player receiving compensation under NIL is so determined to make money based on his skills at football, let him quit college ball and try out for the NFL – where he can find out what his talents are really worth.
Unless the changes I have enumerated are enacted in order to save college football, the NCAA must abandon the farce it presently calls college football and rebrand itself as what it appears it wants to be – a semi-pro league to groom future NFL players.