College football fans need to come to the realization quickly that college football as they know it is changing faster than they realize and they need to get on board with it before they get left behind.
One of the most beloved media members around college football made a statement this week that he hates “losing the tradition of the sport. I’ve always been, I guess, naïve to it”. That media person – ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit.
What tradition is he talking about exactly?
The only tradition that college football has had since the 1950s is the evolution of the game, the money around the game, how athletes are categorized and treated, and the race to be better than all other programs.
Those are the only traditions that each college football program has had for the last 70 plus years. Fact is, “amateur athlete” was not used by the NCAA until the early 1950s and it was only used so that they would not have to pay the worker’s compensation claims of injured football players. Since then, it has been a game of how much money everyone can make without giving the bulk of it to the players.
College football traditions aren’t going anywhere
Over the last forty years, college football conferences have come and gone, teams have moved, coaches have gotten richer as have athletic directors and presidents.
At this point, each program should be doing all they can to collect as much money as fast as they can before the bubble eventually bursts – because that is going to happen. Eventually, programs will price out even the most loyal donors and even television audiences will eventually stop watching as we are already tired of watching out teams get dumped on by biased commentators for three hours.
Rivalries will still be played and each tradition within the individual programs will continue for the foreseeable future because there is too much money at stake.
With Texas and Oklahoma already jumping to more lucrative opportunities, the leadership at Clemson would be dumb to sit around and just allow the chips fall where they may. They have to be reactionary at this point, they have to force themselves into a better paying situation.
For two weeks now, we have read thousands of comments that said things like “we love the ACC” and “we hate the SEC” and that is fine, you can feel both ways but this is about business and not about the feelings of the fan base.
If you love Clemson athletics, the conference they play will never matter more than the programs themselves and you would want the university to be in the best position possible to stay relevant.
If the university and the athletic department embrace the evolution of the sport like head football coach Dabo Swinney has the transfer portal, they will get left behind. That means a championship run as we have seen in the last decade will be the last in program history as they will get left behind while other programs move forward and embrace the new norms.