Opinion - Killing the golden goose

I enjoy college football so I got my fill over the past week watching all the bowl games on TV.

Many of the games turned out to be farces because so many of the top players opted out of the game to transfer to other schools or turn professional. In fact, most of them already are professionals.

Until two years ago, college athletes could not make money playing for their schools, other than scholarships. They couldn’t take so much as a free pizza from a booster, even though their coaches were paid millions of dollars and their schools raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for their students’ efforts.

Now players are allowed to make money off their “name, image and likeness” (NIL), but universities can’t pay them direct salaries.

So boosters set up “charitable foundations” that pay players. A foundation was set up to pay University of Texas defensive linemen $50,000 per year to keep them from transferring to other schools. It’s legal, if not ethical.

If a coach is looking for an experienced quarterback to help his team, it will cost $2 million to $6 million in dark money to hire that transfer.

Some of these players have been in college for seven and eight years, waiting for an opportunity in the pros. And they still don’t have their diplomas.

Several players have transferred to three schools in as many years, playing for the highest bidder.

In the meantime, the Internal Revenue Service has ruled that these so-called foundations will lose their tax exempt status if they are spending money on football players instead of bona fide charity. Donors won’t be able to deduct these gifts. And players will have to pay taxes on this income, unlike scholarships, which aren’t taxable.

Caitlin Clark, the best women’s basketball player in America, has transformed the sport during her play with the University of Iowa. With Clark in the lineup, not only is every seat in Carver Hawkeye Arena sold out for the entire season, so are all the away games where the Hawkeyes play. Telecasts of her games draw record ratings. A lot of people are making a lot of money off Caitlin Clark.

Including Clark herself. She reportedly makes more than $2 million per year from endorsements from Gatorade, State Farm, Hy-Vee and Nike. Five years ago, she wouldn’t have made a dime off her fame. Clark could have turned pro, but would have had to take a pay cut to join the WNBA, where the average pay is $116,000 (men’s NBA average is $10.8 million), so she stayed another year in college.

The destruction and realignment of college football conferences destroyed rivalries that have been the stuff of legends: Oklahoma-Oklahoma State, Oklahoma-Nebraska, Washington-Washington State, USC-Stanford.

If college presidents don’t come to their senses, and soon, they will kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. Football a tough game that has survived over the last 40 years of increasing greed and corruption. Let’s hope big-time college football can survive this most recent attack.

Not all college sports have sold their souls to the devil. If you’d like to see true student-athletes who play for the love of the game, check out a Buena Vista University athletic event. These NCAA Division III competitors get no athletic scholarships, no fancy training tables, no under-the-table payments. They graduate in four years and return home to serve their communities.

They are the real All-Americans.