VFL-82-JP
Bleedin' Orange...
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- Jan 17, 2015
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LWS, I don't think it's that dire.I do believe a lot of schools will have to give up football over all this. The smaller schools can't survive. The NIL is a huge negative impact to smaller schools. If more programs get what the Miami booster is doing, why would kid go to a small school and not try to land at a bigger program to take advantage of that? I do believe there are going to be plenty of booster will to drop 500K or a couple million in an account to pay players.
Small schools have been at risk for a long time. Breakup of NCAA almost dooms them. I don't how much revenue the NCAA can funnel their way but losing NCAA and going to a conference control situation, there is nothing that says the SEC has to share anything with smaller division schools or any other conference.
The better players have always wanted to go to the schools that give them the best chance to get to the NFL. Now they'll want to go to the schools that give them the best shot at the NFL and get them more money along the way. Which happen to be the same schools as before. Blue bloods over not, Power 5 over Group of 5, division I over division II.
The other thing that hasn't changed--and won't unless the game itself changes--is that schools can only field so many players, can only give playing time to so many. Even if scholarship vs walk-on is no longer as big a deal as before, given that a non-scholarship player can make enough money to pay for his education and still rake in a lot of dough if he can get the right sponsorships and NIL deals, even if it's no longer about 85 scholarships, it's always going to be about meaningful playing time.
So the top schools will get the best players, and the next schools will get the next best, and so on and so forth until the division II and division III schools get the kids who only play for the love of the game. JUST LIKE it is today.
I don't think this kills football for the have-nots. No more than any of this did before.
Go Vols!