Mark Wiedmer
If you’re a Tennessee, Alabama or Georgia football fan, the start of your season, the start of your national championship dreams, or at least a spot in the College Football Playoff, is 66 days away. On August 30 the Vols host Syracuse, the Crimson Tide visits Florida State and the Dawgs host Marshall to begin the 156th season of college football.
So we’ve only got to get through 66 more days of worrying about Israel and Iran, heat indexes in the 100s and whether or not the Southeastern Conference is now more a baseball and basketball league than a football conference.
After all, Florida is the defending NCAA basketball champ and LSU just won the SEC its sixth straight College World Series.
Meanwhile, college football, the primary reason the league has always said of itself, “It just means more,” hasn’t won it all since Georgia’s rout of Kansas State in 2022. Instead, Michigan won it all in 2023 followed by Ohio State a year ago.
That Buckeyes’ team supposedly cost $20 million. Now every big boy league school will supposedly have $20.5 million to spend on its athletes overall, and you can bet that in every SEC program save Kentucky, and possibly Vanderbilt, the majority of that money, maybe 65 percent of that money will go to football.
But the bigger question, perhaps the biggest question, as we head into the first school year where which sports a school puts its money into are sure to be critiqued by fans, donors and critics alike, is what happens to the little guy.
Sure, Murray State got to the College World Series. And Coastal Carolina almost won it. Sure, Vanderbilt beat Alabama in football. And UT-Chattanooga, our Mighty, Magical Mocs, won the NIT.
But check out the NCAA Tournament. How many real upsets were there this past year? All four No. 1 seeds reached the Final Four. Of the 63 games played in the entire tournament, the higher seed won 55. This is the fear many thought would happen with NIL and the transfer portal. Over time, the rich would get richer, same as it ever was.
As one mid-major college basketball coach told me this week: “This is not sustainable. I lost my two best players in the offseason to bigger schools. One went for $500,000. The other went for $275,000. Our highest paid player for the coming season is $80,000 and most are $30,000 or less. And what’s going to happen when the donors paying that money are disappointed in their investment? They’ll start putting their money other places.”
The NCAA settlement, which will allow schools to pay their athletes up to to $20.5 million in a given school year, doesn’t say they have to pay that. Outside the Power Four conferences — Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big 10 and SEC — most won’t.
Where there are likely to be challenges from those four leagues will be toward basketball schools such as Connecticut, St. John’s, Creighton, Gonzaga and Marquette (to name but five) who aren’t shelling out major money for football. St. John’s and Gonzaga can use most of that $20.5 million on college hoops, and will. That is sure to give them a noticeable competitive edge against the Dukes, Floridas, Kentuckys, Louisvilles and North Carolinas of the world, who must at least give lip service to football and, perhaps, women’s basketball and baseball.
Just look at Kentucky. As mediocre to bad as its football program often is, it brings in $17 million more a year to the UK athletic department than basketball does. Fans may not care about that, but athletic directors and university administrations do.
In 66 days, it will begin to come into focus. The haves will be spending that $20.5 million — and maybe more through NIL deals — and the little guys of college football — think Miami of Ohio, Northern Illinois, Liberty — will have to make do as they can.
Rosters will be smaller. Locker room jealousies are likely to be more prevalent, especially when a team underachieves. Hot seats under coaches will grow hotter if their eight-figure payroll football team doesn’t sniff the CFP. It’s going to get ugly pretty quick in some corners and unexpectedly happy in others who overachieve, such as Murray State baseball or SMU football.
But at least we only have to wait 66 more days before we begin to get our answers. Within SEC football programs, there is hope that the last two seasons were aberrations, and fear that they weren’t. Whether those fan bases will come to accept that men’s basketball and baseball are a nice consolation prize is as unlikely as snow arriving on next week’s Fourth of July.
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Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@mccallie.org