I’ve gone on record to say that I’ve typically been in the camp that I don’t think college athletes should be getting paid, because they’re in essence already being paid with college educations, room, board, feed and all sorts of non-monetary privileges that are the things that typically drown all ordinary people in student debt for the vast majority of their lives.
I’ve read numerous articles and arguments both for and against the idea of paying student-athletes, and I most certainly see both sides of the coin. And although I still feel strongly that college players shouldn’t be paid money, I do feel like I’m softening on the idea that the reality still is that college players receive very little for their blood, sweat and tears, while the coaches, staff, schools and the fat cats of the NCAA are making literal millions of dollars.
I now think the idea of allowing players to make royalties off of their name is fair, and/or the idea that student-athletes should receive some sort of annuities or flexible scholarships that will allow them to protect their lives with educations and more usable degrees, instead of forcing them to make all sorts of essential decisions while they’re still eligible amateurs, often times still teenagers or just past. The inequity of what students receive versus what the NCAA gets is wider than a Kardashian’s asshole and it just doesn’t seem right to me anymore.
However, going back to the headline of this post, shortly after Clemson put the finishing touches on Alabama in round 4, and winning their second National Championship (which is a disgusting thought in its own right but that’s another diatribe), the recently re-booted XFL made a strategically subtle reminder to the world, that they are “not restricted by the rules that exist in other professional football leagues,” which is basically saying “unlike the NFL, we don’t have rules saying you have to be X years old or have completed X number of years in college,” which to the ears of the young and ambitious sounds a lot like “you can go high school to pro and start getting paid sooner… in the XFL.”
Money is the impetus for everything in the rotten world we live in, and it goes to say that money is main reason for how the world of fútbol americano is the way it is today. Underclassmen in the college ranks are coveted and exploited because they’re young, have fresh legs, and are malleable to a school’s system. Subsequently, their young age makes them appealing to the professional ranks since their window of peak physical performance is open longer at 20 than it is at 22, so they can be exploited and milked for longer.
The rich get richer, which is why college football has seen four straight years of Alabama vs. Clemson. Kids want to play for winners, which is why the top schools always have their veritable picks of the litter, with there being a trickle-down effect of the top prospects often times going to the most winning schools that will have them. Upstarts often happen when the unheralded and underrated rise to their potentials, or more often times, when a disgruntled former prospect grows tired of riding the bench and being forced to wait their turn, and then they transfer to another school with hopes for actual playing time and exposure, but none of them in recent years have still been able to actually topple a powerhouse.
And then they go to the NFL because there’s nowhere else to go, and in spite of the NFL’s best efforts to try and seem cold and callous with their players and try to make them believe that everyone is truly expendable and that every player’s shelf life is just a draft away from expiring, it doesn’t stop them from vacuuming in godly amounts of money in the time that their active careers are running.
These are the reasons why tickets the game aren’t really tickets to the game anymore, and terms like personal seat licenses exist. Why going to a football game costs nearly $200 for two people once you factor in stuff like parking and food on top of admission. Why the Rams and Chargers, despite playing in front of no fans in Los Angeles, were plucked out of St. Louis and San Diego (and still made the playoffs in spite of their shit support).
In my opinion, football is kind of broken, and there’s real no end in sight.
However, I do think the XFL, whether they realize it or not, stands a chance at helping save it. By simply being an alternative and existing, they open the window for the pool of talent to possibly flow elsewhere, breaking the monopoly that college and NFL has turned into. And because the XFL is a professional league where their players and personnel are actually compensated, their existence will create a very interesting scenario in the future where high school prep stars and touted prospects will actually have to stop and think about their career’s future.
Gone will be the linear path after high school, and a fork in the road will be present: will they go to college, where they’ll effectively be paying for free, but have the chance at possibly becoming an NFL player, where they’ll undoubtedly make money in amounts beyond their imagination? Or will they renounce their amateur status and go straight to the XFL, where they can get paid immediately to begin development and start getting paid playing football?
Going to college is no sure bet, and an injury will derail everything in a heartbeat. But if they tough it out and succeed, they’ll make millions. But if they fail, they theoretically could still fall back onto stuff like the XFL of CFL, but they’ll still have to wear the denigration of failure on their sleeves.
Going directly to the XFL might not guarantee them immediate millions, but at the same time, they’re back in an infant stage. Who’s to say that they might not get it right the second time around? Maybe they learned from their failure back in 2001 and have figured out how to run a competent football organization in 2020? Or maybe they didn’t, and they’re going to flop again and crash and burn? But the thing is, they’ll still offer the chance at making money immediately, and that’s going to be a very hard offer for lots of young talented amateurs to ignore when the time comes for them to have to decide on what’s going to happen next in their careers.
The point is, the sheer existence of an alternative is what football really needs. Not that Alabama/Clemson are ever bad games to watch, it just puts an exclamation point on the fact of how broken the system really is. It’s an injustice that a talent as immense as Trevor Lawrence (as much as I loathe the fact that he plays for Clemson) will get no real compensation for his efforts, and maybe it’s the option of something like the XFL that will make sure that it might not have to happen to all of them, in the future.
