As 2022 wraps up, SI staffers Jon Wertheim and Chris Almeida will discuss some of the themes of the year in sports. On Monday, they covered sportswashing. Today the topic is: what has (and hasn't) changed during a wild year in college sports.
Jon Wertheim: I have a rant: We're all obsessed with NIL deals, right? NIL has been this transformational force and it's been twinned with the transfer portal. It's completely changed college football in particular. The Notre Dame starting quarterback, before a bowl game, announces that he’s transferring and people shrug. Deion Sanders can arrive at campus and basically try to prevail upon 19 year-olds to switch schools. And that's completely normal. The fact that college athletes are essentially free agents is now something we've essentially taken for granted. We've done away with this unfairness where Lincoln Riley can leave Oklahoma or Brian Kelly can leave Notre Dame and players have to sit out if they want to do the same thing. And now we have this transfer portal where recruiting isn’t just finding high school juniors and seniors but also finding the unhappy kid at Wisconsin and hoping he comes to Indiana. I mean, The Washington quarterback used to play for Indiana. This is the new rules of engagement.
And it's great that a select few athletes can make money through these NIL deals and as anticipated, they're really not NIL deals, they’re just payments—we used to think, before NIL, that these athletes would be doing commercials at a local car dealer. But with the exception of some social media work, it's not as though these recipients of NIL money are spending huge amounts of time doing commercial shoots and sitting on billboards. What we're missing though with all of these discussions is that this still doesn't address the fact that this is all thriving on unpaid labor.
