DALLAS, Texas — Composed and yet concerned, Bob Bowlsby opened media days with essentially a mayday message.
His voice—so subdued, so cottony—commissioned calm even as his words whispered “ALARM!”
Bowlsby used the Big 12 podium Monday morning to issue an SOS signal that had nothing to do with strength-of-schedule.
If you like college athletics now, Bowlsby warned, “you’re going to hate it” in the future.
There is game-changing litigation pending on multiple fronts that stretches far beyond players receiving the pocket change of video-game royalties. This is about lifetime scholarships, extended health care and union forces attempting to reclassify student-athletes as employee-athletes.
It will cost college athletic departments big money. And how big, Bowlsby says he can’t truly fathom.
“It’s impossible to quantify,” he said.
He foresees universities cutting non-revenue sports—specifically Olympic sports on the men’s side thanks to the parallel pressures of Title IX—as more money is required to fund athletes.
And while the sports consumer mass may not give two foot faults about tennis programs declining, Bowlsby cautions that changes could eventually sour fans on the sports they do care about.
His most dire forecast, one of his so-called “Armageddon scenarios,” involves sports agents roaming campuses to negotiate playing time.
“Change is coming,” he said. “If you like what you see in intercollegiate athletics right now, you’re going to be disappointed when the change comes.”
While admitting the college model needed tweaking—he says he first advocated a stipend in the late 1980s—Bowlsby is firmly entrenched with the institutional types who want to preserve amateurism even as schools seek to wring every free-market dollar that’s printed.
It’s a thorny, difficult-to-conceptualize stance, one that’s hard to digest even from a respected and astute leader like Bowlsby. Yet never forget, he answers to the athletic departments of 10 schools and, by job description, has their interests at the forefront.
More perspectives from breakfast with Bowlsby:
On the growing trend of transfers: “This is not free agency. This is about going to college.”
Bowlsby rightfully mentioned schools making huge investments in recruiting and developing players, because there’s a mutual agreement there on some level. Yet, in a curious example, he cited the concern over mid-major stars leaping to power programs. This was strange because it’s the Big 12 and the other high-visibility conferences that are nurturing the desire to leap by potentially offering alluring perks of all-you-can-eat meals and stipends the less-visible schools can’t offer.
On the new four-team playoff: “Anybody who thought this was going to resolve the controversies at the end of the year was probably barking up the wrong tree.”
Thank goodness we’ll still have something to rant about during the holidays.
How will schools handle the allowance of 24/7 dining for athletes? “We probably have 10 different models.”
Do any of those models extend 24/7 dining to sportswriters?
Lawless land? “The infractions committee hasn’t had a hearing in almost a year, and Ithink it’s not an understatement to say that cheating pays presently. … Right now, if you want to cheat, you can do it and you can get away with it. And there are benefits for doing that. … It’s easy to move money around. There are lots of people outside of universities that are handling things and they can’t be compelled to testify even if they get caught. They’ve gotten very sophisticated.”
Hey, doesn’t every five-star recruit have bitcoins?
College sports revenue isn’t endless: “The NCAA is currently headed down a path of significant financial difficulty. The lines of trend between the expenses and the finance and the revenue are going to cross in a negative way in the not too distant future. The revenues from NCAA television packages mostly is going up about two and a half percent a year and expenses are going up about four and a half percent a year.”
Gee, maybe it’s time to pump the brakes on building glitzy facilities and turning assistant coaches into millionaires.