Just As College Sports Change, So Must We All Or Risk Irrelevance

The beginning of a new year offers the opportunity to reflect on the topic of change and how it relates to leadership. Big-time college sports have never been more driven by change than it is at the moment and, when reading so many on the internet, the change is driving people to say the most distasteful things!

Let’s be honest: college sports are a business and have been for some time, so to be successful requires that you accept the changing landscape and learn how to work within the new rules.

You may not agree with a specific change or may feel uneasy with the overall direction the changes bring about; but how you react in the face of change says everything about your ability to lead forward.

This year, 72-years-young Nick Saban showed how to play the game of modern college football. Even in a losing effort — his Alabama Crimson Tide lost 27-20 in overtime of a spectacular game to the favored Michigan Wolverines — the old master of the new game managed to get his team into the semi-finals. He did so while losing key players, including better options at quarterback, in the transfer portal. He did so while losing a key assistant who left to pursue his fortunes elsewhere. And he did so by overcoming an early season of woeful (and uncharacteristic) underperformance and working with the team he had to make them become better at every position.

And guess what: the Tide got better throughout the season— better enough, in fact, to be included in the conversation when the College Playoff Football Committee met for their infamous deliberations to determine the final four teams.

Did I disagree with the committee’s choices? Yes, as you can read here.

But do I think that Saban’s 2023-24 campaign showed us greatness personified in a coach who adjusted to the game’s new baseline of reality and assumed complete ownership of his team’s fortunes?

You bet your Rose Bowl I do.

A little context is in order here. College sport used to be dominated by coaches and the NCAA. The NCAA created the guidelines and rules for the sports and generated millions in revenue that made many people rich. The athletes were not among them. They were told to remain as unpaid “amateurs” while everyone else was paid professionally. They were also restricted in their ability to move while the coaches enjoyed the freedom of free-agency, signing contracts they could break when better offers came along. This created problems for players who often staked their futures on playing for a specific coach, an ethical concern we wrote about here.

Coaches still enjoy such free-agency, but now with the new rules, players do too as the transfer portal allows them to switch to another program without incurring a career-stalling year of ineligibility. They are also getting a much larger piece of the college sports revenue pie, thanks to the passing of the Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) rules that allows athletes to share in the fruits of their labor.

With this greater equality in terms of the financial rewards and breadth of choices open to players comes greater risk, as well. For example, players who enter the portal sometimes trade the risk of staying put for the risk of failing to find a taker on the other side. But the map of college athletics is constantly shifting, and we only need to look at all the major conferences gobbling each other up through mergers and acquisitions to see the literal application of this truth!

Yes, the train of change has left the station; the amateur ideal has been undergoing professionalization for decades. We may agree with some of the change and resist other parts of it, but change is undeniable and it is real. When many of Florida State’s best players decided to take a pass on playing in the Orange Bowl last week and focus on staying healthy for the NFL draft, they took heat from many who believed their behavior represented a snapshot of “what’s wrong with college football.”

I beg to differ and believe the FSU players behaved in a way that was perfectly consonant with being a good teammate during the regular season and a prudent pre-professional in the exhibition/postseason.

They weren’t the first or the last to behave this way. Remember, most people attend a university to prepare themselves for a job. Some of the pathways to employment are more circuitous; others are very direct. Top-tier division football and basketball are very, very direct routes to pursuing professional status — and often end in failure.

A serious injury would make success even less likely.

I went to college to become a journalist and can assure you that if one of my professors had given me a relatively meaningless assignment that might knock me out of journalism forever, I would have taken an incomplete!

In the professional game of football, the Pro Bowl has become a game of flag football, and the professional basketball and hockey all-star games are 99 percent entertainment and one percent competition.

Whatever big-time college sports has become — a professional apprenticeship, for example — it will continue to fascinate us not only because of its traditions, but also because of its relentless and unpredictable change.

And that’s something all of us should prepare to roll with.