Can the Colorado Buffaloes afford the price of doing business in college football?
When playing quarterback for Alabama can be a seven-figure gig for Bryce Young and coach Lincoln Riley bolts Oklahoma for USC faster than you can say “$100 million plus perks,” the old-fashioned concepts of loyalty and amateurism in college football are dead and gone.
“We have to kind of understand that better,” CU coach Karl Dorrell said Wednesday.
Dorrell added we’ve clung to the quaint notion that when the Buffs storm Folsom Field behind Ralphie that “we’re amateurs. But itap kind of working toward the level of: ‘Hey, this is a business now.’”
After a 4-8 season, Dorrell brought in 19 recruits during the early signing period, including Travis Gray of Aurora, a 6-foot-7, 295-pound offensive tackle from Cherokee Trail High School who Dorrell called the ring-leader of the class.
But the game of college football has changed. Recruits now ask how much they can profit from name, image and likeness. The going price for a top-notch coach is now $10 million per year. A player unhappy with his role can enter the transfer portal and be gone from the team as quickly as he can pack a suitcase and be gone from the dorm.
“It is new, but it has exploded in a short period of time,” Dorrell said.
In this brave, new world, Bama, the Domers and the elite will not only survive, but thrive. Everybody else, including CU, could throw good money at the challenge of competing at a top-25 level and have nothing more than a prayer of keeping up. Football is life in Texas. In Colorado, there are better things to do on a Saturday afternoon in the autumn, from hopping on a bike to going for a hike.
“The NCAA – you guys want to get me in trouble – but (NCAA administrators) put it on the state laws. They just said, ‘Aw, I don’t know if we want to govern this. You guys handle it.’ All the laws are different in what you can and can’t do,” Dorrell said.
“The regulation part was always going to be the challenge, from the very beginning. How much can you allow (athletes) to get, to make it a level playing field? How much is that? Well, no one has an answer for that yet. And I’m going to stop … because I don’t want to get in trouble. But there’s definitely some things that need to be re-thought in this process.”
In places where college football really matters, playing quarterback can be a job worth $1 million. And just as Dorrell tried to warn us a year ago, athletes now view themselves as free agents if the amount of playing time or the won-loss record isn’t to their liking.
“We can’t sit and ignore and think: ‘Oh, thatap just wrong. And we’re not going to get involved in it.’ We’ll be what we are now for a very long period of time, if we think that way. We’re going to need to be proactive. We’re going to need to stay in the game and put some skin in the game.”
We still love the game of college football. But everywhere you look, there are coaches and players that now ask: Whatap in it for me?.
“There are some challenging times ahead in college athletics,” Dorrell said. “Thatap for sure.”
When will the madness end?
Short answer: Never.
As a university, Colorado needs to ask:
If football has increasingly become all about the money to the point where it now has very little to do with college, are the Buffaloes in the wrong business?
