Todd’s Take: Fear That The Bubble Is Going To Burst On College Athletics

College athletics has gone through unprecedented change in recent years and will continue to evolve. Will college athletics find a happy place? Or will greed and consolidation of wealth burst its bubble?

\The NCAA logo on the infield during the NCAA Track & Field Championships at Mike A. Myers Stadium. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – This may not be the last story on Hoosiers On SI you see from yours truly, but it’s the last one that’s being written.

As of Sunday, my time at Hoosiers On SI is up. I am moving on to take a journalism job outside sportswriting. I’d like to thank Hoosiers On SI publisher Tom Brew for the opportunity to continue to cover Indiana athletics.

The decision to move on is my choice in an effort to strike a better life-work balance and to put my family in a more advantageous situation. I leave sportswriting after 33 years, and I have zero regrets. I did everything I wanted to do and then some.

Much of that time has been spent covering college athletics at nearly every conceivable level. From Division III early in my career, to 18 years covering Indiana State athletics and the Missouri Valley Conference, to the last three seasons covering Indiana and the Big Ten, I’ve been exposed to every level.

The landscape of college athletics is unrecognizable from when I started covering it as a beat in 2004. Truth be told, it’s unrecognizable from the time I started covering Indiana in 2022.

As you know, it’s been a dizzying frenzy of change since the late 2010s. Looking back, it’s quaint that cost- of-attendance stipends that began in the mid-2010s were once considered to be a radical sea change in the way college athletics operated. But it was at the time.

Now, student-athletes are 15 days away from being paid directly by participating athletic departments. The transfer portal has made mass player movement a reality. Name, image and likeness has become the economic engine for college athletics in a way few imagined it could (or should) be. The money that exists in college athletics is being redistributed, and everyone thinks they’re the ones who are going to get rich.

In my own small corner of this universe, I am proud that most of what I’ve written over the years was to support many of these changes. The traditional system of college athletics was grossly imbalanced in favor of the schools and the NCAA. It’s ridiculous, in hindsight, that coaches were allowed to dictate the conditions of player transfers, just one example of the accepted abuse of power.

It took a pile of court cases and reluctant recognition from the powers-that-be to make the enterprise more balanced. Student-athletes deserve what they’re getting, and they should never have had their income potential or freedom of movement hampered in the first place.

It’s been a revolution, but as with most revolutions, sometimes the changes can go too far.

A view of the CFP logo and end zone pylon and camera during the game between the Texas Longhorns and the Clemson Tigers in the CFP National Playoff First Round at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. / Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

That is where I think college athletics finds itself now. Those of us who advocated for change got exactly what we wanted – with the unintended consequences that came with it.

Few who advocated for NIL, myself included, thought it would become pay-for-play. I’m not sure many thought free player movement would combine with NIL to dramatically drive up the cost of doing business. The complete lack of structure these changes (and legal cases) have created may have been anticipated, but many assumed powers-that-be – internal or external – would step forward to fill the vacuum. That hasn’t happened yet.

The notion of the student-athlete itself is under duress. Many question why college athletics has to be tethered to the college experience at all.

Many of the changes that have come to college athletics have been detrimental, and some of those less-than-appetizing trends – greater disparity between the haves and have nots, destruction of long-cherished college conferences and rivalries to name just two – are likely to get worse, not better.

The House settlement, approved on June 6, strives to provide some structure, and it’s better than nothing, but its effectiveness is contingent on all of the competing colleges playing ball with its rules. Given the bottomless pit of self-interest in college athletics? Skepticism that they will follow the rules is triggered as if it’s an involuntary muscle.

I believe there needs to be some brakes on some of the changes. My feeling isn’t born out of a desire to return college athletics to 1990, but it is based on two assumptions that underpin the direction of college athletics that may not hold true in perpetuity.

Those twin assumptions that college stakeholders seem to believe is that there will continue to be an endless flow of money into college athletics and that the consumers of college athletics will continue to support the enterprise unconditionally.

On that latter point? I may not want college athletics to return to 1990, but many fans do. A significant percentage of fans don’t really care how the sausage is made. They just want to support State U. What many fans under the age of 30 supported as their ideal of college athletics was a student-athlete model where players went to class and had five years to play four.

They saw nothing wrong with that model and didn’t really bother themselves with the inherent problems this system created for its participants.

Supporters of student-athletes rights might scoff at that level of disconnect, but they forget that college athletics is a consumer-based entertainment entity. The typical response aimed at fans who say, “NIL and the transfer portal have ruined college sports,” is to point out that their previous prohibition was illegal and should never have been barred in the first place.

That may be true, but many of those fans do not care. They want things the way they want them. Too much deviation from the norm can be bad for any consumer product. College athletics is no different.

How many fans will stick with State U when they recoil at the very concept of players being paid in the first place? How many will (or have) said that they will not support college athletics that they feel has divorced itself from the college experience to the degree where it’s unrecognizable? Freedom of movement for athletes is a right they should have, but moving every year is not a sustainable model for the product. How long will fans tolerate it?

There seems to be an assumption there is an endless well of passion out there for college sports. Which gets us back to the other point above.

Conference commissioners, university presidents and advocates of college athletes alike all work under the same assumption – that a river of gold will continue to flow into college sports without end. It influences their decision-making in ways that are tainted by gross self-interest. They want to grow themselves, not the enterprise of college sports.

The current top dogs in Division I – the SEC and Big Ten – are flexing their muscles based on the principle of exponential growth. They have financial power at the moment, and they have little desire to share it. The attempt to corner the market on College Football Playoff guaranteed playoff spots is just one example of how they want to consolidate their power at the expense of their peers.

There has long been the idea floated that the power conferences might break off and do their own thing. There is also a school of thought that the power conferences themselves might have a schism with the elite athletic programs consolidating their power upward.

Indiana Hoosiers offensive lineman Mike Katic (56) prepares to snap the ball during the first half against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish at Notre Dame Stadium. / Matt Cashore-Imagn Images

This is as good a time as any in this column to note that Indiana is vulnerable in such a scenario. If there’s a breakup among power conference schools, it will be the football bluebloods that drive such a change.

Great as Indiana football was in 2024, the Hoosiers are still far from blueblood status on the gridiron. If the traditional football powers jump in an escape pod and form their own 24-school super-league, Indiana might go the way of Oregon State or Washington State and get left behind - with all of the disastrous economic ramifications that go with it.

Perhaps that’s a hyperbolic scenario, but even if just the power conferences broke off en masse, quite a few of today’s haves will become have nots. In a Division I with over 300 members or 130 football-playing schools, a lower-level power conference school usually has enough cannon fodder beneath them to not have an embarrassing record.

If it’s a power conference-only proposition, there’s nowhere for the weaker sisters to hide and some average programs become below-average. A trickle down effect in the worst sense of the term.

There are external factors that threaten this supposed endless flow of money, too. Demographic pressures are on every university as the pool of college-aged kids diminish, the much-feared “enrollment cliff.” It doesn’t affect every school equally, but enrollment has plummeted to alarming levels at some Division I schools, especially expensive private schools and non-flagship public schools.

Universities of all stripes, Indiana included, have become subject to draconian budget cuts and political demagoguery that has placed potential existential pressures on the institutions themselves. 

It also exposes an inconvenient truth – a sizable amount of college sports are not fans of colleges. Some care about the team, not the institution that supports it. Which is where you get some of the sentiment that college sports can be separated from the colleges, even though many who hold the opposite view would rebel against that concept.

An inflatable Big Ten Conference logo adorns the outside of the track during day one of the Big Ten Outdoor Track and Field Championships on May 16, 2025, at Hayward Field in Eugene. / Ben Lonergan/The Register-Guard / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

So where does this all go? It feels, to me, like a bubble that is due to burst.

College sports are testing the limits of their consumers, and whether these changes were forced on the schools or not, many fans don’t care as they didn’t ask for any of these changes in the first place.

The self-interest of college conferences like the Big Ten and SEC is not helpful in trying to create an equitable solution that keeps the entire enterprise healthy.

The best college athletes are enjoying the fruits of their market value without understanding that their demands are driving up the cost of business to the point of unsustainability. Same for coaches who expect to get paid ridiculous sums that the market may currently bear, but will not forever if schools continue to have external economic pressures.

On a different front, some athletic programs are becoming over-dependent on building teams via the transfer portal, a short-term fix that ignores the long-term issue that the talent pool will eventually have to be filled with fresh blood from the high school ranks.

The continued evolution from the traditional definition of a college student-athlete to glorified minor league employee continues, and eventually, the public might decide that State U as a minor league enterprise branded with the old college names isn’t the same thing and isn’t worth their time.

While I believe in the power student-athletes have gained, I also believe that they should still be student-athletes, with their eligibility based on the college model. 

(I’m also old-fashioned enough to believe a free education is fair compensation for nearly all but the most marketable athletes. Ask any parent how much college costs for non-athletes. Too many national media types who are only exposed to the very top of the college athletics pyramid criticize this notion without ever understanding most rank-and-file college athletes aren’t going to get paid much even with NIL and that a college education is just payment.)

These are just a few things that concern me going forward. Maybe I’m being alarmist in this final column and these issues will resolve themselves over time without much turbulence.

I hope so, but I don’t think so. I don’t like the road college athletics is headed down. I’m pulling the ripcord before the bubble bursts. When it does, I hope the collateral damage is minimal and not existential.