Tad Stryker: Don’t Forget the Fan

I’m certainly no top-line recruiting geek, but as college football recruiting grows into a sports media industry of its own, I’ve kept close enough track to know that it’s all about relationships.

At least, that’s what they were saying a year or two ago. Today’s teenagers value relationships more than wins or losses or facilities or traditions or anything else, so the narrative goes, and largely, it’s true. Camaraderie with coaches, peer relationships with teammates, those are the things that draw teenagers to schools and stick with them throughout their lives.

Those who went on to find success in the NFL would agree. I wonder how many Hall of Fame inductee speeches over the years emphasized that the things they valued most were the friendships built along the way.

So it bothers me when I think about today’s major college football players. I bet it’s hard to build and sustain relationships when you’re changing schools every year or two.

For more than 50 years, since back when I was a youngster, college football has intrigued and charmed me with its color, traditions, innocence, rivalries, coaches and the never-ending parade of players that came marching through my life on what used to be a fairly predictable basis. Especially the players. Do fans build relationships with their team’s players? Most definitely.

That was then. Recent seismic upheavals in the sport are changing that rapidly.

College football fans are a diverse lot, and like most groups of people, notoriously hard to characterize, but I think two things are pretty universal:

Point No. 1: College football fans nationwide want our team to win. Point No. 2: College football fans want to watch and celebrate the development of our team’s players over several years.

Yes, we are willing to compromise a bit on Point No. 2 if our team is winning championships, but it’s getting quite difficult to keep track of the players on your favorite FBS team because for so many of them, their stay is so ephemeral. And because the NCAA is moving to reduce football rosters to 105 players, there will be fewer of them to follow.

If you think bank accounts are more important than relationships, I guess you could say college football is becoming more player-friendly, even while becoming less fan-friendly, but I think, with a few common-sense changes, it’s possible that both can win.

The game itself has always been unpredictable, and thankfully, that fact will remain. But not so long ago, the rhythms of the college football year were gentler, somehow reassuring, as enjoyable and reliable as watching the seasons change. About one-fifth of your team, the senior class, would exhaust its eligibility every year. The underclassmen would gain experience and move up to the next level and some would assume leadership. Many would improve regularly. A few would overachieve and their impact would last forever. A select few would rise to incredible heights. Through it all, Average College Football Fan could talk about his expectations and dreams with other fans. That’s what the offseason is for, after all.

True, within five short years, almost everyone’s college football career was over, although some left for another school, or even left the game, much sooner than that. The meteors, like Calvin Johnson or Adrian Peterson or Lamar Jackson or Ahman Green, would leave early for the NFL, and that was understood. Five years, or even four, is long enough for most players to make an everlasting impact on true fans’ hearts and keep them coming back for more.

But now, it’s becoming increasingly common to see players making steady, encouraging progress at a school leave their friends in the program without warning, after some unscrupulous, uninvited voice from another school promises them a bigger payday. So many college football players are bailing on those relationships and chasing the almighty dollar. It seems dreadfully Baby Boomerish. I wonder how that will pay off for them a decade or so down the line.

Speaking of Boomers, I suppose I’m fairly typical Nebraska male who was born in the early 1960s, quickly bonded with the Husker football program and started living and dying with the team. I, like most fans I know, don’t just root for a jersey. We root for the player who wears the jersey. Specifically, we follow them throughout their time in Lincoln. For me, it would’ve been difficult to root for the 2024 Huskers without looking forward to someone like Jacory Barney’s progress and development through 2025 and 2026.

Will he still be in Lincoln in 2026? I hope so. For now, Nebraska fans need to pause and be thankful that Dylan Raiola seems determined to remain a Husker. No doubt he had some tempting financial offers to spend his sophomore season elsewhere. It seems like commitment to his school and the relationships he’s built really do matter to Raiola. The same goes for recently graduated Ty Robinson and Nash Hutmacher.

There’s been a lot of talk about how schools need to make their stadiums more fan-friendly, or risk losing much of their attendance to home TV sets and recliners, sofas and refrigerators stocked with booze. But there’s a more urgent matter to address. The pay-to-play system and transfer portal are running amok, making it difficult for Average Fan to follow his favorite team’s players, because so many are leaving so quickly and capriciously. This development, if left unchecked, will eventually run off a significant portion of viewers who funded FOX, NBC, CBS and ESPN in the first place. I fear that day, not necessarily for the unintended impact it eventually will have on conference’s television revenue, but for the integrity of the game itself. Selfishly, I want my grandchildren to have a compelling, sustainable college football product to enjoy, but in the bigger picture, I want the best sport in the world to thrive, and other college sports programs supported by football revenue to survive.

Have we so quickly forgotten that sports like baseball, tennis, wrestling, soccer and track and field are subsidized by football at most major colleges? A common theme I’m hearing from those who think unlimited transfers and pay-to-play is good for the sport runs something like this: “The NCAA was violating antitrust laws and making millions off the backs of poor exploited players, and using it to pay obscene coaches’ salaries for so long that it deserves to get screwed now.” That’s a pretty shortsighted approach, but it apparently has appeal for a lot of people who forget that the vast majority of these millions has always gone to support nonrevenue sports at their school. One thing’s for sure: that will start to dry up when revenue sharing mandated by the House v. NCAA settlement kicks in this summer, and that will lead to reduced opportunity, because at that point, you’ll see FBS schools cut back on a surprising amount of nonrevenue sports, and many of those athletes will either quit their sport or end up at smaller schools who have scrapped football to be able to afford everything else.

In our zeal to punish the NCAA for poor decisions made decades ago, we have foolishly allowed the current “Wild West” environment. But things can be remedied. Just because the old sheriff was inept doesn’t mean there should be no sheriff.

If left unchecked, unintended impact, or collateral damage, will be the legacy of the rise of the transfer portal and pay-to-play (unless you’re cynical enough to believe it was the plan all along for every last Power Four softball, hockey and water polo athlete to be paid, not just the allegedly exploited college football players who brought in big money for their university). If athletes were exploited, the remedy should specifically remove the injury from those athletes. But the remedy has been too promiscuously spread, and if left to their current course, schools will spend large amounts of money on athletes who were never exploited or injured, under the terms of the original litigation. It’s unjust, and it doesn’t make sense.

I agree that players who help generate millions for their school every year (in most cases, FBS football and basketball players) should be fairly compensated. Those who didn’t, and still don’t, make millions for their school every years should not be compensated, at least not in the upcoming revenue sharing program. I still support NIL, as I did in 2020, but only in the original spirit it was intended. If a player’s name, image or likeness is used for a video game, jersey sales or something of the sort, that player should be compensated accordingly. As it was originally defined, NIL was not the same as five-star potential or market value. It never was intended to be, but within months, it had devolved into “Now It’s Legal,” the flat-out buying of football prospects. And frankly, exploitation is happening under the current system. Robin Washut of Husker Online recently said agents for college players entering the portal typically get 10 to 20 percent of the total NIL payment, compared to 3 percent for agents who negotiate NFL players salaries.

To be fair, in some cases, the lords of major college football have had their hands forced by the U.S. court system, especially as it pertains to NIL and the transfer portal. Congressional action will be necessary to set some things right. A year and a half ago, when I wrote an obituary for the Pac-12 Conference, and almost five years ago, when I was skeptical about the move toward NIL, and suggested a few limits, I didn’t envision the huge expansion of college football spending and the move toward no-limit, never-ending transfers from school to school. The transfer portal should be returned to what it was originally — one free transfer with no questions asked, but subsequent transfers would mean an undergraduate player sits out a season unless they were was prompted by the head coach leaving his program.

I was wrong, though, when I predicted that “fifth-year seniors will be increasingly rare.” It’s turning out that players who have no assurance they will be taken in the NFL Draft are trending toward staying in major college football for a year or two longer. A recent NCAA rule change, one that I like, wouldn’t count junior college seasons against a player’s BCS eligibility. It will make it easier for the modern-day Zac Taylors or Maurice Purifys of the FBS, who aren’t true NFL prospects, to lengthen the time they can make 10 times more than the average Joe by playing college football, and possibly the trend will spread to baseball, softball and basketball as well. That will help athletes and enable fans to follow them longer at the same school.

That rule is a notable exception. In general, the transfer portal and pay-to-play are slowly draining the traditions and regional appeal out of the game and replacing it with a mercenary mentality that’s increasingly hard to stomach. The romance of college football is starting to fade. If “you can’t expect today’s player to fall in love with a university and stay there forever,” as I hear quite often, neither can you expect it from a fan.

Tad Stryker: Don’t Forget the Fan

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