All of these responses, and lots of talk, but everybody on this board knows that the "amateurism" in CFB left sometime in the 80's to early 90's.
It's well known that football, whether it's the NFL or CFB, is now the number one sport in America. An average NFL game draws more audience than the World Series. A marquee matchup in CFB will outdraw almost everything outside of the WS and good NFL games. In other words, CFB is going to become #2 in terms of ratings. You can't stop it, unless all the teams, colleges, etc stop putting the games on TV. And if we did that, the schools would have to accept less revenue, and the coaches/AD's/Asst all the way down to the ticket takers would have to accept less salary and pay.
They're not going to do that. They're (people at the top) making millions of dollars per year, interest in the sport has never been higher and it's only getting worse.
They shut the players out of receiving anything for 30+ years, and they built the league on the backs of players with nothing more than a few thousand for a scholarship and maybe a promise to make it to the league, and most didn't play in the NFL and get the big reward. That wasn't sustainable, everybody knew it but the idiots in charge of the NCAA refused to budge and now we're stuck with this giant mess.
Of course the players need some kind of compensation. There is more than enough money to do that, just figure out a way to get it done right. Portal should not be a free-for-all. And I think that players who have good academics should have advantages that other players don't.
