Purdue, Iowa State, Missouri (etc.) have all been happy to take the TV money that the conferences have been generating. That leads to this point.
I'll say again what I've said many times: the NCAA was probably right back in the 1980s when it was trying to control TV rights for football that losing that control would lead to the end of collegiate sports as we know it. And here we are.
The helmet schools and the large state schools (with healthy athletic department revenue) can probably survive this new version of college football, but I agree that it is a very different version of the sport than we grew up with. Does that doom Wisconsin? Maybe. Thanks to Donna Shalala, Pat Richter, and Barry Alvarez Wisconsin built a very healthy athletic department, but one based on the old model. I don't know how seriously the Wisconsin football fan takes UW football if it becomes the doormat for the helmet schools in a 50-team league.
I don't know if Wisconsin will continue to fill Camp Randall if its reduced to finishing .500 or worse year over year. Professional teams manage to do that, to some extent, but the state of Wisconsin already has a professional team. What Wisconsin rebuilt its program on starting in 1991 was the ability to compete for conference championships. The reality of that in the current environment is questionable, to say the least.
All of the revenue, player movement issues, etc. need a CBA to address them. Otherwise, yes, a continuation of constant free agency, no program building, and just a question of who is willing to invest what and when (as it is in the pro game, except that they have better control of the movement of players because of the CBA). That CBA is going to be tougher than the pro CBAs to figure out because the financial model is so different for a third string safety at Purdue than it is for a third string safety for the Browns. Plucking kids out of high school to figure out who is good enough to get paid (and how much should they get paid) includes a lot more risk than figuring out how much to pay an NFL-level (even if just barely) talent.
NIL, too, is more complicated at the collegiate level. It's curious to see how much boosters will continue to be willing to pay directly to players (or collectives, to pay players) in a world in which the schools directly pay their revenue generating players.
So, yes, change is here. And the Purdue's of the world are definitely at risk. Maybe it will be good for many programs--including Wisconsin--to go to a FCS model, where Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama, Georgia, USC, Oregon, Texas (etc.) is where the real money is--NFL-lite--and the leagues below are the development leagues. But I don't know if Wisconsin can fill an 82K seat stadium in that model.
And maybe this is all ok. Maybe it's long overdue that kids who have the talent to generate real income by playing a sport can accept that income, without the fiction of being students at major universities. And the other kids, who can't, contribute to their school's spirit and camaraderie by being really good at their sport, but not expecting a big paycheck out of it--instead, getting a solid education, which is what they need in life, because their athleticism won't pay the bills for very long IRL.
