Life After Football

The NFL has had a free farm system in college football throughout its existence. It should spend some of its record profits on funding college football. This would enable those schools losing money to maintain programs. It would also allow football to be exempt from Title IX calculations which have cut into a number of men’s “non-revenue” sports with football sucking up a larger percentage of men’s sports dollars at many schools.

The greedheads running the NFL will never do this despite the fact that failing to do so will shrink the pool of programs feeding talent to the league.

Can you imagine a world in which large school districts in Texas or California drop football? I doubt we are that close to a widespread shutdown, but we can play with the idea.

My unresearched guess is that a school or district could be compelled to drop football on the grounds that the costs of maintenance per student served cannot be justified.

Fast forward with the hypo. Now formerly fertile recruiting grounds have no football, and university programs are forced to spend more resources to procure the same talent they came to expect during the era of “in all public schools” football. What if OKC, Dallas, and Tyler ended football? What if an entire state ended football in public schools (or alternatively, severely limited the amount of public funding toward football)?

Right now, a handful of big states are subsidizing football for the entire country. The funding varies by district, as does the proportion allocated to football - but to some degree, wherever the game is played (and funded), the property tax-paying public pays for high school football. This is the case anywhere. Given that, and given the shitstorm of municipal and state-level finance problems, I expect to see a pioneer district cut or severely pare back athletics funding, possibly taking cues from a state legislature, or under political pressure, or following a school-funding law suit.

The potential dilemmas are the same as those presented in PB’s post, just lower (higher?) one level of competition. What will the people in power “at the next level” do when their recruiting/scouting populations begin to dry up?

Recognizing the essential role played by the profit motive in our economy, I’m not ready to go Gordon Gekko (“Greed is Good!”). To me it is a question of degree. It is possible to be so focused on maximizing profits that you end up making short-sighted decisions and cutting your own throat. That is my concern with the NFL with this issue and one of many reasons I am a much bigger fan of the college game.

In advocating for the NFL paying the freight for its own developmental league, I am merely asking it to do what the NBA, MLB, NHL, etc. do. College programs play a role in those sports too but aren’t the sole supplier of incoming talent as they are in football.

I can tell you that the football program was not really that big a deal here. The big problem here is an overall lack of interest in collegiate athletics in New England, as it is dominated by professional sports. Granted, the team was terrible most seasons, and when Northeastern made the 1-AA playoffs one time while I went to school there, hardly anyone noticed. The only collegiate sport that receives any attention is hockey, and even the interest for Boston College football is not that large. I sincerely doubt that even a winning team would change that (they were ranked as high as #2 as recently as a few years back). I know this is slightly off topic from the original post, but thought I would add some perspective specific to Northeastern.