re: If college ball is going to unions

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Programs like Dartmouth have stated if their players form a union they will possibly drop the program. They give no athletic scholarships and the football program makes no money. If a super league were to form I would wager many programs will no longer offer football as TV contracts and other revenue will not be available to the majority of programs outside of the super league.

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This would actually be to the benefit of the majority of universities in the long run. For most schools, sports are just a really expensive advertising campaign. The massive investment is all predicated on the gamble that you can have a good run. Good runs ramp up enrollment applications significantly due to the increased publicity. But for any school below the major conference FBS level, even an undefeated championship season isn't going to bring much exposure.

If anything, the football team actually generates more negative press than positive at most schools due to the poor academic performance and off-field conduct of many players and the corruption we all have seen exist in the sport for so long. Take Vanderbilt for instance - their recent rape scandal is the most publicity that program has had since at least the Dan McGugin era, probably ever. Baylor would be another example. They've had some good seasons, but if the majority of the public has heard about Baylor football, it's not about them having a ten win season, it's about their rape scandal. Even Penn State football, for all its historic success, is probably better known among the general public for the Sandusky scandal than anything else.

So you have a situation at the majority of schools where football is this massive financial sink that will increasingly demand more and more investment and entail significant reputational and even liability risks, and the payoff for all that is the chance of eventually getting increased exposure with the general public. And let's be frank about this - at the vast majority of schools, the chance of ever winning a title and getting that exposure is next to zero. TCU's 2022 run is probably the absolute peak for schools below the top tier in this new era, and we saw how that ended when they faced a just below NFL level program.

Honestly, it's surprising that this has been going on as long as it has. I think that when a big name drops football, you might see a domino effect of many schools following suit.