Chips are down: Is the free market bad for CFB?

Yes. If you're going to have unrestricted free agency every single year their needs to be a cap and collective bargaining.

Rolling out NIL and Transfer Portal at the same fricking time with no real plan was the death of college sports as we knew them.

If you can do it in CFB, why not basketball and baseball as well?

Yes currently but it’ll most likely correct itself in time, the question is will the product you used to love be obsolete by then? I feel like cfb viewership is in a transfer portal scenario, will the new fans coming on board for the new era of cfb be equal to or greater in number than the fans that are inevitably going to walk away?

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Does CFB need socialism to reign it in?

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What it needs is collective bargaining, which is a non-socialist, legal way to regulate both a labor market and labor/management relationships. The management end (universities and conferences) want to say this is not feasible because they think they can just have the government come in and nuke this market.

What we need is a market regulated by mutual bargaining, not congressional fiat.

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Not detracting from your thought, because I agree - but how will it even be possible to collectively bargain FBS, FCS and downstream?

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You could see the lower levels maintain "amateur" legal status. Can't argue that for SEC/B1G. Thus the need for them to split away. So their rules are consistent with their reality.

The School Presidents and Athletic directors must recognize the NCAA as a governing body with absolute authority and with whatever the legal term is for immunity. Anti trust or whatever. They need a “commissioner”.

They can do this. They can do it right now. But they are scared over money. TV deals and contracts. They don’t care anything about the competition as long as we are watching and dumping money into the programs.

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The School Presidents and Athletic directors must recognize the NCAA as a governing body with absolute authority and with whatever the legal term is for immunity. Anti trust or whatever. They need a “commissioner”.

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I don't know what happened that flipped the idea of "NCAA overreach" handing out penalties to now them being absolutely toothless overnight

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I think I’m done with it. Good riddance.

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So you will stick to academics and academics alone? Sounds good!

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I think I’m done with it. Good riddance.

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A lot of this probably has to do with getting older and just losing interest in former passions anyway but I spent less time on CFB last season than I have spent since my 8th or 9th year and I will probably spend even less time this year. I will watch UGA games but I probably won't watch Friday nigh ACC action between Stanford and NC State or some other such nonsense. There is far more interesting things to do on a fall Saturday than watch a bunch of 20 year old millionaires play a meaningless game and be inundated with commercial after commercial after commercial while doing so. The game is almost untenable on TV and TV makes it completely untenable in person. I fully understand that viewership is up and growing but I sincerely think most of that is due to TVs being tuned in and viewers simply watching while doing other things...I would bet the VAST majority of viewers couldn't tell you what the down and distance was at most points in the game....and I know they won't be able to when there are 10 minutes of commercials between 2 and third down....watching from home or the stands, either way, the breaks in the action has made the game less watchable than baseball....

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I don't know what happened that flipped the idea of "NCAA overreach" handing out penalties to now them being absolutely toothless overnight

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Ambulance-chasing lawyers and district courts, like those in Northern California.

Some of their decisions have been described as "egregiously wrong," and "granting sweeping injunctive relief with virtually no evidence, inviting further chaos in college sports."

Once that door was opened, each new lawsuit brings fear that the NCAA and/or member institutions will be sued and awarded billions of dollars, so they simply kowtow to every challenge that comes along rather than risk exposure to liability.