This is Stuart Whitehair, publisher and editor for the CU at the Game website, and your host for the CU at the Game podcast.
The off-season for college football has become almost as busy and newsworthy as the regular season, with the future of the sport being debated in courtrooms and boardrooms across the nation.
I am joined for this episode by Neil Langland, and we are here to discuss the disintegration - or re-invention - of college football as we know it. We take a brief detour into the history of litigation which brought us to the current chaos, from Jeremy Bloom’s case against the NCAA twenty years ago, to the landmark decisions in the O’Bannon and Alston cases, which lay the groundwork for the tectonic shifts taking place today.
So ... With the Dartmouth case allowing players to vote on forming a union, and the Tennessee and Virginia lawsuit against the NCAA likely to bring about a stripping of almost all NIL regulations, where is the sport heading in the near and long term future? ... Will the Big Ten/SEC “advisory group” develop solutions, or are even the big boy conferences merely wholly owned subsidiaries of ESPN and Fox? ... And, most importantly for Buff fans: Will Coach Prime have enough time to salvage the CU brand, giving the Buffs a chair to sit in when the music stops? ... Or, is it time for schools like Colorado to accept, and perhaps even embrace, a future in a new mid-tier college football world where the Buffs can once again compete on a level playing field with its competition?
Let’s find out ...