Soccer is the tail wagging the canine in faculty athletics.
Because of TV contracts, soccer is the money cow, the ATM and the checkbook for many of the sports activities on a campus.
Basketball nonetheless makes cash and at Arkansas, Eric Musselman has made the Razorbacks a year-round sport once more.
Underneath Corridor of Fame coaches Nolan Richardson and Eddie Sutton, the Hogs had been headliners 12 months a 12 months, then they grew to become seasonal and typically barely that.
The NCAA Basketball Match, the best occasion in sports activities, is the No. 1 supply of earnings for the NCAA.
Simply what the NCAA is now appears to be up within the air, particularly now that it’s looking for a brand new president.
The as soon as highly effective group that managed faculty athletics with a robust fist has been stripped of its energy as a result of its final chief appeared to lack imaginative and prescient.
It has been unable to get any kind of grip on the switch portal, NIL and convention realignment.
Now this Wednesday, the NCAA seems poised to permit limitless transfers for athletes who’ve the grades and transfers throughout a particular time-frame.
Each the necessities are good concepts. Nevertheless, the limitless half goes to create havoc in faculty soccer.
In a latest column by Dan Wolken for USA Immediately on-line, Tom Mars was quoted as calling limitless transfers “utter chaos.”
In case you don’t know who Mars is, you haven’t been paying consideration.
He’s the Arkansas lawyer who labored with the NCAA to permit athletes who transferred to be eligible instantly and never have to take a seat out a 12 months.
Mars is a top-shelf litigator who knew little about faculty athletics till, on the urging of his former pastor, Rex Horne, took on Houston Nutt as a consumer.
Nutt was being accused of the vast majority of NCAA violations by his former employer Ole Miss. Nutt did have a number of, however the bulk of the violations got here below former head coach Hugh Freeze. Nutt received his apology.
Mars adopted that by getting Shea Patterson rapid eligibility at Michigan after he transferred from Ole Miss.
All of the sudden Mars cellphone blew up with athletes wanting him to signify them. Then coaches received in on the motion and at one level the NCAA talked to him about employment.
In the meantime, convention enlargement appears to be in a holding sample though new Large 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark has stated his league is open for enterprise.
New Pac 12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff stated he doesn’t count on his league to be purchasing in Large 12 nation.
Large Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren stated USC and UCLA will not be the tip of his league’s enlargement and it’ll take a “daring” method to additional development.
The SEC’s Greg Sankey lately stated his league could be “nimble,” and ACC Commissioner Jim Philllips, who has been on the job a 12 months, stated every little thing is on the desk.
None of them are saying it, however the trophy all of them need is in South Bend, positioned in Indiana, which borders Kentucky, making it a state contiguous within the SEC footprint.
Notre Dame, an semi-independent, must be on the highest of everybody’s want checklist. It’ll finally notice the should be a part of a convention as a result of faculty athletics as we’ve recognized it not exists.
It’s nonetheless good and enjoyable, however it will be totally different. Southern Cal and UCLA didn’t bounce conferences as a result of they needed to expertise a sport in a snow storm. They did it for cash.
They did it for soccer cash.
Till some management is discovered, there might be no normalcy in faculty athletics. If it isn’t too late, the NCAA must shoot for the moon and even Mars to get a pacesetter who can get NIL, transfers and convention realignment below management.
