Deion Sanders doesn’t have the exact solution, but he has an idea of how to fix college football, as he told Fox Sports’ Joel Klatt.
In the age of the transfer portal and NIL, college football is more like the NFL than it was five years ago. Not to mention the expanded playoffs and conference realignment.
But the biggest issue and factor is payment and what the student athletes make in financial gain at this point, according to Sanders.
“Everybody wants it both ways,” Sanders said. “Like the kids want to be compensated like pros but they want to be treated like pros, right? Pros get talked to in a way, not by the coaches but by the media. See there has been a safeguard around college athletes that the media don’t really go at them because they’re amateurs. Now you got media talking junk to college players because college players are making more than the media.
“And a lot of these collegiate athletes ain’t built like that to hear that. Because the first thing they do and we try to safeguard that, is at halftime, they go to checking the phone. ‘Yeah, what they say about me?’ You can’t live like that. It’s tough. They should be compensated, all of them in every sport. But what’s that mean? What does that look like?”
Sanders believes college athletes should be able to be compensated across all sports. But that still doesn’t mean the star football player should make the same as his teammate that gets rotational reps.
It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.
“Because I don’t believe that Tom should be making what Harry makes,” Sanders said. “Tom may not contribute what Harry doesn’t, but Tom needs to be compensated … If I give you something, I have an expectation. Now (if you’re not living up to that expectation), what do I do? So I should have some type of recourse if I’m breaking you off and blessing you and you ain’t doing nothing for it. Where do we go from there?”
Where does college football go from here? Like Sanders questioned, it’s a layered topic. With revenue sharing on the horizon, it begs the question of what programs continue to rise to the top and what it means for olympic sports.Heck, that’s why Klatt suggested separate governing bodies between football, basketball and women’s basketball and then putting non-revenue sports in their own category.
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