AHC: Prevent College Basketball & Football From Becoming The Semi-Professional Game They Are No

Or try to figure out SOME way to make these
sports what they’re supposed to be: small-
time affairs which really are played by coll-
ege students in their spare time(instead of what we have now: huge monstrosities,
belching $, played by semi-professional mer-
canaries who, from time to time, may wan-
der into a class or two). (OK, I’m exagg-
erating- but I would still say that this des-
cription is more true than false). I know that
most likely this is ASB- if anything seems in-
evitable it’s how college basketball & foot-
ball developed- but my fellow posters, do what you can!

P.S. I’m NOT someone who hates sports!
On the contrary- I LOVE college BB & FB.
I prefer them(especially the former)to their
professional counterparts. I’m a dyed-in-the
-wool fan of BB & FB @ UC Berkeley, my
alma mater(I’d just about DIE to see Cal actually play in the Rose Bowl!!) But intell-
ectually it seems more & more apparent(if painful)to me that there is simply no just-
infication for what college sports have be-
come(there is just so much wrong with it, so
many abuses) *Sigh*
 
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Do what most sports do in Europe and just make all clubs have academies and so college basketball is just a sideshow and the future pro's play for club youth teams
 
Though ESPN in the early days, if I remember, televised some college baseball, it is not the draw that others are because of the minor leagues.

The shortness of the season and playing one game per week, plus injuries and other factors, make this hard for football. Practice squads seem to be easier.

However, in the early days of the NBA you could very easily develop a minor league system. Yes, the CBA was something like that, but that was just one League. However, get an entrepreneur to start some leagues in inner-city areas, and with just 12 players or so needed on a roster you might be able to develop it and easily allowed those players to be working jobs when they aren't playing. The CBA would be like a AAA League like the international league, whereas smaller leagues would be in areas where basketball is really popular like Indiana Oh, North Carolina, and so on. As well as the inner cities.

This would eliminate the need for a pipeline from college and draw those who would normally go to college to the miners. Yes, you might see a Larry Bird occasionally go to college but you see College players go from college to the majors now.

On the other end, with fewer really good players keep the NCAA tournament from expanding so wildly. I remember when it went from 48 to 64 teams when I was growing up and people thought it was insane. There might be a way to keep it at a sweet 16, perhaps because conferences become very possessive of that one or possibly two berths. Perhaps the NIT retains its power as another tournament.

Basketball is a relatively easy sport to do this with because you don't need huge arenas for your Minor League games. There is not nearly the overhead when you don't have that many players and it can almost seem like a semi pro team League at the lowest rung. Once you siphon enough talent out of college or keep it from coming in the sixties and seventies, you eliminate a lot of interest.

Editing and inserting here to say I was Ninja'd on the minor league thing though I give more specifics, but also thinking that this would have been a very interesting thing to pursue in that Selma Massacre collaborative timeline we did, after the all black starting five of West Texas won the NCAA tournament in 1966 in that timeline as well as our timeline. It would have been an interesting reaction by schools which did not want to let that continue, urging their basketball players to go to the minors and even setting minor leagues up.

However, football requires rosters four times the size and a lot more overhead, meaning I don't think you can keep college football from becoming dominant with the same measures. On the contrary, college football was way more popular than the pros till around the time the AFL came around.
 
Or . . . really roll with veterans going to school post-WWII on the GI Bill of Rights. This was a sea change with a lot of universities doubling their admissions or even more.

And yes, more total students mean more sports fans, but since these are somewhat older persons who often ended up being more serious students and/or were married or had families, the percentage of students who are big sports fans may be quite a bit lower.
 
The problem is that the college game is developed way before the professional game is, the NFL is started in the 1920's and the NBA begins in 1949 and they do not become stable leagues until the television money kicks in.
Contrast that to baseball and hockey where they both started out on the club level and evolved into professional leagues where the college level is basically an afterthought.
What is considered to be the first football game in the United States was between Rutgers and Princeton University in 1869.
 
There is always the Ivy League approach, the Ivy League prohibited athletic scholarships and post season play for football in 1945 and that could have been extended to other sports.
 
Maybe salary cap on college coaches?

Reducing the yearly income potential of college coaches from the what- 7 figures in the case of mega coaches to that of senior professors (still in the low 6 figures). This could produce a talent pool of skilled coaches willing to partner with minor league entrepreneurs capable of paying low to mid 6 figure salaries for coaching talent.

As minor leagues develop, they start to attract skilled would be Division 1 college players more interested in real pay checks (probably capping out at say 300K) than going to college.

College interest among these players further declines as "degree glut / degree inflation" grips the nation. Most college degrees no longer lead to immediate rewards income wise. A growing number don't necessarily lead to any financial rewards. Minor leagues attract even more skilled players wanting salaries which further moves college ball towards the " good, but not great part timers having fun" level.

As a side note, two minor league football groups will debut in the next two years. One is well funded. Their business model seems to be; Offer 80% of the NFL product at 33% of the cost- the same ratio that the Soviets and now Russians sell weapons at. Degree glut / inflation has reduced college appeal nationwide, thus the potential of willing salary defectors from NCAA football. Add the possibility of an over confident NFL and new technologies that may allow televised games beyond the grasp of the strange NFL- FCC uhmm... "relationship" and who knows what the future can bring.... .
 
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