After several failed attempts, Mark Cuban has finally reshaped college football.
With the assistance of billionaire Mark Cuban, Presidents of 46 former NCAA member universities struck a historic accord Wednesday night, forming their own governing body dubbed simply “The Alliance”. The move codifies what many have observed to be a shift towards treating popular athletic programs as profit centers.
The Alliance will be a semi-professional sports league involving former NCAA member institutions from the Football Bowl Subdivision. Play in new league is set to begin in 2012. The news came as a shock to college football fans as well as the administrations of many of the 74 remaining Bowl Subdivision schools left out.
“This is nothing but a blatant money-grab,” exclaimed Baylor University President Ken Starr. “We’ve made plenty of money playing by the same rules for over a hundred years, there no reason to De-amateurize.”
Reports later surfaced that the Baylor administration had been told that it was going to be the 47th team admitted to The Alliance up until the official announcement in an apparent attempt to keep the arrangement a secret.
"No, I do not see the hypocrisy in my earlier statement. I was merely looking out for my school's best interest," said Ken Starr (above) when reached for further comment.
The new league will operate under many of the same principles of the NCAA, with some major changes. Scholarships will still be given out as reward for players who wish to retain their amateur status, but contracts worth up to $200,000 per year will also be offered as an alternative.
“To be honest, I think most players will opt for the contracts” said Oklahoma Head Football Coach Bob Stoops. “Most of these kids I recruit don’t have any real desire to sit in class, and a few hundred thousand for a young kid out of high school is a big deal. Personally I don’t like it, but times are changing, and I think we have to face that. College football is about to look more like the NFL: Bigger, Faster and Dumber.”
The 46 member Alliance struck a closed door deal with ESPN which will reportedly boost revenue for member schools between $30 and 40 million dollars annually, in many cases tripling or even quadrupling current television rights revenues. Factoring in an average payroll of $50,000 per player and 100 players, the league set a salary cap of $5 million dollars per year, making the annual return on increased television revenue alone an astonishing 600%. Cuban claimed this was a major selling point for the Presidents in this statement released by his office:
“The point of The Alliance was for these schools sitting on billion dollar endowments to find an investment strategy that utilized their natural assets. The point I made was that if you’re Alabama or Oklahoma, why in the world would you be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in an increasingly weak stock market when you could invest that money into your sports programs and create massive returns. The only thing keeping these guys from tapping the full value of their football program are the silly self-imposed restrictions of the NCAA.” -Mark Cuban
When reached for comment, Cuban said he got the idea while listening to criticism of the former Bowl Championship Series, which had previously guaranteed certain conference champions a spot in lucrative high-payout bowl games. “I was sitting there listening to everyone pound on the BCS, claiming it was some sort of Cartel. I thought to myself, ‘Aren’t cartels supposed to make sure they take all the money off the table?’ No playoffs, hangers-on like Wake Forest and Northwestern getting undeserved cuts of the money, and a product where the value is unnecessarily hampered by self imposed rules? In business this is what we would call low hanging fruit.”
Cuban’s rhetoric certainly found the ear of school presidents, many of whom pledged to invest their personal funds into the effort in the event they couldn’t secure an investment from their school’s endowment.
This is a developing story, tune back to see a full list of Alliance schools as well as comment from NCAA president Mark Emmert. CorndogCountry will have more on this story as it develops.
