Todd Golden Gives His Opinion on NCAA Creating a CBA

College basketball and college football, specifically, have gotten a bit out of hand. While the University of Florida benefits from that because it can put up just as much NIL money as any other school in the country, relatively speaking, that doesn't mean it's not having an impact on universities like Florida. 

Florida still has to manage its NIL budget, find donors, up prices because of how much these guys are making now, and many other things.

Some also believe that it's killing college sports. Attendance numbers are down around college sports, it's tougher for fans to get into things when they don't know many players because of how many of them leave in the transfer portal, and other tough realities of what's really going on behind the scenes.

As Florida gets prepared to take on Merrimack on Friday night, we're going to see a big discrepancy in talent because of the lack of NIL that Merrimack has compared to a school like Florida. 

A Metro school is never going to be able to do anything close to what Florida can in terms of NIL money, but that also poses the question of whether college basketball and college athletics in general need some sort of CBA.

The NCAA is supposed to have rules in place that can make things make sense, but the NCAA clearly hasn't been able to do that. 

Regarding a potential CBA, that's where things would get very challenging, even more so than they already are. Speaking to reporters about whether that's ever a possibility, Florida head coach Todd Golden had some really interesting thoughts about it.

"Yeah, I don't get it because they're not employees, and as far as I know, there's no collective bargaining that can go on in this setting. There's big picture-wise, there are solutions, but it would take a complete kind of reorg of what college athletics is right now, and I'm just not sure people are willing to do that. I think a lot of these ideas, collective bargaining caps, all these things are, in practice and theory makes sense, but how are we going to really execute that with the way the landscape is right now? We have to crawl before we run on the solutions,” Golden said, per 247.

“I think that's something that's way down the road, and we have to figure out how to solve the problems that we have now before we get to collective bargaining. We got to figure out: are these guys going to be employees? Are they not? And if they're not, how are we going to continue to support them financially?"

If I were a coach like Golden who knows that he has just as much money as any other program in the country, I really wouldn't want much to change. 

For the university's sake, Florida likely doesn't want to spend as much money as it has to to have an elite basketball team, but it's really just the price of college sports nowadays. I'll be interested to see if a CBA or anything similar ever comes into effect, but the chances of it happening seem very low.