The product that College Football is putting on the field right now is as good as it has ever been while the product off the field is a complete and total disaster.
The quarterfinal round of the College Football Playoff was a refreshing reminder of how great College Football can be. The weekend got off to a great start when Ohio State battled the Miami Hurricanes down to the wire in a game that Miami pulled out at the end.
Then, Saturday afternoon started with an Oregon beatdown against the Texas Tech Red Raiders, followed by an Indiana drubbing of the Alabama Crimson Tide in the Rose Bowl. Those two games were a bit of a sleeper, but they set the stage for one of the greatest football games of the current College Football Playoff era.
Everyone shut their eyes on New Year's Day, thinking about how great college football is. Then they woke up on Jan 2nd, and they were reminded how nasty College Football is right now.
The transfer portal opened on Jan 2nd and chaos ensued.
By midday, there were over 4,500 Division 1 players in the transfer portal. That is not a typo; there were over four thousand and five hundred players that were in the transfer portal by the middle of the first day that it was open.
For reference, there are 136 teams in Division 1 FBS and 128 in Division 1 FCS, and if teams average 100 players on their roster, there are roughly 26,400 players in Division 1 College Football. That means that 17 percent of all players were transferring this offseason.
Money, cars, empty promises, one-year deals, lawsuits, tampering, non-contact tags, and a whole lot of empty promises are being thrown around, and it is simply so bad for the sport of football.
My biggest problem is not the money at all. College Football players deserve the money; they bring in so much for their universities, but the game they are playing right now is not real life. This transfer portal world is simply a fairy tale land that has so little realism.
When these kids graduate and go into the real world, there is no such thing as a transfer portal. If they go into business and they don't like their position and they decide to quit, good luck finding a new job.
If they go into the NFL, there are these things called contracts that they must abide by in order to earn their money.
There is no place in the real world. The reality of college football is hardly a reality; it is a fake, made-up world, and the only people who get harmed are the kids.
It is a constant reminder from now until January 16th that no matter how good the product is on the field, the product in College Football off the field is a complete disaster, and fixing it will be no easy task.