It's a dark day, but perhaps the Huskies' loss will be the rest of the sports gain.
The Demond Williams Jr. situation is a really unfortunate one for the University of Washington, and for the Big Ten. It's a dark situation for the sport of college football and for the NCAA as whole.
The only hope now is that it eventually leads to some good.
How we get there is anyone's guess, but we have to get there. Because of NIL, the transfer portal and seemingly lawless nature of college sports, fans are becoming more disconnected from the sport. You don't know who's going to be on your favorite team from year-to-year, and that's a frustrating position to be in. Fan resentment or discontent is not good for anyone.
It's also not good for coaches and programs to not know who will be on your team the following year, with each year representing a potential mass exodus that can cripple your program.
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How the Williams situation can spur change
There's any number of ways, ranging from rolling things back closer to how they used to be, to pushing the sport even closer to professionalism. Again, we just have to get to a place where the sport is being governed and run in a universal way - and where everyone respects it.
Perhaps the Williams situation leads to a world where the players are all in a union and there's a collective bargaining agreement and contracts actually mean something. Perhaps it leads to a world where each player needs to have a registered and verified agent who knows how to act, as opposed to just a family advisor who has the ability to torpedo the whole system.
Perhaps athletes should have to sit out a year when they transfer, like they used to, which would help limit some of the mobility. Perhaps there should be an earnings cap on how much a player can make in NIL, or perhaps NIL should be used for what it was intended for and not just as a player salary and 'pay for play' incentive.
That's for someone smarter than me to figure out, but what's obvious is that the current system is broken.
It's broken for players, many of whom get left out in the dust in the transfer portal, and it's broken for programs who sometimes lose most of their roster one year to the next, and it's broken for the fans, who are left rooting for a team from Sept.-Jan., and then who are unsure of who they'll be rooting for in the next season.
The Williams situation has showed the underbelly of this new world of college sports. Here's hoping it can also help rectify the situation before it's too late.
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