The Precarious Future Of College Athletics

The essential truth of the matter, as a gentleman of a certain academic bearing might observe over a glass of iced tea, is that modern collegiate athletics rests upon a delicate and perhaps unsustainable paradox. A university president like Joseph Harroz Jr. finds himself contemplating not a spectrum of possibilities, but a stark bifurcation.

There is Scenario A, a world of managed expectations and capped revenue sharing, where a semblance of the old order is preserved through a new, codified set of rules. A gentleman’s agreement, backed by antitrust lawyers. Then, there is its more feral cousin, Scenario B.

This second scenario is where the river of revenue, fed almost entirely by the mighty tributary of football, is allowed to flood its banks.

In this world, the polite fictions of amateurism are abandoned for a raw, untamed marketplace, and the concept of a "polluted" Name, Image, and Likeness landscape becomes the consuming fear. What, precisely, is a "polluted" NIL? Is it a salary? Is it a payment from a booster channeled, with a wink and a nod, through the institution?

The lines blur. The definitions fray at the edges, and that is the point of the worry. If football becomes an unregulated financial entity unto itself, what becomes of the hushed concentration of a gymnastics meet, the sharp crack of a softball bat on a warm spring evening, or the lonely endurance of the cross-country runner? These pursuits, which generate camaraderie and character but little cash, risk being washed away.

And here is the crux of the matter, the very heart of the quiet consternation in Norman. For men like Harroz, and for Randall Stephenson—a man who once steered the leviathan of AT&T and now finds himself contemplating the trajectory of a pigskin—the university is not merely a business.

It is a tapestry. They speak of college sports holding together the fabric of the country, a place blessedly free of red-versus-blue animus. It is the story of Patty Gasso’s softball dynasty, a recurring lesson in excellence that has captured the state’s imagination far beyond any balance sheet. It is the legacy of the women’s basketball program, the swimmers, the rowers.

These are not liabilities on a spreadsheet; they are threads in that tapestry, integral to the whole picture.

Of course, philosophy must eventually reckon with the abacus. The preservation of this ideal required a difficult, even painful, bit of arithmetic. Before one can ensure the viability of the whole athletic enterprise, the revenue-generating engines—football, and the two basketballs—must be in robust health.

This led to a somber necessity. A difficult calculus. Staff reductions in May. Five percent. A necessary pruning, they might say, to protect the roots of the entire garden. An unfortunate, but clear-eyed, triage to ensure that the patient survives the night.

So as the search commences for a successor to the long-tenured Joe Castiglione, the mandate is unusually complex.

The university does not simply need a fundraiser or a facilities manager. It requires a navigator, someone who can steer the ship of state between the Scylla of an unbridled marketplace and the Charybdis of financial insolvency. The next athletic director must be a person capable of championing the financial primacy of football while simultaneously understanding, in their very bones, why the synchronized splash of the diving team matters just as much to the soul of the institution.