Show Me The Money

College athletics is no longer in the place that it was supposed to be, not where it was meant to be. The Lane Kiffin saga has exposed the major problems that are plaguing college athletics. It is exposing both the hypocrisy and the ridiculousness of college sports. LSU is paying a football coach $91 million over 7 years. That feels ridiculous. People will argue, ‘these football programs bring in so much money to the universities, that it only makes sense to pay the best coaches these types of salaries, regardless of how it looks.’ If that is true, then it’s hypocritical.

Lane Kiffin left the University of Mississippi; he abandoned his team, in the middle of the season. It is not like he has not done this before. He abandoned Tennessee; he abandoned Alabama; he abandoned FAU, all during the season, all for greener pastures for himself. Always putting self over team. Where does he go to get his credibility back? How many times in his six years at Ole Miss did Kiffin stand in front of his team and preach about the importance of being a team? I’m sure he rolled out the old cliches like, ‘the name on the front is a hellava lot more important than the name on the back.’ Demanding that his players sublimate their egos, their personal goals and agenda to those of the team. ‘We are all in this together… You are not playing for yourself; you are playing for the man next to you.’ How many speeches did he give his team on the importance of loyalty to the team, loyalty to the man next to you? Isn’t that what intercollegiate sports was supposed to be all about? Building character. Developing young 18-year-olds into mature adults with the right values? 

Lane Kiffin violated everything that he pretended to teach his players the last six years. He just gave everyone in that Ole Miss locker room one big lesson – go after the money, put the self ahead of the team, personal character does not matter. How big the contract is the only thing that’s important. He will somehow find a way to justify what he did. He will convince himself that he still has a level of standing to teach the young men that he coaches about character and teamwork and loyalty, but you can’t preach and teach character if you don’t model character. You can say all the right words, but your words run hollow if they do not match your behavior.

It was almost hilarious that he had the audacity to try to leverage himself to be able to coach the remainder of the Ole Miss season while being under contract to coach their bitter rival. Kiffin said that his request to coach the rest of the season was “denied” by Ole Miss, as if they are the bad guys and he’s somehow is the victim. He chose to leave Ole Miss to go to LSU before the season was over. He’s not coaching the rest of Ole Miss’ season and their playoff run because of the choice that he made. Legendary college coach Nick Saban defended his former offensive coordinator when he said, “This is not a Lane Kiffin conundrum; This is a college football conundrum.” He went on to argue that “In the NFL, you cannot leave your team until you’re finished playing… There’s a defined time when you can talk to them if they’re in the playoffs. That’s the way it should be.” What Saban fails to mention is that the rule is for coordinators of playoff teams, not head coaches. It is unprecedented in the NFL for a head coach of a playoff team to leave to become a head coach of another NFL team.

Maybe the current rules created this difficult situation and difficult decision for Kiffin, but isn’t it the difficult situations and the difficult decisions when character is revealed. Hall of Fame coach Vince Lombardi once said, “football doesn’t build character, it reveals it.” Kiffin’s character has been fully revealed. Maybe he will win at LSU, maybe he’ll win a couple national championships there, but that will only serve to prove that in athletics today, character doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all about money and it’s all about talent. Nothing else. So, I wish these coaches would do us all a favor, and get off the soap box, stop blathering on and on about personal character and loyalty, because those things don’t mean a thing, especially coming from them whose actions rarely follow their words.

But Kiffin is just the symptom of the larger the problem. Those problems became exposed with the introduction of NIL. NIL was put in place to compensate the players for the work they put in and the revenue they produced for the school. But coupled with the transfer portal, NIL has turned into pay for play. The players are chasing the big bucks, leaving programs every year for bigger NIL deals, so why would it be wrong for a coach to chase the big bucks as well? Intercollegiate athletics is no longer teaching character; they are teaching greed. The coaches will get up on the podium after a big win and speak eloquently about an individual player’s character, and then a month later that same player will jump in the transfer portal chasing a half-million dollars more from another school. Now, the same people who screamed at the NCAA to pay players and loosen the restrictions on transferring are screaming at the NCAA to pass laws to fix all the problems that NIL and the transfer portal have created – the very problems the NCAA tried to avoid by limiting player pay and player movement. 

What’s getting lost in all of this is the mission of college – the antiquated belief that college is supposed to educate young adults. College sports has become like a company softball team. The company hires three former minor league baseball players part-time in their mail room, just so they can dominate the corporate softball league. They’re not real employees of the company just as college athletes are not real students of the University. Most of these players are majoring in eligibility, doing the bare minimum just to stay eligible. They take non-serious majors; they are given access to multiple tutors free of charge. They may be receiving college degrees, but they are not getting a college education.

The entire system is corrupt and compromised, and it’s not getting fixed because there’s too much money to be made. You can’t fix greed, you can’t fix lack of character, you can’t fix disloyalty with legislation. It doesn’t work that way. Whatever laws that could have been in put in place, Lane Kiffin and LSU would have found a way to circumvent them, because that’s what people like that do. That’s who they are. Remember, LSU sued their former Head Coach Brian Kelly to avoid paying him his $50 million buyout he was contractually owed after they fired him. They claimed that they never actually fired him when they did, so they went to court to try to fire him “for cause” to void their $50 million obligation to him. That’s what LSU is. That is what they are about. That is the school that just poached their rival’s head coach from them prior to them competing in the playoffs. And I’m not picking on LSU specifically, they like Lane Kiffin are a microcosm of the bigger problems with college athletics.

One of the main problems with college athletics is that too many people go crazy over it. On Sunday, there were grown men who went to the private airport in Oxford, Mississippi and shouted obscenities at Lane Kiffin as he walked from his limousine to the private jet that was about to take him to Baton Rouge. Grown men, with jobs, with a wife, with children, taking time out of their day to go shout obscenities at a football coach. So, everything is skewed in college sports. Everything is. It is taken way too seriously, and that’s why we have all these problems. But if we think about it, college football has become nothing more than minor league professional football masquerading as college football, monetizing the nostalgia of the more idyllic times of days gone by. The level of play is not much different than the USFL, which nobody watched on TV, and nobody went to their games. That is the level of play. The team that wins the National Championship this year would get slaughtered by the lowly Las Vegas Raiders of the NFL. They would. Over half of the NFL first-round draft picks every year turn out to be busts. Half of the players who had such stellar college careers that NFL teams decided to select them in the first round, can’t cut it in the NFL. This is minor league professional football. And we as a society are completely losing our minds over it.

It will never go back to what it was. It will never return to the place that made college sports so appealing and so worthwhile in the first place, a place where true student-athletes shined, not glorified minor league players. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle or the toothpaste back in the tube. This is what it is, and this is what it is going to be for the foreseeable future. There is no fixing it. And the further it goes down this road, the less interesting it becomes. In the whole sweep of things, who cares? Why does it matter?

Yes, the games are fun and exciting, but let’s stop pretending that college football is something different than it actually is. The whole concept of the student-athlete, at least on the Division One level, does not exist anymore. It’s a façade. It’s a lie. These are paid professionals. The “old college try” and “win one for the Gipper”, has been replaced by “show me the money”. That’s what it is. It’s solely about the money. And the institutions have lost their mission. They’re no longer about educating kids. They are more interested in generating revenue.

And that is not exclusive to college athletics. Colleges, in general, are no longer about educating students. They’ve gone in for the big money grab on all levels, compromising their academic standards and mission to grow their endowments. China has infiltrated many colleges and universities; Islam has as well, both giving tens of millions of dollars for a foothold in the process of molding the minds of our youth. And the universities, instead of protecting the students, and protecting the purity of the academics, went for the money grab. They sold out. They have become indoctrinating institutions bought and paid for by the far far-left, the CCP, and the Muslim brotherhood. It appears that the people who teach our youth about hating America and hating capitalism, sure as hell love to get their hands on money. They teach Marxism to their students while the institutions practice crony capitalism.

These institutions have become jokes. And nowadays, most students are not even doing their work; they are using ChatGPT so they’re not even being taught academic rigor. The diplomas they receive are not worth the paper they’re printed on. And they sure as hell are not worth $75,000 a year that many colleges are charging the non-athlete students. While we are losing our minds over Lane Kiffin, the Marxists and the Islamists are methodically taking over more and more of the institutions that were originally set in place to preserve and teach the values and principles that made our country great. That is why many of these colleges were overrun by anti-Jewish, pro-Palestine protests the last three years, and why Charlie Kirk was gunned down on a college campus this fall, and how a Marxist, Islamist like Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. But we love College Game Day, so we can ignore the destruction of America’s most vital institutions, and pretend that all is right with the world just as long as our team won on Saturday.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.