MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: With the NFL season starting tonight, all eyes of the people who care about football will be on the pros. But we're going to talk a bit about the college game, because it's undergone massive changes recently. Longtime sports journalist Armen Keteyian has a new book out with a provocative title. It's called "The Price: What It Takes To Win In College Football's Era Of Chaos," and he wrote it with John Talty. And Armen Keteyian is with us now to tell us more. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.
ARMEN KETEYIAN: Oh, you bet, Michel.
MARTIN: Why chaos?
KETEYIAN: Well, it's coming from every direction, because you have, obviously, NIL - name, image and likeness. You have the transfer portal, which is like free agency now in college sports. You have massive realignment. You have massive money moving into the sport, so you've kind of opened the devil's door there.
MARTIN: Well, let's just start with NIL, the name, image and likeness rules. Would you just, for people who don't follow this, describe the impact, in your view?
KETEYIAN: Well, it's been a monumental change. Name, image and likeness basically says that if you're a college athlete, you have now the rights to control your likeness. You can profit from it. For decades, the NCAA created these phrases - student athlete, amateurism - and the only reason they did it was to protect the association from workers' compensation claims and then to basically hold on to all the money. Well, in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled, nigh nothing, to say, in essence, that the NCAA was a cartel, and they were artificially suppressing wages of their labor force. When that door opened, now student athletes could go out, and they could make money on their likeness.
MARTIN: Yeah, in the same way that pros can. Like, they can do commercials. They can sell pictures of themselves, and so forth like that. And yeah.
KETEYIAN: The same way a musician can, if you're a college student, but athletes were not allowed to do that. And when the court ruled, it just threw the floodgates open. The problem was there was no system in place, and the NCAA just basically kind of threw their hands up and said, well, we're going to figure this out.
MARTIN: You have a story in the book about Taulia Tagovailoa, the former quarterback at the University of Maryland. You write about how he approached his coach before one of the team's postseason bowl games and demanded tens of thousands of dollars to play. And I know that many people might think that that's shocking, but you source it in the book. You say in the book how you know this stuff. How is that OK?
KETEYIAN: Well, that's the state of the game now, Michel. Mike Locksley found himself in this unenviable position - the head coach at Maryland - and Coach Locksley had to go out and scramble to find tens of thousands of dollars, not only for Taulia, but for a couple other players who had come in before a bowl game. What is that? Is that legalized extortion? Yeah, you could argue that's what it is.
MARTIN: You know, it used to be that marquee players might have gotten paid under the table. Now it's out in the open. Coaches get these huge salaries, and they transfer all the time - and, you know, oh, by the way, they're not the ones getting hit. And the schools get these big TV checks, right? So I think people have looked at that and have said, well, why is that chaos? Why isn't that just fair?
KETEYIAN: Oh, I think it is fair. And I think if you think about a proverb, you reap what you sow. The problem now is it's just open season. And Charlie Baker, who is the new president of the NCAA - and, as someone said to me, he's either going to be the best president or he's going to be the last president - he's been trying to put together a framework for some sort of system where everybody kind of knows what the rules are. Right now, there are no rules. And when that happens, the two things that are really driving college football right now - and they're not great - it's wanton greed and complete self-interest. And so I think if you're trying to figure out what the future of college football's going to look like, I don't think anybody knows right now. That crystal ball is really cloudy. It could be catastrophic in a lot of ways, particularly to the nonrevenue sports, as these schools try to figure out how they're going to balance their budgets.
MARTIN: Armen Keteyian's new book, with co-author John Talty, is called "The Price: What It Takes To Win In College Football's Era Of Chaos." Armen, thank you so much for talking with us.
KETEYIAN: Thank you so much, Michel. Good talking to you again. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
