Tim Benz: A Super League with NFL ties? Power conference CBAs? Many paths still uncertain for college athletes

The latest forecast of what could become the college sports landscape came last week from Yahoo.com’s Ross Dellenger.

He outlined the prospect of a compensation model for power schools of $300 million each over the next decade via a $17 million- to $22 million-per-year revenue distribution cap for athletes.

That news came on the heels of last month’s story in The Athletic that a batch of college presidents and administrators are working with big-business executives, pro sports owners and NFL officials to “implement a drastically new system that would replace the NCAA and the College Football Playoff.”

Affectionately (and somewhat imposingly), it’s being dubbed “Super League.”

Regardless of how things move forward, whatever scraps remain of the concept of amateurism are quickly dissolving.

Frankly, the time for mourning that eventuality should’ve ended a long time ago — if it were ever worth such tears in the first place.

For those who still have a romantic attachment to the idea of college kids playing multibillion-dollar-revenue-generating sports just for the glory of Good Ol’ State U, maybe such a construct could have remained had the NCAA been less greedy when revenue sharing and the seeds of name, image and likeness were planted a few decades ago.

“A lot of this is the NCAA strategy backfiring,” Sportico sports legal analyst Michael McCann told me during a recent “Breakfast With Benz” podcast. “By resisting what were really modest changes — allowing players to get endorsement deals just like anyone else, just like their classmates who are actors, or who do e-sports … they took unreasonable positions.”

From there, the legal system took over.

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“It really led courts to be very skeptical,” McCann continued. “(The NCAA) seemed exploitative, and that incentivized a lot of smart lawyers to take on cases to challenge all these NCAA rules. And we’re now seeing those efforts bear fruit. The NCAA, I would say, is really not in control. It’s really a legal process that’s going to dictate how all this shakes out.”

The legal pendulum has swung so far in the other directionagainst the NCAA that its role in governing college sports and its very existence are coming into question. Especially if the Super League idea takes off and the NFL figures out a way to sink its hooks into college football. That would make the game into the NFL’s revenue-generating minor league, thus cutting off what is the main income source for every other NCAA sport.

“I don’t think the NCAA will go away per se. … They have a lot of money, and they’re good at running the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, and they have some other things that they do,” McCann said.

“But I think what we’ll see is the major conferences take over and do their own thing and create their own rules — have athletes who are employees and have them be able to get paid and (receive) other benefits. Then I think smaller conferences, smaller schools will probably still see something akin to what we have now.”

The tribulations of the NCAA and college sports administrators have come with much fanfareand celebration from the masses online and within the sports media. After all, there is nothing more enjoyable than seeing a greedy, monolithic, duplicitous, heavy-handed embodiment of misappropriating governance collapse upon itself while the poor, downtrodden, hardworking student-athletes are finally getting their pennies on the dollar.

Now all sorts of doors are open for those kids. Because when I think of greedy, monolithic, duplicitous, heavy-handed embodiments of misappropriating governance, obviously the last thing in the world I think of is … the NFL.

Hmmm. Um, wait a minute.

Yeah, that’s an angle no one seems to want to talk about, particularly on the college football front. Does the phrase “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” mean anything to anybody?

Whether we’re talking about the Super League model (presumably with some sort of NFL oversight) or the major conferences starting their own leagues, what we’re ostensibly discussing at that point is a collectively bargained agreement (or agreements) between unionized players and “management” of college football.

Whoever that may be.

“The area of law that’s destroying the NCAA is antitrust law,” McCann explained. “To the extent the NCAA — and more broadly, colleges that have athletic programs — can avoid antitrust scrutiny, the better and the easiest path is the one they don’t want. But it’s also the one that solves a lot of their problems. It’s through players being employees and unionizing and entering into labor agreements.”

While being a student-athlete under the old-fashioned regulations of the NCAA was never fair, ask the NFL Players Association how enjoyable it is to go through collective bargaining negotiations, revenue-sharing discussions, television broadcast distributions and matters of discipline and roster construction with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Does that sound like a good time to anyone?

Whatever collective bargaining agreement may be struck with the NFL, the power conferences and/or the NCAA, it is likely to face the same hurdles for whatever hypothetical “student-athlete union” gets formed — especially if Goodell’s negotiators are on the other side of the table.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But, hey, at least now they’ll be paid in a streamlined manner.

As much as they think they deserve? Probably not.

With more money getting siphoned off to other sports to fulfill Title IX regulations than they prefer? Probably.

With less transfer freedom than they have just fought so hard to open up? Once a CBA gets put into place, yeah, perhaps.

In other words, even though we may be taking the “college” out of “college football,” there is still some education to be had for these student-athletes.

One important lesson that needs to be learned is that, for as much as they have been told in recent years to embrace the notion that they are their own corporations and that they are no longer beholden to the same archaic rules that the NCAA had in place, somebody still gets to be in charge.

And it’s not them.

Some basic Economics 101 stuff is taking place here. Unless you are making your own money, somebody is paying you. And so long as you are making that money in a team sport, you aren’t going to be self-employed.

Then, once we start seeing unions, CBAs and salary caps in college sports, the always overdramatized narrative of the exploited All-American SEC linebacker who allegedly can’t afford a slice of pizza in the dorm room after practice is going to start falling on deaf ears.

Everyone wanted the Wild West for college sports because the NCAA held on too strong for too long.

Fair enough. That’s bubbling up now.

But if the new sheriff walks in and his name is Goodell, don’t expect the grip to loosen all that much.

Listen: Sportico sports legal expert Michael McCann describes some of twists and turns we may see soon along the uncertain path of college sports.