Goodman: Dancing into college football’s glorious ‘disaster’

On the final day of SEC Media Days, Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin closed it all down by calling the current state of college football a “disaster.”

The four-day event in Nashville began with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey wanting everyone to understand that college football needs some kind of emergency act of Congress to save the sport from impending doom.

What’s wrong with college football? Well, it’s all a matter of perspective. Consider the current state of the SEC’s expanding empire.

In between Kiffin’s dire rhetoric and sky-is-falling Sankey, the SEC had enough money and power to shut down the main thoroughfare in the middle of Nashville’s busy entertainment hub for a concert to celebrate the media members who cover and promote the league. It was a massive flex, or at least it was going to be.

The stage for the concert took two days to build. Truly, I was honored by the gesture.

“Thank you to Regions Bank and to the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation for making that concert possible,” Sankey said on Monday. “It’s a huge stage and one of those vision points we’re excited to realize.”

Vision point? Hmmm.

Imagine, for a painful moment, a couple hundred pudgy sports nerds dancing to country music in the middle of Broadway Street in Nashville. Vision point? Music City might never have recovered from witnessing a party of that epic magnitude.

Broadway Street, that beautiful stretch of Southern Americana dedicated to live music and debauchery, was saved, in the end, from my various signature dance moves that pretty much all resemble Category 10 medical emergencies. Unfortunately for the dorks like me — and maybe, perhaps, thankfully for everyone else — a thunderstorm on Tuesday night forced the SEC to cancel the show at the last minute.

Next year in Dallas, when SEC Media Days heads west to welcome Texas and Oklahoma into the conference, I’ll be sure to wear a brand new cowboy hat and chaps to the kickoff rodeo.

SEC Media Days are over and so now it’s almost time for us to shift our focus to the preseason. Before moving into the frightening beyond, a proper amount of reflection might be considered useful for a few people wondering what the fuss was all about up in Nashville.

What’s wrong with college football? This is going to sound counterintuitive for some, but it’s quite possible that the sport has too much money and not enough good sense.

A brief history lesson:

College football teams began forming conferences more than a century ago for the explicit purpose of regulating a sport that was growing too quickly. A lot of schools, including Alabama, considered ending football. The biggest perceived problem back then was — guess what?! — players being paid to play. College was for learning, demanded the university presidents.

The formation of conferences, it can be argued, saved college football. Then along came the TV and priorities eventually shifted.

The existential crisis facing college football in its current form is now this. The conferences exist to make huge amounts of money and the SEC is about to add two of the biggest brands in the sport, Texas and Oklahoma.

As Kiffin quipped during his opening statement on Thursday, “Hats off to the commissioner for getting that done and making it the super conference of all time.”

Away from the cameras, the NCAA Division I Council recently proposed something pretty curious in reaction to college football’s new reality. It wants to increase the price from moving from the FCS level to the FBS level from $5,000 to $5 million. That’s a pretty good numerical illustration of just how much major college football is about to change. Why did the council do it? Well, I can guarantee you that it wasn’t for the stated reason of protecting the scholarships of college athletes.

What’s coming for college football as we peer into the future? A lot of problems? Meh. If making tons of money is a problem, then major college football is about to be in really big trouble. The sport is already rich, but billions of dollars more will soon be flooding into universities when the College Football Playoff expands in 2024 to 12 teams.

This is probably just the beginning of expansion for the CFP, by the way. Why cap it at four and then 12 and then 16 and then 24? Why not expand it to 24 all at once? Because every single time that the playoff expands it’s going to represent an enormous payday from the networks. Just a prediction.

SEC Media Days in its current form is an exercise in over-produced coach-speak for the sake of summer programming on the SEC Network. Coaches generally don’t want to say anything remotely interesting. Then there is Kiffin, God bless him. Ole Miss’ controversial coach offered up a rationale for why the NCAA is seeking help from Congress to fix a mess it created.

Kiffin believes that college football’s current economy is negatively affecting the overall health of the sport. College football players finally being paid above board for their services isn’t the problem. Kiffin’s big complaint is that big-money boosters of college teams now have too much influence on the procurement of talent for teams they support.

On top of that, Kiffin noted, some state governments are now taking things a step further.

“And now we are adding some states that you don’t have to follow the NCAA, and now the university can take their money and give it to the collective to give it to the players,” Kiffin said. “So now we really have pay-for-play — that the biggest schools with the most donors, most aggressive, and the school wants to spend the most money paying the players to play to come to their school, is where we are with that.”

Kiffin’s job description might be evolving based on these changes, but that doesn’t mean college football is going to suddenly implode because players continue making more and more money. Is Sankey correct about college football as we know it heading for a cliff? Maybe so, but the runaway stagecoach is about to crash into a canyon of gold.

History tells us that college football will be fine, and here’s the reason why. It’s not because of the coaches, or the players, or the commissioners, or the networks, or the reporters, or the politicians, or the conferences. All of those spokes are important to the wheel but the road to the stadium is paved with fans.

College football is a uniquely American endeavor and it has always adapted to the times. The sport is adjusting once again based upon the obscene levels of fan support for this game. College football’s current dilemma? Fans love it too much.

Something tells me everything is going to be OK.

On the second day of September, a sellout crowd is going to cram into Bryant-Denny Stadium for a predetermined exhibition between Middle Tennessee State and Alabama. The stadium seats more than 100,000 people. That’s over twice the capacity of the Roman Colosseum.

Then comes Texas, and that’s when the real fun begins. The only disaster for college football on that day will be if Texas super fan Matthew McConaughey doesn’t bring Sankey a new cowboy hat.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama”, a book about togetherness, hope and rum. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.