Like ACC Officiating, this spending topic comes up every season and I link to old posts that show A. Officiating Bias Exists and B. There is an easy fix to this and paying players:
https://www.canesinsight.com/threads/where-is-college-football-headed.138980/page-2
1. Athletic Department spending caps on a per sport basis, set to allow competitive balance and sufficiency (rising propotionally to inflation each year) You get a set amount, so you have to decide how much you pay assistant coaches per annum, how much you pay for recruiting expenses per annum, how much of a new head coach will cost in the out years...Skill, as opposed to bigger schools outspending smaller schools being the deciding factor in championships. Sure, you still will have the taxpayer giving state schools an advantage in real property and pensions, but at least a lot more balanced then what happens now.
2. With spending capped to less of an insane level, the conferences will take a large share of their TV money and set it aside to provide a post-playing career annuity to college athletes, with annuity value set by each relative sports revenue (Title IX may force a minimum). If an athlete passes before the athlete receives his full annuity, his/her beneficiary gets it. This way you keep the intrinsic student-athlete value that straight pay destroys, while compensating the athlete appropriately for the revenue thay have generated.
3. Because of the Athletic Department spending caps being universal in CFB, teams don't need to spend all of their conference share, so the conferences keep the TV/merchandise excess revenue and use it to fund the annuity, on a CFB-wide universal scale. If Conference A has more money than Conference B after the annuity payouts, the remaining money is then evenly divided between Conference A's member schools NON-athletic scholarship funds.
All you have to have is leadership...Marky Mark Emmert, John Swofford,Jim Delaney and Greg Sankey like the status quo, even if it kills the sport in the end.
