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Today, we are going to ask you to break out your laptops, or if your old school, your notepads and pens, because we are going to go into a short history lesson to try and make any type of sense of the insanity that has engulfed college athletics.
Truth is, insanity has always been a part of the college game. There have always been headlines that made you shake your head; instances that made you say, "That's not what college sports are supposed to be about."
We are saying that today over the 5 for 5 rule, which has sparked court cases here in West Virginia, as well as Mississippi, Colorado, Louisiana and likely will reach all 50 states before it's said and done.
Injunctions and restraining orders against the NCAA are being handed out like cold beers in the Blue Lot, all of them with the intention of giving athletes - some who had already dipped their toe into the professional world - one more year of college eligibility.
"I think it's crazy if you think a guy can sign a professional contract and he gets cut or he doesn't get what he wants to get and can go back to college," was the way WVU football coach Rich Rodriguez put it. "I mean, what are we doing here?"
In reality, what we've done in college athletics is take what used to be crazy and say, 'You know, we can actually ramp that up a notch or two if you give us enough time."
It was just 23 years ago - most of you will remember this - when former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett sued the NFL to allow him to enter the NFL Draft following his freshman season of college.
It was 39 years ago that SMU got hit with the NCAA's one and only "death penalty" for basically refusing to stop paying its football players even after it had already been caught and penalized for doing so.
We now have the benefit of time and hindsight. Through the introduction of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL), we have about 98% of Division I football schools essentially doing the same thing - and they don't even have to hide it - as what SMU was doing back in the day.
Clarett sued the NFL, because college athletes in those days had no legal NIL, and the only avenue to making some good coin was to go pro as fast as humanly possible.
Spending five years in college? Heck, Clarett wanted out after one.
That is insanity being topped by more insanity.
Around the same time as Clarett, college basketball was taking a big identity hit for the same reason that nobody wanted to be there. Guys who had good years at smaller schools didn't transfer to bigger ones the following season. Instead they just went pro.
Year after year, the early-entrant list for the NBA Draft ballooned up with guys who seriously had no business applying for the draft and college basketball became a sport that was won by teams who either had the most impactful one-and-done guys or simply had the best collection of leftovers you never heard of before.
Look how different it is now. You can't get guys out of college. They're suing for a fifth, sixth or even a seventh season of eligibility.
We all know why. The NFL rookie minimum is $885,000, meaning Arizona Cardinals quarterback Carson Beck is likely taking more than a 100% pay cut to be a NFL rookie compared to what he made while leading the Miami Hurricanes to the national title game last season.
The NCAA is begging the federal government to save it by passing the Protect College Sports Act, which would essentially put a cap on revenue sharing and limit the number of transfers an athlete can undergo, among so many other things.
This might be the greatest case of insanity topping insanity, because the last time the government got involved with the NCAA came in 1984, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 against the NCAA in the NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma case.
You may not be familiar with the case, but you know the results. That ruling basically ruled the NCAA was a monopoly and that the individual schools and conferences should be in charge of their TV rights rather than the NCAA.
From that sprang what you see today. The SEC and Big Ten making billions, as well as conference realignment and then more conference realignment.
WVU is in the Big 12 because of that ruling. USC and UCLA play conference games in the state of New Jersey because of that ruling.
So, if you believe the current state of affairs in college athletics is wacky or just flat-out stupid, history tells us you better buckle up, because we haven't seen anything yet.