I'm not talking about right or wrong here. When it comes to college sports I'm not righteous enough to feel like I know what is right or wrong.
As I established with a previous post on this thread - not that I expect you to have memorized my practically incoherent ramblings - I feel like there's a cognitive dissonance we all agree to with college sports being a multibillion dollar entertainment enterprise within academic institutions that fundamentally I'm uncomfortable with. My ideal world would put the genie back in the bottle in ways that aren't practical, where there's an oppressive overarching organization that negotiates the television contract for all college teams, evenly distributes the revenue, heavily enforces no payments to athletes, NIL or otherwise, colleges have much smaller athletic budgets than they do currently, and there are professional options in each sport if athletes want to go that route.
I don't think NIL propels college athletics forward in productive ways, personally. It's a mess. It's basically impossible to enforce. It further separates the haves from the have nots. But as a fan of a have, it certainly benefits my fandom. So if this is going to be how we move forward, I'm thrilled Texas is exploiting it as much as possible.
I don't blame O'Bannon in any which way. It's absolutely against the Sherman Act, so it's tough to see where the Supreme Court went wrong on a 9-0 blistering unanimous decision. We can blame the NCAA, but I'm not sure what they were supposed to do to get ahead of something I don't think there's any way to implement in a way that wouldn't be tossed out. Congress hasn't been in a position to act on college athletics for at least a decade, if not longer. Maybe work harder to get something passed in 1984 after the Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA negotiating television contracts? But I don't think that would have resulted in anything the average fan wanted to see whether it would have been good for my personal model of college sports or not.
But I'm not thankful for O'Bannon, that's for sure. And it could have been a comment you were making to a general audience, but you made it as a reply to me, and so I responded in kind. I'm not mad at you, O'Bannon, the Supreme Court, the NCAA, or any of the individual actors who have led us down this path. I'm just an old man who doesn't like the direction things are going in and see it as unsustainable, but I'm too busy railing at kids to get off my front lawn to do anything about it.