Warnings about college athletics’ dire future have been heard before

In the first half of the 1900s, it was the issue of whether colleges should award athletic scholarships.

“If our college athletics ever become primarily professional in character, then indeed they will be on the way out,” John L. Griffith, former president of the NCAA and the Big Ten’s first commissioner, said at the NCAA convention in 1937.

At the same event a year later, then-University of Pittsburgh chancellor John Bowman said that while it was not a sin to pay for someone to go to college, The United Press reported, “It is a sin, so to speak, to pay him to go to college to play a sport for that college.”

Bowman went on to say that the practice of putting players on scholarship “will kill the game.”

One wonders what a time-traveling Bowman would think of his prediction as he watched his sinful university’s football team somehow defying his death sentence nine decades later.

In the 1970s, Title IX was supposed to ruin college athletics. By compelling athletic departments to provide equal opportunity in sports, the institution’s survival supposedly was being threatened.

A Boston Globe story in 1975 reported the fears that, for example, if Harvard sent a men’s crew team to a regatta, it also would be compelled to send a women’s team to the same event.

Wrote the Globe: “That kind of talk terrifies major conference ADs, who often have to finance entire budgets from football-basketball income. Unless revenue-producing sports are excluded, they warn, the entire intercollegiate athletic structure will be destroyed.”

And yet somehow football and men’s basketball not only have survived but also have achieved popularity and revenue that might have been unimaginable then. Imagine how women’s sports in this country would have been affected if that boys club, panicked over having to share their toys, had been listened to.

Here’s another gem from the same article: “A number of people at places like Maryland and Indiana and Tulane and Oklahoma feel that it’s also being designed to wipe out their football and basketball programs. …”

Congratulations to those people. They saw right through Title IX advocates. Under the guise of seeking to be treated fairly, those conniving women played the long game and, after decades of conspiring, pulled the strings to ensure that Brent Venables someday became the Sooners football coach.

Move forward to 2014 and the landmark Ed O’Bannon class action, filed on behalf of the former UCLA basketball star on the grounds that college athletes should be compensated for the use of their name, image and likeness.

Mark Emmert, then the NCAA president, testified that schools wouldn’t tolerate athletes becoming professionals.

From a CNN report:

“Emmert said officials at several member schools have told him that if athletes were to start getting paid beyond the cost of attendance, institutions would ditch Division I sports and opt for Division II or III, in which coach’s salaries, stadiums, hype and scholarships are much smaller.”

Emmert made $4.3 million in the final year of his disastrous tenure. Crying wolf never paid so well.

In that scope, here’s the funny thing about the landscape that college athletics is entering. It’s not difficult to think that this actually will drastically change the enterprise, potentially for the worse.

The schools with the resources to pay athletes will separate themselves even further from those that don’t. The added cost of the payments puts the future of nonrevenue sports in peril.

With scholarship limits being replaced by roster caps and permission for schools to fill as many of those spots with scholarship athletes as their budgets will allow, the future of walk-ons is threatened, particularly in football.

The transfer portal remains wide open. And lawsuits that challenge the salary cap’s legality most surely are coming on the grounds that it’s an artificial limit on compensation and that funneling most of the money to football and men’s basketball is a Title IX violation.

Other lawsuits will contend that four years of eligibility — or even five — is an unfair practice.

The settlement established a clearinghouse that will vet name, image and likeness deals made outside of their athletic departments to determine if they’re fair-market value or merely pay-for-play arrangements from boosters.

Good luck with that.

State lawmakers continue to author laws to help the universities in their state circumvent the House settlement’s framework.

The Big Ten and SEC have turned the College Football Playoff into their own cash machine. The power conferences could split off from the NCAA.

“In some ways, this might get worse before it gets better, just in terms of the additional lawsuits that will be filed and the challenges to the clearinghouse, Title IX issues, the impact on employment status and then what the next state decides to do,” Tulane sports law professor Gabe Feldman told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

This could indeed be the change that endangers a beloved American institution.

But you can be excused for hearing cries of wolf.