Lane Kiffin, a former Eagles undrafted free agent, and a fitting episode for our times in college sports

Maybe the best thing that can happen to college sports’ integrity is everything that is happening to its integrity right now. It would be ironic, in a way. The NCAA and its member institutions are where they are because they spent decades adhering to a policy of inertia. Only now does it look like a viable strategy, after their world is already burning around them. Sometimes, in order to gain back what was lost, one must lose what little remains.

Very little remains. Let’s be clear about that. That was true even before last weekend’s news that former Eagles undrafted rookie free agent Dae’Quan Wright was planning on returning to the college ranks after being waived by the Browns. In fact, the hand-wringing that has accompanied the tight end’s reported agreement with LSU is mostly an admission of naiveté or ignorance on the part of the hand-wringers.

The NCAA is more than a decade into a series of logical premises and conclusions that was always going to lead power conferences like the SEC and Big Ten to where they are right now. The university presidents who operate behind the NCAA’s bureaucratic anonymity chose this path when they allowed the almighty dollar of television contracts and the vanity of a news cycle monopoly to become the primary goal of collegiate sports rather than sports played by, for, and among collegiates. They are living in a reductio ad absurdum of their own creation.

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The best thing any of us can do for our sanity is to lean back and enjoy watching them lose theirs. It no longer makes sense to react to each development as if university athletic departments are tethered to some sort of ethical baseline that sets them apart from any other major professional sports organization. They pulled up that anchor long ago. The ship has sailed.

Frankly, the idea of an undrafted athlete moving from the bottom of an NFL training camp roster to a college football starting lineup pales in comparison to the legion of current college football starters who are making bigger bank than they would as NFL players on rookie contracts. The average Power 4 quarterback is currently signed to a name, image, and likeness deal worth $3.1 million, according to Sportico. It always made sense that there would come a day when a player would ask out of a contract from the Browns for a more competitive offer funded by Big Willy’s Jeep-Chevy of Baton Rouge. That’s the way NIL was always going to work.

The ridiculousness is the real sport, now. We should treat it as such. For years, the NCAA chose to address the logical implications of its profit drive with a weird and counterintuitive combination of hope, avoidance, and authoritarian dictates. They fully recognized that the genie would one day escape the bottle. Now, they’re left to hope that Ja’Marr Chase and Joe Burrow already have plans for their bye week, when LSU plays Mississippi State.

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Lane Kiffin’s central role in the latest lunacy is fitting. College football’s Kendall Roy has spent the early part of this week channeling the exact sort of ends-based nihilism so sublimely satirized by HBO’s Succession. He did the same last year when he left his Ole Miss team on the eve of the college playoffs in order to sign a mega contract with LSU. Nick Saban, his former boss at Alabama, leveraged the full power of the media-sports industrial complex to absolve him of responsibility.

“We need to take a better approach to the business aspect of what we do in college athletics,” Saban said on ESPN’s pregame studio show after Kiffin left Ole Miss. “In the NFL, you can’t leave your team until you are finished playing. You can’t talk to another coach in the regular season. There’s a defined time when you can talk to them if they are in the playoffs. We should match the academic calendar with the football calendar.”

Well, yeah. You should. But there are a whole lot of competing self-interests standing between ought and is. Like any system, it is first and foremost a reflection of those who agree to its framework. Major college football has become nothing more than Boar on the Floor in pads. Any television news segment on NCAA should conclude with a clip of Logan Roy smirking at all the piggies at the trough.

“In general, should NFL players come back to college? I believe — it doesn’t matter necessarily what I believe — that answer would be no,” Kiffin said in a Monday news conference while defending his recruiting of at least two former Ole Miss players who’d spent the summer in NFL training camps.

Focus on Kiffin’s interjection.

It doesn’t matter necessarily what I believe.

You’ll struggle to find seven words that more accurately summarize both the current state of college sports and its contributing factors. In a more principled world, they would be written off as the words of a coward. In our current world, they might as well be written in Latin beneath the flag or family crest or company logo of a disconcerting number of tech titans, politicians, and Fortune 500 firms, not to mention the hundreds of university presidents who have long embraced the plausible deniability of the concept of shareholder value. The best thing you can say about the system of higher education in the United States is that it remains steadfastly by and of the system at large.

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The only hope is that it burns itself as quickly and completely as possible. The inevitable end game for the major football-playing schools won’t look much closer to the mandates of their university charters. The big schools will break away, impose a salary cap, hiring and transfer restrictions — all of the things major sports leagues long ago did as a result of similar competitive inevitabilities. They will sign their own television contract, sell their own licensing agreements, consolidate the revenues. The nonpower schools will exist mostly as a counterweight to any antitrust claims. Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to contemplate the question: Do we really care about college sports if they are no longer about the college?