We’re not naive about college football.
It was blood sport at the turn of the 20th century. According to the website of Dickinson State University’s Theodore Roosevelt Center, the gridiron was known to have “several troubling aspects, including excessive violence during play, fatalities on the field, the use of non-student athletes, recruiting scandals, and corrupt referees.”
News reports tallied at least 18 college football fatalities during the 1905 season. The collegiate game survived mostly because then-President Teddy Roosevelt loved the game and pushed for reforms to prevent it from being banned.
None of us remembers that era, but we are nostalgic for the quirky rivalries we grew up with — the meet-you-in-the-middle Texas-OU contest, the Stanford-California (UC Berkeley) Big Game with its ax trophy, and the TCU-SMU Battle for the Iron Skillet. College football still had devoted fans, but the play itself was safer and officiating more professional than in those early decades. It was scandalous, if not unexpected, when coaches offered nonacademic enticements to attract gifted high school athletes.
Now, at big-time football schools, everybody’s a professional. Some coaches make millions; top players sign lucrative name, image and likeness deals; and ESPN pays billions of dollars for worldwide media rights to College Football Playoff games.
Opinion
It’s that ever-escalating emphasis on money that saps our school spirit. In June, a federal court approved a $2.8 billion settlement, which covered multiple antitrust lawsuits that claimed the NCAA and power athletic conferences were illegally limiting student-athletes’ earnings. Sedona Prince, a former women’s basketball player at TCU, was a lead plaintiff in one of the lawsuits.
The players were right, but the outcome is warping the supposedly amateur nature of college sports even more.
Since 2021, third parties, such as athletic wear companies and groups of wealthy boosters, have been able to establish NIL deals with athletes. The lack of rules and limits led to bidding wars and chaos. The recent settlement attempts to instill order by allowing universities to pay student athletes directly.
The settlement limits the total each participating school can distribute to about $20.5 million this academic year, but the cap can be adjusted annually. So now athletic departments and universities are under pressure to raise money to pay their student-athletes.
Into this financial frenzy comes Sportsmo, an app from a Dallas entrepreneur that attempts to combine the fun of fantasy football and school spirit with the satisfaction of charitable giving. Friends can download the app, load as little as $10 into its wallet, and pledge to give $5 to their team if it scores during the first quarter, for instance. Friends goad one another through the app to make similar gifts.
It is “driving donations based on on-field play,” said Chaitan Fahnestock, a proud alumnus of Oklahoma State University. “There’s a real opportunity for social interaction.”
The app has tried to avoid potentially ugly outcomes. For example, it recognizes only team success, such as a first down, rather than missed plays or individual players’ efforts. Money abandoned in a wallet will be donated to a nonprofit that supports athletes’ mental and brain health. Last, Fahnestock stressed that Sportsmo isn’t a gambling app and users cannot win money, it just “gamifies” the experience of watching sports and making small donations.
It’s a clever, harmless addition to the college athletics ecosystem. No doubt, schools will welcome donations they didn’t have to solicit. It just seems strange to gamify watching games to add more money to a system drowning in it. We wonder if even Teddy Roosevelt could solve this problem.
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