Big Ten College Sportsball

I should be ranting about Zuck’s bunkers. I should be raving about debased congressional maps. I should be dumping buckets of blood on Gavin Newsom. I should be on Macadam dressed as a frog. I should be howling Whitney Webb through a megaphone. 

But I’m here to shout into the void about college football’s indomitable slog to the bottom of corporate greed – with the Big Ten leading the charge, as first reported by the NFL’s journalism arm:

“The Big Ten is closing in on voting on a capital agreement that will infuse league schools with more than $2 billion, industry sources told ESPN. The framework calls for the formation of a new entity, Big Ten Enterprises, which would hold all leaguewide media rights and sponsorship contracts. 

Shares of ownership in Big Ten Enterprises would fall to the league's 18 schools, the conference office and the capital group -- an investment fund that's tied to the University of California pension system. The UC pension fund would receive a 10% stake in Big Ten Enterprises and hold typical minority investor rights but no direct control.

Big Ten Enterprises would be tasked with not just handling the league's valuable media rights (the current seven-year, $7 billion package runs through 2030) but trying to maximize sponsorship and advertising deals leaguewide such as jersey patches or on-field logos.”

Don’t at me with what the hell most of that actually, really, truly, means. Don’t ask me to explain fuckboy capitalism gymnastics. It’s recapitalization through a structured secondary sale with downside protection. It’s credit default swaps. Markets over everything. 

It’s the bituminous slime seeping and seeping. We can only look on helplessly. It can’t be stopped. It never reverts. It seeps and seeps and creeps and creeps.

Heinous.

They – the men behind the curtain, the short-sighted, rapacious profiteers – have been rending college football, and college athletics with it, for generations. You might call the ruin of the Pac-12 a gut punch. This is a scythe piercing the peritoneum, a spilling of the intestines with a quick tug up to the sternum. 

The “private capital infusion” will also “extend the league's Grant of Rights through 2046, providing long-term stability and making further expansion and any chance league schools leave for the formation of a so-called ‘Super League’ unlikely.” 

Long-term stability? For where we’re at now? Where storied rivalries have irreparably morphed into clown shows? If this new era of conflated interest and cash-grabbery was to be forced upon us could it have at least happened a couple years ago, when the Atlantic Coast Conference didn’t include schools in Northern California? When the Big Ten only had 12 (13?) teams?

It’s not hard to predict where we’re going. The extra money will be burned. Bigger facilities. Bigger TV contracts. Higher ticket prices. Pad the pockets of a few suits at BiG tEn EnTeRpRiSeS. Fans and alumni will continue to be gavaged with increasingly intrusive advertisements, continue to watch in horror as coaches are paid $49 million to stop coaching. 

It will fuel a need for more money. More private capital. Every conference diving in, taking a header in the shallow end of shit’s pool. Small conferences won’t be able to keep pace and the competitive gulf between the haves and have-nots will continue to grow. 

The rich get richer and if the poor want something to cheer about they can gamble on the success of the rich. The FanDuel apocalypse loop. The America loop. 

We’re going to sportsball, the millennial term to signal you don’t appreciate the camaraderie of sport, never cared to find joy in chasing a ball. A flippant reduction of a lifestyle, of a universe of athletic experiences. Snide superiority re: the meaningless of winning or losing a game, of rooting for a team.

Because allegiances shatter, reasons for loyalty muddle, when the magic hand of private equity has equal interest in all the “public” and “private” institutions it has cleaved into fractions, purchased, and must eventually sell for profit or die. Will victory be a moment to celebrate, or a moment to lament another windfall for parasites? Can it be both?