Full transparency, my wife is a graduate of Ole Miss. Occasionally, we end up at Vaught Hemingway Stadium to catch a game. It’s not a great experience. Individual tickets cost north of $120. When you finally find your seat, it’s a 2×2 foot section of steel in the middle of a thirty yard row of squished humanity. The people seated behind you are drunk on $12 cups of beer. If you want something to eat, prepare to miss a significant chunk of the game as you wait in an oppressively long line. After the game, with your ass sore from sitting on an anvil for a game made four hours long thanks to way too many TV timeouts, you trudge out of the stadium and walk forty-five minutes to the car you paid $55 to park. Then you drive an hour to Memphis because hotel rooms in Oxford cost $500 a night on game days.

This is the experience the Power Four want fans to pay a little extra. The donors in the luxury suites don’t mind. What’s a few more dollars to them? To the rest of us, having already donated to the athletics foundation and collective, its a massive tax waged because you’d like to be a fan.

College sports, especially football, is an expensive production now made extravagant by the new “pay-for-play” model that wasn’t created by fans, but fans are expected to shoulder. We’re told that it’s our burden to bear because we’re the ones who want to enjoy a winning program. It’s our fault! Meanwhile, broadcasters, universities, and all the companies that comprise the sporting universe are raking in profits while not contributing a dime to “talent fees.” How did we get into this mess?

As the SEC and BIG 10 commandeer brands and revenue streams, the interest of the fans doesn’t even factor in the calculus. Hello! I’m an Oregon fan! I get to travel to 2,000 miles to Madison, Wisconsin for a conference game this season. Thanks for destroying the ancient conference I loved so I can enjoy my bitter rivalry with Maryland. At least Fox Sports receives a larger audience, though. In college sports, fans don’t matter, just their wallets.

Eventually, fans will rebel. Already, stadium attendance is dropping. As the cost of broadcast fees rise, fans will stop paying for TV packages too. Athletic directors will grouse and call us “bad fans” while handing assistant coaches multi-million dollar checks and securing zero-interest loans from state governments who should be funding public education and infrastructure. The Governor’s favorite team needs more luxury suites! That pothole will have to fill itself.

Caught in the maelstrom is the Group of Five and its hearty fans. We’re contributing to collectives and paying more for parking, too, just so our programs can survive. Thoughts of a national championship don’t even make the equation. We just want to see a reasonable percentage of our rosters remain intact. I donate a small sum monthly because all I can afford is a small sum. Many of us can’t even do that – we have bills, man.

Wouldn’t it be terrific if the Power 4 (really the Power 2) spent less time ranking in cash and more time finding ways to make it less financially catastrophic to be fans? How about agreeing to subject itself to a governing body (like, I dunno, the NCAA) that has the authority to cap coaching salaries, scholarship numbers, realignment borders and NIL? What if we agreed to an even playing field even if that meant that football locker rooms no longer resembled Club Med? What if we stopped treating fans like a crypto farm?

It’s a pipe dream because we are conditioned to distrust governing bodies and worship individual hoarders of money. Everybody agreeing to a single set of financial rules? That’s communism! So we’re stuck with yielding to the mad whims of conference commissioners who will not rest until every penny is plucked from our purses. And when the cash cow delivers its last drop of milk, those commissioners will be long gone, floating into retirement on a golden parachute.

Meanwhile, we’re going to fund those talent fee coffers for you. The special teams coach needs a new Land Rover.

IMAGE: AI monstrosity