Can college football please go back to the good ol’ days?

Can we just go back to the days when college football’s biggest problem was the unfairness of the polls?
We didn’t know how good we had it.
That was better than today’s anarchy and chaos.
It’s sure better than this: A quarterback at Nevada-Las Vegas — the starting quarterback — is holding out for more money. He says he was promised $100,000 if he came to UNLV and no one has paid up. So he left the team this week after a 3-0 start, the school’s best start in 40 years. UNLV denies it and says it violates NCAA pay-for-play rules.
What!? There are still rules? Who knew.
College holdouts are going to become the norm. Earlier this year quarterback Jaden Rashada filed a lawsuit against Florida coach Billy Napier and a booster, among others, claiming they failed to deliver on a $13.85 million agreement that included an upfront partial payment of $1 million. He left the school.
It was better when players were being paid under the table and we didn’t know about it.
Elsewhere in college football’s Wild West, the league formerly known as the Pac-12 — which was ransacked last year by the Big Ten and Big 12, which was ransacked by the SEC — is making a hostile takeover of the Mountain West Conference.
Five Mountain West teams are leaving to join the Pac 8/10/12/2/7, including Utah State, which is celebrating as if the Aggies just won the lottery. Hold the party; this is not your father’s Pac-12. Only two schools were left behind after last year’s mass exodus, and the Pac Whatever was on life support.
As usual, the Aggies are late to the scene. The league that once consisted of USC, UCLA, Washington, Oregon, etc., before they abandoned ship, is now adding Boise State, Fresno State, Colorado State, San Diego State and USU, making it a mix of the Mountain West and Western Athletic conferences with a new name. So far, the score is Mountain West 7 teams, Pac Whatever 7 teams.
To add insult to injury, not only is the Pac-7 pillaging the Mountain West, the league is now suing the MWC to avoid paying fees for an agreement that the Pac Whatever signed last year. Pac-7 officials claimed they signed it under duress. Talk about shameless.
College football is a wildfire that no one can put out. Actually, no one has even tried to put it out and new fires are breaking out everywhere. It would be difficult to know where to start. Take the disastrous combination of NIL, the transfer portal and liberal redshirt rules, for instance. Since 2022, about 40 schools have jumped to new leagues or are in the process of doing so. This has been going on for years of course. Some 78 schools changed conferences during the 16-year BCS era from 1998 to 2013.
College football has a lot of moving parts. Last May it was reported that more than 3,800 players had entered the transfer portal, breaking the previous year’s record of 3,500.
“I don’t think what we’re doing right now is a sustainable model,” Nick Saban told The Associated Press in a 2022 interview.
No kidding. And what’s being done about it? Nothing. Coaches, administrators, college athletic directors and school presidents have to know that college football is a mess, but they’re all standing around looking at each other wondering if someone else will do something.
Which is the problem, of course. Nobody is in charge. What college football needs is a grownup in the room. The NCAA ceded control a long time ago by refusing to abandon its silly, greedy, outdated notions of amateurism and apply them in the meanest, pettiest way, such as punishing athletes for accepting free pizza from a coach or telling a school’s fans they weren’t allowed to help a homeless player because it would constitute “impermissible benefits.” They alienated everyone. They lost control. They brought on the current state of college football.
The power vacuum was filled by the biggest, most powerful conferences who saw the opportunity to make billions of dollars. It’s every conference for itself. There are no rules, there is no one overseeing the overall good of the sport. There is no central government. Someone needs to step up and create an overall plan and a new set of rules.
Everyone knows where all this is leading. Eventually, a super conference will emerge and everyone else will be forced to take the scraps. When that happens in a few years, none of the above will matter.
In the meantime, Darwin rules the college game. The biggest and strongest prey on the weak and take what they want, whether big conferences stealing schools or the richest boosters and programs offering a kid 100 grand to come to their school.