If there’s one sports media personality who has consistently sounded the alarm on the future of college football, it’s Paul Finebaum.
Sure, Finebaum often comes off as the boy who cried wolf about the sport’s imminent demise, but he sees it as his duty to show college football elites where the country really stands.
The extent to which Finebaum and others have carried out the wishes of college football’s power brokers — like ESPN — is a discussion for another day.
But the ongoing and overwhelming sentiment is that the sport is in trouble. And Finebaum shared a similar sentiment during a recent appearance on CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.
“I’m not optimistic, Kaitlan. I know that in a position that I have where we want the game to be great, we’re possibly at a tipping point. What I mean by that is: players are not only getting huge sums of money to go to school, now, at the end of whatever year it is, they’re now holding the schools hostage for even more money. And we’re talking three, four million dollars from the very top players.
“SMU, which made the playoffs this year, nearly 40 years was put out of business. They were given the death penalty for less than what is going on right now in college football. And what the college administrators are doing, which also sounds crazy, is they need Congress to bail them out. I mean, where have you ever heard something like that before? And it’s possible with the Republicans in charge and Donald Trump at the helm, it may actually go through, where in a split Congress, it would not have.
“They need protection because they’ve done such a poor job. The people that run college athletics have literally been asleep at the wheel.”
Finebaum’s words pretty much cut through the growing concerns around college football.
With the rise of NIL deals, the chaos of the transfer portal and an ever-expanding cash flow, the sport seems on the verge of an identity crisis. And without real leadership and accountability, as Finebaum warns, the sport’s foundation could crumble under its own weight.
[Kaitlan Collins on X]
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.