Now the courts are seeing NCAA vs Tennessee…?

Wednesdays with Chip. I should write a book. I should write a book about Wednesdays with Chip here on the Adam Gold Show's Chip Patterson Sr. I don't know. I'm making up a title for you.

CBSSports.com Cover 3 Podcast, a master of all things college football and college sports related. Are you ready for your legal debut? Oh man, I've had to, I mean, thankfully as the son of an attorney, I do have some ingrained DNA advantage here.

I have not put it to good use at all. So, it seems to be that covering college football does have me closer and closer by the year to needing that legal expertise. But no, I had a, you know, Bud Elliott on the Cover 3 Podcast was an attorney, you know, before he... Oh, I didn't know that. Wait a second. He left the legal profession to do this?

I don't know exactly how long, but yes, he was. There's a lot of former attorneys that are college sports writers. You'd be surprised.

It definitely does come in handy. So, for people who don't know, the NCAA announced an investigation into Tennessee Athletics for their relationship, I guess, and how they were using name, image, and likeness like we've had all over the place. Florida State got hit. Miami got hit in various ways for, you know, directing athletes to NIL collectives.

I don't know the ins and outs of what's happening with Tennessee, but the NCAA announced an investigation and Tennessee's Attorney General, along with Virginia's Attorney General, have turned and sued the NCAA for essentially doing what they told everybody that they were going to do. And that was, as best they could, police how NIL was used because they don't want it used as a recruiting tool. Why don't we simply remove, because we knew they can't, they were never going to be able to police this. Why don't we simply, as I've been saying for a long time, get rid of all the regulations? Because they can't stop it anyway. Wait, hold on. So you want to get rid of all of the NIL regulations?

Yes. We knew that NIL was going to be used as a recruiting inducement because it's been used as a recruiting inducement forever. So once you make it legal for the players to earn money based on who they are in some way, shape, or form, they were never going to be able to stop it.

So why try? Oh, because coaches are asking for it. And coaches, yeah, because, all right, this is, let's get to the crux of it. Coaches who are then going to scream to their athletic directors are saying, we need regulation.

We need guard rails. They use all of the buzzwords and they would like to make things more restrictive ultimately, but more manageable when it comes to them doing their job of maintaining a roster and running a college football program. The problem is that it is anti-competitive and anti-American. And when you bring this to attorney general's office, when you bring this to a motivated state house, when you bring this into the courts where the NCAA has gotten absolutely run out of the building every single time, then you understand that this is an operation that is restrictive of many of the American rights that individuals in this country and even other individuals on a college campus are not able to have. So college coaches and thereby their athletic directors and bosses are trying to put in guard rails and they're trying to ask for antitrust exemption so they cannot be held to the same standard of everything else that operates at this level in the country at the same time, there is a campaign, you know, with very different motivations, but Adam, it's a campaign that's bringing like red and blue together. I mean, we're going to be looking.

So I'm serious. Like we have a situation where I think more states will join this lawsuit because, you know, I don't, I'm sure that with North Carolina being involved, you've discussed the ongoing lawsuit with the NCAA that the federal government's gotten involved with about transfer rules, right? You know, coaches want to be able to restrict how many times you can transfer and the rules around that. Well, now the department of justice and 11 States plus the district of Columbia with North Carolina included, they're getting sued over that. Cause they're saying it's anti-competitive.

It is anti-American. You now have this lawsuit, which I would not be surprised if other states join, which are attacking some of the NIL rules. And so whether it's transfer portal or NIL, I am hearing all the buzzwords that coaches complain about. And I'm hearing all of it getting put to the task and the courts where they will ultimately lose.

And I go back to that red and blue. Like California is all about trying to empower individuals. They've got rules that allow high school high schoolers to make money off their NIL. And by the way, that is when Nico E. Amalieva got that deal done as a high schooler in California, when it was legal. The NCAA would lose the NCAA case. Forget a court case against the state of Tennessee and the state of Virginia. I just think we're going to see the state of Tennessee and the state of California holding hands.

And I've never seen purple look so good when red, blue are holding hands like that. But the truth of the matter is that all the attorneys general are correct in that. And this is all going to come crashing down when the courts establish that college football players and men's basketball players, maybe women's basketball players are employees.

They are de facto employees and need to be treated as such. It's all going to come crashing down. We forecast this years ago when the college establishment was fighting NIL. When they were fighting the ability for players to realize their name in the marketplace that it was ultimately going to cost them dearly in the long run. I wonder if they had allowed NIL to be part of the world 10 years ago when they were patting themselves on the back about full cost of attendance finally being allowed. If they if they would have headed this movement off, maybe not. Maybe we would have never stopped this train. And frankly, it's about time.

It'll get us into our other conversation in a minute. But I think the attorneys general are all correct because you shouldn't be able to restrict anybody's right to make a living. None. Forget about make a living. To realize their value. You can't do it to a regular student.

Why can you do it to a college athlete? You should. I think they're right. I hope they I hope all 51 and Guam and 50 and Puerto Rico. I hope 52. Hope we had 52 53. That was my math.

Bad math. So that's where I am. But you know me.

I am I am way more militant about this particular issue. Well, all right. Well, we can't have our cake and eat it, too. And if you want to get to the future part of it like I'm just going to while we're sitting here, I'll go ahead and drop one of the big like, um, one of the big things that I'm wrestling with because I do imagine and can't imagine a future that involves the universities that want to compete at the highest level, having the resources to invest. And having their football players be employees and having deals that are collectively bargained and salary structures and salary caps and, you know, health benefits and I mean, you think about it. You know, a grad student can be in a graduate school and be compensated to also be a teaching assistant. So I think we can keep the educational side of this in there where you are an employee of the school and given the opportunities to pursue a degree at that school in the same way that aggressive flip flopped clearly in terms of the money that's being made the work that's being done. But you know, still that same standard exists.

But I mean, I'll just go ahead and throw out the red meat. I think that is an N C double A tournament that doesn't look anything like the N C double A tournament. I think the N C double A tournament is gone when we get to this future. And I think that we instead have a big boys only basketball tournament and March Madness as we know it might look a little bit different. I don't I don't necessarily disagree with that. I I think the entire college universe will look different.

So let's spend a few minutes doing this to me. The first thing that needs fixing is what we already referenced players, football players, men's basketball players. I'm going to throw women's basketball players in as well as that sport becomes it teeters on producing enough revenue, certainly at certain places. It does more than like baseball produces revenue in certain places. I think they're all employees at some point, but I think is all collectively bargained and you tack on minimum wage based on I don't think it has to be a lucrative thing. I don't because the NIL money is going to take advantage, you know, is going to take over in a lot of places. But at the very least, it's minimum wage and they earn whatever it is per week and they become employees of the school. And are some schools going to scare people into say, well, we're going to have to drop other sports.

They might, but that's because they wanted to do so in the in the first place. And I also think that we should make schools pay taxes. I believe.

Oh, wow. Now you're going in that night and we ain't got enough time for the whole higher education system on trial. We're just starting with college sports. I mean, come on, the athletic department, their money making enterprises.

Um. But you're talking about the whole schools. You're sorry when you say the schools separate schools from athletic department. You're talking about asking the athletic department to pay taxes on the revenue that it generates, but the revenue that's being generated from the conferences, which are being paid to the schools and the schools are not subject to those same requirements. But the reason they're not subject to that same requirements is because of the federal money that comes in. Thanks in part to Title nine, which requires them to have all of the regulation of their schools and their sports under Title nine requirements. You just have to break. I think it's just got to be football.

I think you can't go any further than that. I think you just have to take football and you've just got to break it out, separate it entirely different. I mean, it is the, um, you know, with the financials, even at a place like, uh, North Carolina, the difference in the revenue generated from a football team that has fallen short of expectations in the last couple of years still is almost what double what you're getting from the revenue generation from a basketball program.

No question was in the national championship game two years ago and is one of the top five teams in the country this year. I just think that the reason why this conversation is here is because the money has gotten so big. The money has gotten so big because of football. So if we're going to get this right, I just think football has to be broken out entirely separate from everything else. And like if you want to say that the football programs have to pay taxes, then I guess that can be, uh, you know, a challenging debate for the legal scholars. But I don't think that there should be anything that extends beyond football if we're really going to build this thing out because nothing else besides football comes anywhere close to generating that kind of revenue, especially if we're going to talk about, you know, football at the very highest levels because most of the schools in the state of North Carolina are going to say no to this opportunity. I agree with you and make their football players employees.

It was a mistake to bring up the you should pay taxes on it because it gets into a conversation that takes probably too long and I'm not qualified to have. But I do believe that we are these are all they're burying money. I'm not I'm not being fooled by, you know, nonprofits or anything like that, like the PGA Tour. Let me let me what will what will the future playoff? What should the future playoff structure look like? Not just the playoff, but well, let me just throw this at you because I think we should stay at four.

I don't think we should have 12 or 16 or 24, which is the number I think we're ultimately going to end at because that's there's so much more money in it for the networks and for the end for the schools. But I think what we should do is have four leagues with however many add more teams and they should only play each other. I think there should you should only play schools at your level stop with the division one double-a the FCS and I think power five and group of five need to have the line of delineation as well. And I don't believe you should play in a low play against teams with a lower League.

I think you should only play in your room. I'm mostly with you when I had jotted down for this conversation is that I would drop I would expand conference championships. Okay, it's not just a conference championship game, but a four team sort of playoff within these conferences and then probably keep the overall playoff about the same with automatic bids, but then I would drop the schedule from 12 games to 11 games and then I would have 10 conference games. So you've got an 11 game schedule and of them are conference games and one of them you do whatever you want with. Okay, if you want to go and play like if you want to maintain a rivalry with a school in your regional proximity that chose not to jump up into the level where you are currently competing that 11th game gives you that opportunity.

Um, but I think that everything else for the most part has to be against other teams that are at that level. So I to see something like a four conference type world in this division. I think 10 of those games should be conference games. One of them teams can do whatever they want with. And then when we get to the end of the season, this is where we get the trade off is okay.

Well, if you're going to take a game off the schedule, what are you going to do? Well, we're actually going to have four team conference tournaments, which then play into the college football playoff, which I do think would be something similar to the 12 team. And the 12 team, I think, works in our dumb little sports brain because it's the old NFL model before they expanded that. Our dumb little sports brain is a is a perfect phrase here in an ideal world. And I'm not even kidding myself to think that we'll ever get back to an ideal world because what has happened in the Big Ten and the SEC is simply greed. It's simply how much more money can we take from this from the ultimate pie that is college football. And I am not they're not fooling me. Nobody has thought one second about the athletes. It's only about how much money they can get. Well, I'm thinking competitively like the reason why I say expand the conference.

No, no, I am. I would, too. But I would go back to the five major conferences. I would ship Southern Cal, UCLA, Oregon, Washington back to the Pac-12. I would expand those leagues. But the Big Ten and the SEC, who should throw Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M all back into the Big 12. Like. To me, if we're thinking about the overall health of the entire sport and not just what's good for our 16 or 18 schools, then what's better for the health of the entire sport is more teams involved and more regionally based conferences.

But we're never going to go there. I think. No, I think the league we're proposing is a national product.

It is a minor league NFL. I mean, yeah, it is something that you are trying to sell. Like you you are excited about the idea that Michigan and Washington are going to play against each other. I won't be because of because of the like the it is a national something to sell. So I I kind of think that I again, it breaks my heart because we're sitting here.

And while there is enthusiasm in my voice, there is sadness behind it because it is leaving behind a lot of what I love about college football. But, you know, you wanted to do the exercise. I did homework. I tried to come prepared. No, no, no. I, I totally understand.

I like my my druthers. Perfect world is we're going back to the way it was. 20 years ago. And we're just allowing athletes to be paid. I thought I think college football was a better product before before it became only about winning a national championship. I don't think it's a better product today. I don't think it's close. I think it's covered better. I think there's more coverage every games on TV. It's just it's a wealthier product.

I don't think it's better. We just need to make sure we don't keep burning out these coaches. I mean, I, I think that they're not. I'm not talking about Nick Saban, not talking about Jim Harbaugh going to the NFL. I'm I'm talking about talking about people that would be quarterbacks, coaches or different defensive line coaches or linebacker coaches who might in five to 10 years be there. But the the world that is being built right now is so taxing and so punishing. And they're not the ones signing the, you know, eight million dollar deal.

Now, I would get rid of that. I wouldn't limit what coaches could could earn. But I think schools need to exercise some more sanity when you're when you're paying coaches. Again, most coaches are way overpaid. I mean, it's tough because guess what? Now we're going to have overpaid players, too. It's a tough deal. It's a lot to wrestle with right now. Yeah, we are. We need we need more than 18 minutes to do it. Chip Patterson, CBS Sports dot com. Cover three podcast. My friend, I appreciate your time always.