The world according to Jim:
• It’s funny the things you stumble across in the archives. I ran across a column from late in 1999, part of a special section meant to welcome the new millennium (and likely timed to make sure it published before the Y2K bug was to wipe out all of our computer systems on Jan. 1, 2000).
Ah, the things we worry about. …
• The column was a forecast of what sports might look like by the year 2020, and no, I did not predict a worldwide pandemic. (Or, for that matter, the cacophony that is today’s social media.)
But there was this line about big-time college sports, written in past tense: “(By) the autumn of 2020, the only difference between ‘college’ and ‘pro’ was the size of the paychecks. … Basically, revenue sports at big schools became independent businesses, using college facilities but operating independently of the academic side of the campus. Things weren’t any different; the schools were just more open about it.”
I also predicted that college football and basketball players would eventually unionize, and while my timing was off just a bit, Dartmouth’s basketball players may have opened the floodgates this week. …
• One outgrowth of the new economics of college sports is that the mid-majors, in addition to being disrespected in so many other ways by the power schools, are being plundered by the big kids, thanks to NIL and liberalized transfer rules. But while UC Irvine, for example, lost its top two scorers from last year to the portal, coach Russell Turner sees no problem with the new way of doing things.
“The changes in college basketball are changes that should have been made a long time ago,” he said last weekend. “I said to a donor group, the paradigm was off and the players were not appropriately respected before. Now they will be and I’m happy for them on that.
“And I also know that what we have here is really special. It can be great for a lot of guys. So we just need to…
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