OK, and maybe the terrain is so new, so unknown, so anti-everything we have come to know and rely on in college sports that each passing NIL headline is the next rung down the ladder to the bottomless pit of “total college sports game-changer.”
And yes, yahoos like me much-too-frequently use the extreme superlatives of ‘most’ or ‘GOAT’ and become over reliant on over-the-top phrases that this will change everything or will ruin it as we know it.
So, the ‘columnist who cries wolf’ hyperbole aside, we must acknowledge that change is often a great thing. Think of the many milestones that folks at the time wondered whether those changes would ruin a sport when, in actuality, it was never close and in a lot of cases made the sport better.
Dunking was that way. The shot clock. The 3-point line. The DH (and yes, it’s debatable but hardly the game-wrecker it was perceived to be). The pass-friendly rules of the NFL. The two-point conversion. Free agency and salary caps. The shift.
OK, strike that last one. The shift, to paraphrase what Larry Hockett told Crash about working at Sears, stinks. Bad.