MORGANTOWN — It appeared on X, which fittingly enough no longer is what it once was, Twitter, in mid-morning on Friday, about the time most of America was still trying to come to grips with another change in their lives, for some an even more pressing change the name of a social media site.
College football was no longer what it once was and the post from Preston Fox, the West Virginia wide receiver from Morgantown, was as strong a symbol of that as you could have gotten, whether he meant it to be or not.
“I went from playing football at tailgates wearing a shirt that says ‘Your time will come’ to making it become a reality. I thank God every day for where I am today. Really living the dream,” it read, accompanied by a pair of pictures, one of them as a Mountaineer today and one of that little kid who’d been playing football in the Mountaineer Field parking lot wearing that “Your time will come” T-shirt.
See, Fox was living out the American dream, one that we hope will live on as the college football system changes from its outdated amateur model where the rich got richer and the athletes were taken advantage of financially to one where they will, in the future, be able to be paid.
The NCAA’s Power 5 conferences and the group had agreed to settle a trio of lawsuits that addressed the unfair labor practices where the athletes were left out of the monetary food chain, agreeing to make reparations to former athletes back to 2016 and agreeing to a deal where future athletes will be paid.
This was one of those moments in time meant to be etched into the stones of sports history, right there along with baseball free agency, with the NFL-AFL merger, with Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color line.
No one questions that history has been made, but left unanswered is where this will take us.
Will there be more Preston Foxes in the future, kids who walked on, earned a scholarship, became a starter and lived out their dreams.
Is there room in a pay-for-play system for walk-ons, for locker room ceremonies where, with their parents present, they are surprised by being awarded with a scholarship.
Where are we heading?
Certainly, American athletics no longer has room for Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy. It is now a bottom-line endeavor which changes everything.
When the system was set up, college sports were meant to be like college academics, a means to an end. You came in a child and left a man. You were given an education in the sport you played and experience at playing it.
Oh, there was money involved all the way through. It was under the table, a handshake with a $100 bill or envelope with cash in it off the books from an alumni. Now you are not a student of the game, you are the game.
Where is it headed, how will we get there?
No one seems to know.
A short while after Fox posted his version of where we are and what it means, WVU athletic director Wren Baker posted a Q&A on the Mountaineers’ website with 10 questions about WVU sports ... and buried in it were a couple of questions that unlocked the workings to his mind in where WVU stands in the new order.
Baker had been in the league meetings where this was front and center before the issue was settled.
“We had lots of discussions about the future of college athletics,” Baker wrote. “There is a lot of instability right now, and it appears we are heading toward a settlement of the three court cases that could end up being four. That would take care of the back damages on the NIL issues and then have a go-forward opportunity to share revenues with student-athletes in exchange for some of their NIL rights.
“When you are in a situation like WVU, you look at our brand value, it’s top 30 in the country when you look at viewership, when you look at licensing and all the different brand valuations all third parties do. If you look at our performance right now in the Directors’ Cup standings, I believe we’re 35th.”
That is the good news, but there is a darker side to the picture.
“If you look at our budget, we’re 61st and there are less than 70 power conference teams now, so we’ve got to find a way to grow that,” Baker said, knowing that paying off the settlement and paying athletes is an expensive venture.
“We don’t have to have a Top 20 budget, but we’ve got to find a way to move from 61 to 40 because I think if we can do that, we can move from Top 30 to Top 20, and the implications would be significant for our department,” he said.
“This settlement does provide an opportunity to start to get clarity on where we’re going,” Baker continued. “I’ve said this for the last couple of years, the most frustrating thing is we know we have to go from point A to point B, and we know the road map to get there is going to be tough – there are going to be mountains that we’ve got to climb in the middle of blizzards, and there are going to be valleys that are flooded, and it’s not going to be an easy path to get there.”
But the time to press forward is now as they reach for a compass to the future.
“Right now, no one can tell us where point B is so you can’t even start to build a road map no matter how challenging it is because you don’t know where you’re going. I think the settlement now provides some clarity on where point B is likely to be – doesn’t identify it exactly – but at least what neighborhood and what state it’s in.
“We spent the better part of our time talking about this and we’ve got some more meetings next week in Dallas. There are a bevy of issues for us to figure out, but we will. As I said on the Caravan, we’re going to improvise, adapt and overcome because this means too much to West Virginians and to the health of this state.”
He then let reality slap all of us in the face as to just how important it is that WVU move forward with the times.
“The alternative is to die, and that’s not something that we’re prepared to do in terms of our athletic programs, so we’re going to figure out how to get through this together.”
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