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So the starting quarterback of the UNLV football team, Matt Sluka, bolted from the team today claiming he was promised name, image, and likeness money to the tune of $100,000 but the university wasn’t paying him.
Led by him, who transferred in this season from Holy Cross, the team is 3 and 0. But he’s gone like a traitor, fleeing in the night. Looking for more money someplace else, chasing bank like thousands of 18-22-year-olds in the college football cash carousel. Leaving before the team’s fourth game enables Sluka to take another redshirt year plus one more year of eligibility after that all to make more big money at a young age, taking advantage of a system gone bonkers.
What’s going to happen tomorrow? Is the UNLV running back going to tell the coaches he wants $100,000 by close of business tomorrow or he’s leaving?
Will another team pay him that? If he’s good enough to help them win – which translates to more money for all UNLV crusaders involved – they probably will. Or if UNLV thinks he’s good enough to help them make the 12-team College Football Playoff this season, they’ll probably pay him because the university, coaches, administrators, and players will have more money to pay better players next year.
How many hundreds of college football programs are dealing with these financial threats from players today? Or are we really talking about thousands?
This will undoubtedly happen tomorrow, next Tuesday, all the time, 24/7 365. Because money motivates people.
Most of us are not lurking and conniving in college football’s fiasco seemingly invented by Gordon Gekko. So if we went into our boss’s office today and told him to pay us more money or we would walk out, he would tell me to have a nice life and to hand him our security badges and look at his smartphone and his latest TikTok video. He would go home and not think another second about it.
This is so weird. I know the only concrete step I can do to extricate abject selfishness from college football is to stop watching the games so there’s less money flowing through the enterprise. But you know what I’m obsessing about right now: Going to watch the Wake Forest football game this Saturday because it will be relaxing and take my mind off serious and complicated things about life such as how to make more money.
I want the system to change but am not strong enough to do anything about it. Weakness has me ensnared. College football has me hooked just like hundreds of millions of other Americans. We know it’s a corrupt dirty business with greed at its core and yet we keep opening our wallets to support the seediness.
Is there anything that can be done? Will players continue to pressure coaches to pay them more while threatening to leave if they don’t?
Probably. But like in other walks of life, the only players who will have serious leverage are the most talented ones who work the hardest at their crafts. They’re the lucky ones.
It’s like in business. The smartest people tend to have the most leverage to threaten to leave because they deliver the most value to the business. They’re the lucky ones. They get paid more to stay, gain more power, and snatch the biggest beach houses.
It comes down to being born with the ability to process information faster than others. It comes down to a person’s IQ. The smarter you are the higher your earnings potential. This is not an absolute truth; most things aren’t absolute. But for the most part, I am right.
So to become rich and powerful, hope that you’re an exceptionally talented athlete or highly intelligent. And work hard at your craft; not necessarily harder than less talented people. You’ll beat them without outworking them because you have more innate ability.
You’ll get yours.
The rest of us will scratch and claw.
And keep watching college football to forget about our plights for a few hours, ashamed we can’t turn away from these games that are becoming increasingly corrupted by money and selfishness.
Man, I’m fired up for Saturday’s game.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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