Whatever Happened to College Football?
College football begins in earnest this weekend, and I’ll be watching. But as someone who has been watching college football for more than 60 years, I sometimes wonder whether what we’re watching should still be called college football.
For decades, universities, conferences, television networks and coaches made enormous amounts of money while the athletes playing the games were prohibited from sharing the money. The NCAA took the approach that no financial benefit should be provided to college athletes that wasn’t available to the entire student body. There was something fundamentally unfair about that.
I have always believed college athletes deserved a portion of the revenue their sport brought to the university. As a parent of a successful college student athlete, I saw the additional burden, physical and mental, college sports put on the student athlete.
In the last five years, things have changed drastically.
Name, Image and Likeness—or NIL—opened the door for athletes to earn money from endorsements and other commercial arrangements.
Then came the transfer portal.
Players can now change schools much more easily, and the annual ritual of building a college football roster increasingly resembles professional free agency.
And then came revenue sharing.
Following the House v. NCAA settlement, major Division I schools can now pay athletes directly from athletic-department revenues. In the first year, participating schools were permitted to share approximately $20.5 million annually with their athletes.
Think about how extraordinary that would have sounded when many of us were growing up.
And this week college football crossed another line I never imagined seeing.
On Thursday a Louisiana judge issued a preliminary injunction that allows LSU to put former NFL players back on a college football roster. Among them are former Cleveland Browns tight end Dae’Quan Wright and former New Orleans Saints defensive lineman Zxavian Harris.
The circumstances are complicated. The players argue that NCAA eligibility rules changed after they decided to leave college and pursue professional football and that they shouldn’t be penalized for decisions made under the old rules.
The NCAA and Southeastern Conference disagree. The SEC argues that allowing professional athletes to return threatens one of the remaining distinctions between college and professional sports.
That argument is now being fought in court.
Here’s the part that tells you everything about how strange college football has become.
· Harris testified that he received only $190 in travel expenses during his time with the New Orleans Saints.
· He also testified that he made approximately $1 million playing college football.
Think about it. He made considerably more money playing college football than he did during his brief stint with an NFL organization. His case may be unusual, but the larger transformation of college athletics is not limited to football.
If that doesn’t tell us that the old definition of “amateur college athletics” is dead, I’m not sure what does.
I don’t begrudge student-athletes getting as much as they can. If universities and television networks are making billions from college football, the young men putting their bodies at risk deserve to share in the money they generate. But something has been lost along the way.
When I grew up watching college football, players were identified with their schools. You watched them develop over three or four years. Rivalries weren’t simply television programming. Michigan-Ohio State, Alabama-Auburn and Notre Dame-USC represented generations of history.
In the last five years things have changed.
· Today a quarterback can play against a school one year and play for that school the next.
· Coaches recruit their own rosters every offseason to keep players from transferring.
· Boosters and collectives help finance NIL deals.
· Schools directly share millions of dollars with athletes.
· Conference realignment is increasingly driven by television revenue rather than geography or tradition.
And now we are debating whether someone who signed with an NFL team can come back and play college football.
Maybe we should simply acknowledge what college football has become.
It is professional football played by athletes who happen to attend universities. That doesn’t necessarily make it bad.
The games will still be exciting. Michigan Stadium will still have more than 100,000 people on Saturday afternoons. We’ll still argue about rankings, complain about officials and celebrate beating our rivals.
I’ll still watch. But I won’t pretend it’s the same game I grew up with.
Perhaps the challenge now isn’t figuring out how to restore the old model. That model is gone. The challenge is figuring out how to build a new one that compensates athletes fairly while preserving enough of the traditions, rivalries and connection to universities that made college football special in the first place.
Because if we lose those things, college football may eventually discover that the word college was one of the most valuable things it had.
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Election Security or a Solution in Search of a Problem?
For the past week, I’ve been writing about election fraud.
I’ve tried to approach the issue from a fairly simple premise: Election fraud exists. When someone votes illegally, we should investigate it and prosecute it. But before changing the rules governing how millions of Americans vote, shouldn’t we first determine how large the problem actually is?
Two developments this week make that question even more important.
Michigan recently completed an independent audit of its voter rolls.
The state’s nonpartisan Office of the Auditor General examined Michigan’s Qualified Voter File, which contains approximately 8.3 million voter records.
The finding that jumped out at me was this: 99.99% of those records contained complete and valid personal information as required by state law.
The audit identified registrations that had been canceled or rejected for citizenship-related reasons, questionable birthdates and records involving people who had died. But when you dig into the numbers, they tell a more complicated—and considerably less alarming—story.
· Auditors found 2,582 ballots associated with people whose death records indicated they died before Election Day. That sounds terrible until you discover that 2,561 were early or absentee ballots cast by people who died within 40 days of the election. In other words, most were ballots cast by voters who were alive when they completed them but died shortly before Election Day. Michigan law generally requires those absentee ballots to be rejected if election officials learn of the death in time, but delays in death reporting can prevent officials from identifying them before the ballots are processed.”
· The audit also found 653 registered voters with birthdates suggesting they were more than 122 years old. Some apparently resulted from old paper voter records being transferred into a computer system that required birthdate, with 1900 sometimes used as a placeholder year.
· Most importantly, Michigan election officials canceled nearly one million registrations between January 2022 and March 2026 for legitimate reasons such as voters dying or moving.
The evidence supports that voter-roll maintenance is working in Michigan.
Now Look at What Washington Wants to Do
President Trump has issued an executive order that, if implemented, would fundamentally change how mail ballots are handled by the United States Postal Service
Under the new USPS rule, states would have to provide information about mail-ballot voters through a federal system and use specially designed ballot envelopes containing unique barcodes. The Postal Service could refuse to transmit ballots that don’t satisfy the new requirements. That alone would represent a significant change in the federal government’s role in elections.
This week it became known that a whistleblower inside the Postal Service has raised an additional concern. According to the disclosure, the system has been developed on an extraordinarily compressed timetable. Under what the whistleblower describes as a “zero percent failure” standard, a problem with one sampled barcode could potentially cause an entire batch of ballots—possibly thousands of them—to be rejected and returned for correction.
These aren’t necessarily fraudulent ballots. These are ballots being sent to eligible voters so they can vote.
Harry Litman’s Warning
Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman has been following this legal battle closely. His argument gets to the constitutional heart of the issue.
The Constitution gives states the primary responsibility for conducting elections and gives Congress certain authority to regulate federal elections. What it does not do is give the president general authority to rewrite election procedures by executive order.
Litman also identified a procedural problem several weeks ago that now looks remarkably important.
The Trump administration initially argued that challenges to its mail-voting executive order were premature because USPS hadn’t yet completed the regulations necessary to implement it.
The Supreme Court agreed that the earlier challenge had come too soon.
Then USPS issued the final rule.
The challengers immediately went back to court.
And now we’re finding ourselves racing against the election calendar.
What Happened This Week
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani held a hearing to determine whether she should extend her temporary order blocking implementation of the USPS rule.
One exchange was remarkable.
The judge repeatedly asked the government’s lawyer how the Postal Service’s new system would actually work. Judge Talwani said:
“I don’t even have a declaration from the Postal Service: ‘This is how it will work.’ I don’t have it. I have nothing.”
Judge Talwani then asked:
“As you sit here today, you can’t tell me the government has a program ready to go?”
That was an extraordinary question to be asking less than 70 days before a national election. A USPS official acknowledged in a court filing that the online portal states would use to upload voter information was not yet operational.
Then today, Judge Talwani extended her order blocking the new USPS requirements.
Her ruling came on the same day North Carolina became the first state to begin mailing ballots for the November election.
The Trump administration argues that USPS has authority to establish what it describes as modest requirements for ballot-mail design and that state election officials would continue to decide who is eligible to vote by mail.
The states and voting-rights organizations challenging the rule argue that the changes could disenfranchise legitimate voters and improperly insert the federal government into election administration traditionally handled by the states.
But the legal battle isn’t over.
On Thursday, the Trump administration asked the United States Supreme Court to intervene and allow the USPS rule to take effect. That emergency request remains pending.
So, we now have an unusual situation:
Ballots are being mailed. A federal judge has blocked the new rules. And the administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow those rules to take effect while the election is already underway.
Which Brings Me Back to the Original Question
This entire debate would look different if we had evidence that our elections were overwhelmed by fraudulent voting. But that’s not what the evidence we’ve examined over the past week shows.
The Heritage Foundation has documented roughly 1,600 proven instances of various forms of election fraud over several decades.
Michigan’s independent audit just found that 99.99% of 8.3 million voter records contained the complete and valid personal information required by state law.
None of that means fraud doesn’t happen. It does.
None of it means Michigan’s voter rolls are perfect. They aren’t.
And none of it means we shouldn’t continually improve election security. We should.
But it brings me back to the question I’ve been asking all week: Is the remedy proportional to the problem?
We are now considering fundamentally changing the way the United States Postal Service handles millions of mail ballots, immediately before a national election, using a computer system that a federal judge was told today may not even be ready.
That’s a very large remedy. The evidence of widespread illegal voting remains very small.
Perhaps the most important principle here shouldn’t be Republican or Democratic. It should be caution.
If we can make elections more secure without making it harder for legitimate voters to vote, let’s do it. But if we’re going to change the machinery of an election while that election is already beginning, the government should have an extraordinarily compelling reason—and an extraordinarily well-tested system—for doing it.
Right now, serious questions remain about both.
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Quote of the Day: “The right to vote is preservative of all rights.” — Justice Hugo Black, Oregon v. Mitchell (1970)
Orchid of the Day: Michigan’s state and local election workers.
Michigan’s independent audit found problems in the voter rolls that need correcting. But it also found that 99.99% of the state’s 8.3 million voter records contained complete and valid personal information and that nearly one million outdated registrations had been canceled since 2022. Maintaining voter rolls isn’t glamorous work. When it is done correctly, we rarely hear about it.
Onion of the Day: The U.S. Postal Service and the Trump administration, for attempting to introduce a fundamentally different system for handling millions of mail ballots immediately before a national election—while serious questions remain about whether the system has been adequately tested or is even ready to operate.
Question of the Day: If an election system is already identifying improper registrations, removing ineligible voters and prosecuting people who vote illegally, how much additional risk should we impose on millions of legitimate voters to prevent a relatively small number of illegal votes?
Lyrics of the Day: That the people have the power To redeem the work of fools
Upon the meek the graces shower It’s decreed: the people rule
If you know the title and/or author, let me know in the comment section below.
Answer to Lyrics of the Day September 2, 2026: For What it’s Worth - Buffalo Springfield
Video of the Day: USPS Video on Voting by Mail.
https://about.usps.com/video/EM_CONSUMER_y25.mp4