With basketball, the talent seems to get a little more evenly distributed because the best players can go straight to the NBA and having less players per-team.Wait, how does scholarship limits hurt parity?
What we have now is the best it has ever been in college football in terms of a free market. Cincy had a chance to play its way to a title. This is way better than the decades of when it was based on the media and coaches polls. That was disgusting. Imagine the title being determined in any manner by the hawk fanboys in the Iowa media. If settling it on the field leads to the same teams competing, so be it.
Also, I don't think we're giving Saban his due. The SEC will likely have as good of chance as any conference, but the field is getting shutout because of his anomalous greatness. If not Saban, you'd have more upsets and diversity. LSU can win one year and be 6-6. UF can win and then have a decade in which they are up and down.
With football, teams like Alabama and Georgia have a 24/7 propaganda department running on ESPN (due to SEC TV rights contract) and can fill their rosters with tons of 5-star talent (nationally, i.e. Alabama's Heisman Trophy-winning 5-star QB from California). Top players have no pathway straight to the NFL like in other sports. NIL has legalized what they were probably doing already with paying players (and I'm not sure if there are really scholarship limits anymore if you could just pay walkons). Also the playoff system and committee has made it more difficult to knock these teams out even when they do lose games in the regular season since they get in anyway.
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