Welcome to the 2040 Dubai Bowl, featuring UCLA and Michigan in a battle of tradition-rich college football teams.
The Bruins hail from the new Four Corners Conference, which only allows membership to schools a minimum of 3,000 miles apart.
The Wolverines are now part of the It Just Means A Whole Lot More Conference, a collection of 24 teams plucked from what was once the Power Four conferences.
Both teams will arrive via next-gen Space X transport, after the starship takes them on an orbit of the moon. The guaranteed purse for each team is $100 million, with an oil well going to the respective starting quarterbacks.
Swag bags include certificates for five free nights in a Burj Khalifa penthouse and Bitcoin featuring an Arabian oryx.
Media will be allowed to conduct interviews with a select number of players appearing via hologram — at a cost of $10,000 for each session lasting no more than five minutes. Priority will be given to players in their 25th and final season of eligibility.
We apologize for all the opt-outs. To meet roster minimum requirements, alumni from each institution, incoming transfers and anyone who digs the school colors have been granted eligibility.
There’s plenty at stake besides a first-round victory in the recently expanded, 64-team College Football Playoff and a bowl trophy made of 24-karat gold and flawless diamonds. The winning team gets its accumulated athletics department debt — approaching $1 billion at each school — wiped off the books.
Understandably, ticket sales have not been brisk given the distance from the respective fan bases, but there should be plenty of noise inside The Sevens Stadium. A jeering section is expected to include fans of Michigan State, which relocated to nearby Abu Dhabi in 2035 to ensure its NIL coffers could stay competitive with those of its rivals.
By halftime, there could be an update on the Protect College Sports Act that continues to inch its way through Congress.
Think all this sounds absurd?
Imagine what the late Bo Schembechler, who once preached “Those who stay will be champions,” would have said about college football today, much less in 2040.
Those who stray will be champions?
Every team is now located in Silly Town given the nonsensical conference realignment, ceaseless roster turnover, runaway financial arms race — some teams are approaching $50 million in NIL and USC just spent more than the GDP of some countries on a football facility — not to mention the number of athletics departments headed for Chapter 11.
So, what’s the answer?
New governance with some enforcement power and a shred of stability would be nice, though neither appears on the immediate horizon.
When it comes to athletics departments finding their way amid the lunacy, more people should listen to Ben Jay, a former Pac-10 associate commissioner and Ohio State executive associate athletics director who says college sports leaders can’t wait for Washington to save them.
In a compelling article on his Substack, Jay wrote that athletics departments must reimagine themselves into a sustainable model by making wholesale structural changes. Easier said than done, of course, but Jay lays out a clear framework rooted in separating the operations side — competition, academics, compliance, student-athlete care — from the revenue and enterprise side — NIL, media, sponsorship, facilities, fundraising.
Outdated means of doing business must go the way of the BCS and the old Pac-12. NIL must be fully embraced and integrated within each athletics department, revenue operations must be treated like a media company and every opportunity must be seized to maximize income and increase campus visibility.
That’s not to say it should be a soulless money grab. Private capital deals — like those struck by the Big 12 and Utah — must be thoroughly vetted and fully align with the interests of every school involved, not just the schools in power and investors infusing cash into the system.
“Build the machine,” Jay wrote. “Staff it with people who are committed to learning from their experience. Keep the mission at the center. Understand what you are trading before you sign anything. And go be great.”
While those who get it right will undoubtedly accelerate the athletics arms race, at least they won’t exacerbate the flip side of what’s happened — shedding staff, cutting sports and further eroding the essence of a once-thriving operation.
The programs that survive the next decade, Jay concluded, will not be the ones that waited for a better conference deal but built their own revenue engine.
Accountability is another issue that’s not being widely addressed.
One former high-ranking UCLA administrator told me that he was in favor of athletics departments being spun into their own entities, forcing them to exist free of university bailouts.
The administrator added that coaches and athletics directors who once declared that their comparison for market-based compensation should be the professional leagues have a moral obligation to extend that same principle to the players, allowing them to organize in a collective bargaining unit just like pro player associations.
One thing that won’t change is skyrocketing player compensation and influence. This is now pro sports operating with the cover of a higher purpose.
By 2050, the Dubai Bowl could be held in a biodome on the moon, the players having demanded it as part of their latest CBA.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
