When a sport jumps off the tracks

Dec. 5—Eight days ago, Oklahoma football coach Lincoln Riley interrupted a postgame question to say, unequivocally, he would not be the next football coach at LSU.

He then took on a follow-up about his relationship with his superiors.

"All of us are trying to make this place better, make this program better and so you don't do that without working together ... So of course we're gonna continue to do that," he said. "We work well together and we're going to keep working together."

Less than 24 hours later he'd been named the new football coach at Southern Cal.

That same Saturday, Notre Dame closed its regular season with a 45-14 victory at Stanford, a win that kept it steady at No. 6 when the new College Football Playoff rankings arrived on Tuesday.

Things would have to fall the Irish's way, like Baylor topping Oklahoma State in the Big 12 title game, maybe Alabama falling to Georgia in the SEC title game and Michigan coming up short to Iowa in the Big 10 title game. But were all that to happen, Notre Dame's would be in the playoff.

It would, though, reach it without its coach, Brian Kelly, who was announced Tuesday as LSU's next coach.

The Sooners have installed Bob Stoops as their interim coach, yet a fair portion of Riley's old staff, including defensive coordinator Alex Grinch, are already working out of Los Angeles.

The Irish have elevated defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman as their next coach, so should they get the playoff nod, maybe he'll keep the staff together, though it could easily have gone another way.

The Sooners may be looking to hire Cincinnati's Luke Fickell, but would they really pull him away from the Bearcats before they appear in the playoff, a spot they may cement by topping Houston in Saturday's AAC title game?

Just jilted, would Sooner Nation be on board with helping another program, pre-playoff, get jilted?

----The week before Riley and Kelly departed, Mel Tucker re-upped at Michigan State.

He somehow turned a 5-7 mark at Colorado in 2019 into the top job in East Lansing, where he has since gone 12-7, including a 10-2 mark this season.

It figured his next Spartan contract would reward him, yet nobody saw it happening so soon (now), for so much ($95 million), guaranteed for so long (10 years). It was reportedly funded by two big-pocketed donors, Steve St. Andre and Mat Ishbia, not only blowing the lid off the coaching market, but blowing up the method by which the market is set.

How far away can we be from billion dollar endowments to pay college football staffs and, for that matter, would it even be enough to fund the bluest of bloods and the most sought after coaches and staffs in perpetuity?

You get what the Spartans have done. It's their first chance to be competitive long term since Nick Saban was there 22 years ago, only to parlay a nine-win 1999 campaign into the LSU job. So here were a couple of donors willing to back the money-bag truck up, all by themselves, wherever Tucker tells them to.

But Tucker has not won a conference title, nor played for one, nor sniffed the playoff. Heck, he's only been a head coach for three seasons ... and the contract he just agreed to will pay him more next year than every single college football coach is making this year, save Saban.

It's tempting to compare Tucker's deal to Alex Rodriguez's long ago 10-season, $250 million contract with the Texas Rangers, but A-Rod was clearly the game's best at the time. Meanwhile, so many coaches who have done so much more than Tucker for so much longer than Tucker make less than half what he's about to make. In the whole scheme of things, weren't they overpaid already?

It's ridiculousness on top of ridiculousness and there's no end in sight.

----On Monday, Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione, who was diplomatic about Riley's departure, took a post press conference question from your humble columnist.

What's to keep a prominent donor, business owner, insanely rich person to conduct a one-hour autograph session with a college athlete and pay that athlete $1 million or $2 million for his time.

Castiglione told me I was using hyperbole, yet still answered seriously, telling me he did not know what the new college NIL (name, image and likeness) marketplace would eventually bear for such ventures; perhaps not meaning to but nonetheless making the implication clear: there's nothing's to keep it from happening.

While that may produce its own set of consequences, what we did not discuss was how easily an NIL moment like that could become something promised to an athlete upon arrival, or merely alluded to and delivered upon arrival.

Would that be a violation?

Were it a violation, could a neutered and wholly unequipped NCAA govern the biggest and most moneyed college sport well enough to do anything about it?

Let me answer that:

Nope.

It's exciting, though.

It's great copy.

It fills stadiums and provides economic wallops universities, cities and states wouldn't know what to do without it.

It is also off the tracks.

Unsustainable.

Something's got to give.