The playing field in college athletics never has been level.
Some schools always have had more resources than their opponents and used them to lure better coaches and more-talented athletes to their programs. They play in bigger and better stadiums, work out in fancier weight rooms, stay in nicer hotels on road trips and travel in more luxurious chartered planes.
On the fields, playing courts, tracks or in the swimming pools, though, they all play by the same rules and have the same opportunity to be successful.
As scary as the new NCAA governance proposals for the power five conferences are to those on the outside looking in, like CSU and the 11 other schools playing football in the Mountain West, that's not going to change. Colorado State University can still line up against the University of Colorado, a member of one of the so-called "high-resource" conferences, the Pacific-12, and win when they meet in an Aug. 29 football game in Denver.
And that won't change, even when the Pac-12 and other power conferences — Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12 and Southeastern — adopt new rules this fall that they believe will allow them to take better care of their athletes, including providing scholarship that cover the full cost of attendance. There's nothing CSU or any other school not in one of the power conferences can do to change that, nor do they necessarily want to. CSU athletic director Jack Graham along with Rams coach Jim McElwain and the other 11 football coaches in the MW all agree that schools with higher revenues ought to use more of that money to benefit the athletes who help generate it.
What they don't want to see happen is those five conferences break away completely from the NCAA, as some had threatened to do if they were not given more autonomy, or make any other changes that would take away the opportunity MW schools now have to compete with them on the field and off. MW schools still want to be able to line up against the best teams in the country, with a chance to beat them. Wyoming is visiting Michigan State in football this season, San Jose State will travel to Auburn, Utah State visits Tennessee, and Fresno State will take on both Southern California and Nebraska.
"We've never had as big of budgets as other conferences and a lot of our peers that we compete against," MW commissioner Craig Thompson said last week at the conference's football media days in Las Vegas. "What we need to have is the ability to play against them, because you get 11-on-11 or 5-on-5, you don't know what's going to happen. If it's ever shut down or shut off that we can't compete against those people, then we have an issue."
Off the field, that means allowing conference schools to match what the five power conferences are doing.
"We can adopt those rules if we choose to," Graham said, "and it's very likely we will."
That doesn't mean every school in the MW will be able to provide those benefits, only that those who can afford to do so won't be restricted from doing so by conference rules.
That's an important distinction.
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