Mississippi State football coach Mike Leach will find many fans of the game who agree with him and don’t like it when college players decide to skip their school’s bowl game so as to not risk an injury that could hurt their NFL draft stock.
“You’ve got an obligation to the place that helped build and develop you and finish it out in the bowl,” the Bulldog coach was quoted as saying. To not do so, according to Leach, is a betrayal of a player’s teammates, coaches and fans.
There is no doubt that when star players on a bowl-bound team end their season early, it robs the bowl game of some of its glamour and interest.
However, as Blake Toppmeyer, the Southeastern Conference columnist for USA Today points out, one group that has no right to grouse about it are college coaches, who will dump their school and their players in a heartbeat for a more lucrative offer.
Just this year, as Toppmeyer notes, at least six college head coaches, including three from high-profile programs, abandoned their bowl-bound teams to take other jobs, leaving an interim coach to try to hold everything together.
Toppmeyer also dug into Leach’s own past and found the coach has a mixed record when it comes to sticking it out to season’s end with the teams that helped him advance his career. When Leach was hired by Mississippi State in 2020, he did coach his previous school, Washington State, in its bowl game before departing for Starkville. But two decades before that, when Leach landed his first major head coaching job at Texas Tech, he scooted out of Norman, Oklahoma, where he was the offensive coordinator, before the Sooners could play their bowl game.
Just as with coaches who resign prior to season’s end, the players who opt out of bowls are doing so because they think it is in their best financial interest. Although it doesn’t happen often, there are occasions when players suffer serious injury in a bowl game. Such an injury could potentially cost a top-ranked player millions of dollars on an NFL contract. And unless they are on one of the four teams that have qualified for the college playoffs, they know that whatever bowl game their team is in will be modestly followed and quickly forgotten.
College players, without a doubt, have become more mercenary than ever. Deciding whether to play in a bowl game is a rather modest manifestation of that attitude. Changes in the rules to allow players to transfer more easily to other programs and to negotiate with companies for use of the players’ name, image and likeness have turned these athletes — or at least the most talented ones — into professionals for all intents and purposes.
College football has become a microcosm of the NFL. Players at both levels want to help their teams, but they are also highly motivated to help themselves. They know the window of opportunity to make money in their sport is relatively brief for a player — a lot shorter on average than a coach’s.
Fans of college football might not like it when players don’t finish what they started, but it’s to be expected in a sport where money, especially TV revenue, strongly influences what everyone involved does. Coaches and schools have shown for decades that their top priority is their own bottom line. Why should the players be expected to be any different?
- The Greenwood Commonwealth
