College football is booming, chaotic and more confusing than ever

Texas offensive lineman Nick Brooks hoists the Lone Star Showdown trophy after the Longhorns beat rival Texas A&M in Austin last November. Photograph: Alex Slitz/Getty Images Is college football healthy? It’s a seductive question, one that now comes up every year around this time. Actually, it never recedes, so it’s just with the sport all the time. It’s also the wrong question, because whoever answers it is free to choose their own adventure. The television ratings are way up there in the galaxy. Money rains down on dozens of programs and thousands of players. Marching bands continue to march. Yet a lot of teams are stranded by realignment or an economic inability to keep up in a transfer arms race. Their fans – actually any team’s fans – may be exhausted by escalating asks for their dollars. If you have been checked out of the sport for a while ahead of this weekend’s first set of games, you may feel like your body has been frozen for a few decades. Indiana, ( yes, really ) are the defending national champs, fresh off a 16-0 season that puts them on the list of the handful of best teams ever. Texas Tech, once likened to Siberia by a former coach who is now a US senator , are the fiercest program in the Big 12. Ole Miss are good for the first time since integration. At least Ohio State and Georgia are still powerhouses. Meanwhile, college sports leaders are talking apocalyptically. “We’re on a runaway train and it’s not slowing down; it’s just getting worse,” West Virginia’s head coach says . We live in the “wild west”, Georgia’s president says , among many others. “The whole educational system is going to go out of business because of this,” claims Donald Trump , who may be unaware of how much money major college football programs generate for their universities. (Shocking that he’d be light on details, I know.) All of these groups are pushing for a now-stalled Senate bill that they think would calm the chaos. To be fair to the cynics, it’s not like everything’s fine. The NCAA has lost a handful of eligibility cases, or suffered temporary injunctions in them, that raise questions over whether the governing body can make its own rules. LSU are trying to play a tight end who just got cut from his NFL team , as the SEC and other conferences race to outlaw such things. Texas Tech gave a real effort to starting a quarterback who bet on his own team’s games, and was set to succeed before a misguided legal maneuver doomed them . Players are paid but lack anything resembling a union or national standards over their pay and workplace conditions. Washington State and Oregon State are among the teams left out in the cold by conference realignment. They now make a fraction of the money they used to and can no longer compete with rivals Washington and Oregon, at least not consistently. The implicit message to their fans is, “You do not matter.” Then again, it’s not like “the sport” is in existential peril. At the top, things seem great. Michigan just set an all-time college football ticket revenue record despite having a mediocre team. The TV ratings for the regular season and championship game were a bonanza. EA Sports’ popular video game is back on shelves and has spawned a big social media subculture. It’s not just the handful of best teams, either. At the power conference level, things have tightened. Once-dominant Alabama are struggling, while longtime outsiders are thriving. The two highest-rated quarterback recruits this season landed at Houston and Vanderbilt, two schools far away from blue-blood status. Fans at UCLA and Virginia Tech are dreaming of their schools being the next Indiana, and that’s no longer a ridiculous concept given how the past few years have gone. And, as herky-jerky as the current economic system is, you’d be strained to make a good argument that it isn’t an improvement. Roster-building has become precarious, and fans are understandably bummed that there are no longer guarantees or even high likelihoods of seeing a player develop across a four- or five-year career. The sport’s leaders can, should, and won’t get serious about recognizing players as employees and collectively bargaining with them in a fashion that would yield a more stable structure. But for now, players do get a piece of the enormous revenues they generate as a class, and that’s better than the organized theft of their wages that schools and NCAA leadership perpetrated for a century and a half. Thank the heavens, there will soon be actual football to discuss instead of the vaguely definable state of things. The season kicks off Saturday, appropriately enough several thousand miles from US soil, when Bill Belichick’s North Carolina face Texas Christian University at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium. Alabama will try to rediscover their exceptionalism after two years of being just another SEC team. Lane Kiffin will try to justify the hype and the $40m roster that surround him after his move from Ole Miss to LSU. USC will try to make something, anything, of Lincoln Riley’s tenure before the school fires him or he leaves. Indiana and Texas Tech will adjust to life as the kind of team everyone wants to beat. The race for the playoff spot reserved for non-power teams should be electric, too, after most of last year’s contenders for that spot lost both their head coach and a lot of players to power schools. The sport will stay fun, the gains for players will be real, and the frustrations with all of it will be real and endless.