Now, money is the only scoreboard that counts.
NIL fused with the NCAA transfer portal in a dangerous way: with players free to move at will, loyalty to a team, a school, or a community has vanished.
Rivalries a century old have dissolved. The Atlantic Coast Conference, now home to Stanford, absurdly calls itself the "All Coast Conference." The traditions that bound generations to alma mater have been rewritten for television contracts.
It feels less like progress than like a Marxist inversion of meaning, where everything enduring must be stripped of its roots and remade for profit.
Downstream, the damage deepens. Youth sports were once the training ground for discipline and friendship. It is now a miniature economy. Every second-grader has a travel team, every weekend a tournament, every family a financial stake. The game has become a résumé or a lottery ticket with a scholarship and NIL as a prize.
And speaking of gambling, the betting conglomerates have arrived. Among Gen Z and Millennial men, bankruptcy is soaring, driven by the lure of sports gambling. The very activity that once taught restraint and teamwork now feeds addiction and debt.
Culture, at its highest, may not depend on sport. But if sport once served as a breeding ground for virtue and a binding love of city and alma mater, then its corruption marks more than the loss of games.
It marks the loss of meaning.
Go forward bravely,
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