We’ve got a major problem in college sports, and the “leadership” seems intent on gleefully burning in down.

I’ve been saying this for a while, but it was more in the sense of they’ve got to stop kicking the can down the road and do something before things get really bad.

But, after hearing what Mike Elko and Trev Alberts said yesterday at the SEC Meetings in Destin, we’re already at “really bad”.

College athletics, with help from some politicians, seems absolutely intent on setting itself on fire. If a regulation is put in place, it’s ignored. For instance, remember the $25 million salary cap that teams were supposed to adhere to? After LSU decided to throw $40 million at players this offseason, everyone else followed suit. That $25 million threshold is now a sad memory.

The same athletic directors that talk about the Wild West (until you tell them they said it, at which point they’ll deny saying it) are out there supporting expenditures that they’ve condemned elsewhere. LSU is the most blatant offender, paying through the nose for not only football players but professional players “recruited” by sleazeball Will Wade.

And they’re doing this with the full support and backing of Gov. Jeff Landry, who just can’t keep his hands of his purple and gold toy.

That’s a big part of the problem. Politicians in places like Louisiana and Tennessee see this new era of the transfer portal and NIL as things to take advantage of. They pass very permissible laws that basically give programs the ability to go nuts. The SEC can’t do anything about it. The NCAA won’t do anything about it. Congress hasn’t been able to get anything done, with opposition from the likes of Democrats who want the players to be able to organize into unions, the Congressional Black Caucus that is upset about redistricting in Southern states and wants the SEC in particular to do something about it, and Republicans who just don’t want the government to get involved in what they see as a private sector problem.

I’m not laying blame on anyone in Congress; in this case, they’re actually representing the people who paid for them to be there. Some programs want uniform regulations; others say they do and intentionally try to undermine it. Then others listen to boosters who are having a grand old time trying to buy everyone and don’t want anything changed.

And that’s a problem. There’s an arms race in college sports, and the money being spent on weapons (players) has exploded over the past few years. And it’s getting to the point where it’s untenable.

“If we don’t find a way to create some level of regulation in the market, a lot of people are going to go bankrupt pretty quick,” Elko said. “We’re two-and-a-half years away from having an NIL budget that’s greater than the TV revenue for our entire university.”

Unfortunately, some program and their backers want exactly that. They want to break other programs by outspending them. And, while they may think it’s great, it’s going to eventually jump up and bite them too when TV networks see something that’s so lopsided they’re no longer willing to pay big to air it.

Right now, college athletics is like a guy who has a gun to his head while screaming “STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN!” They’ve planted the seeds of their own destruction and seem to be happy about it.

“Do we want to be governed or not? College athletics is sending a strong message we don’t want to be governed,” A&M Athletic Director Trev Alberts said.

Most of the time, people who think they have better ideas or better routes to take figure out they may have made a slight mistake right before everything caves in on them. If anyone is looking for the future of college sports, they may find them happily skipping their way to the edge of a cliff, blissfully unaware of what they’re about to do to themselves.