Brock Huard: ‘College football in its current form is unsustainable’

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On Tuesday’s edition of Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk, FOX college football analyst Brock Huard dove into why he thinks the sport is, in this current form, is unsustainable.

Here’s a transcript of what Huard, who quarterbacked the UW Huskies in the 1990s before a career in the NFL, had to say in a conversation with guest host Mike Lefko.

Transcript: Brock Huard on college football in its current form

There’s a sort of hollowness that comes from the portal and all these opt-outs and everything that now comes into the fold of college football. And it’s not only hollow, I think it is totally unsustainable. This model that we have right now – and this is channeling a little bit of (WSU football coach) Jake Dickert, this is channeling a little bit of Oregon State, this is channeling a little bit of (Montana State) yesterday, who saw three of its starting offensive linemen go in the transfer portal because they’re gonna get a chance to transfer out of Bozeman and into the FBS at some level. They’ve taken their time and their opportunity and their development at Montana State and said, ‘Thanks but no thanks. I have no business or desire to finish my career here. I’m gonna go on and I’m gonna look out for totally my best interest.’ And that’s all this is right now.

It just feels like – and this comes from somebody that’s not just an old man yelling at the clouds: “Oh, it was so much better then. Oh, when we used to play last century, there was something about paying your dues and sacrifice and all that.” No, I understood the old ways were archaic, too. It was out of whack, it was out of balance. Some of the ridiculousness of the 900-page NCAA rule book, that was not sustainable either, and it proved that, and the Supreme Court proved that and said this is dumb, this is antitrust, and this is not how our country works with the people that are playing the sport getting very, very little, while others are making a lot.

So this is not an argument to go back to the way it used to be. It is just simply telling you that this current model of everybody out for themselves, and only themselves, is not sustainable. If it was, the billion-dollar industries that are pro sports would follow this model. If free agency every single year was a good model and a sustainable model, don’t you think the NFL and Major League Baseball and the NBA, who are all about greed and all about money and that is all that it is driven by at the end of the day, don’t you think they would take on those models? I think they would have, but they know that this is not. In their leagues, collectively bargained amongst the players and the owners, they know that there’s got to be guardrails, that there’s got to be constraints. Otherwise you get the kind of chaos that we’re getting right now in college football.

Listen to Huard’s full thoughts and even more of the conversation with Lefko in the video at the top of this post or the podcast at this link or in the player below.

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