We stumbled across this in our LinkedIn network last week, and it is a truly disgusting development that is going to bring about the end of college football as we know it: a pay-for-play application where a college athlete literally can do something good on the field—and get instant payments for it from the team’s fan base. We respect the author of this piece as someone we have known professionally since the mid-2000s.

There are so many ethical and moral issues of integrity associated with this that we don’t have the time to delineate it all, but needless to say that in a world where “influencers” are actually a thing, this development has the potential to undermine everything in college sports, regardless of whatever safety measures and protocols the governing bodies put in place. If this is was a professional sports thing, no one would care.

We know that shit is corrupt (save the NHL, of course). Baseball, basketball, and football have all had their moments with cheating, corruption, fixing allegations, rigged officiating, and suspect outcomes over the last handful of decades since the Olympics decided to chuck the amateur model. That really was the beginning of the end, or at least one of them. Yet to stain the college sports is akin to sacrilege. Here we are.

College football has had its issues for years; we know this. College basketball has had its issues, too, for years; we know this. College baseball and hockey remain pure, though, which is always our beacon of hope—they have perfect models for basically enabling real amateur athletes to get better and find their respective way to the professional leagues, while MLB and the NHL have the minor-league systems down.

We can just imagine the scenario described in the LinkedIn piece, though, or something like it: a kid scores a touchdown, goes to the sideline, posts on a social-media app that he won’t play anymore today unless fans give him $50,000 in the next 15 minutes … do the math. And then realize what doom we’ve brought upon our once-pure joys via the corruption and greed in American society. What a world we’ve created/destroyed.