We are back with a Thursday Thorns column for the first time in awhile, for no reason we can discern. But today we take on the sad state of college sports, again, with the reality of schools with deep pockets just buying their teams every year in order to “win” and profit from enabling fan bases desperate to gloat. In football this year, the award goes to Texas Tech, and in basketball, it might be going to cheatin’ Michigan.

In the not-so-old days of … you know … a few years ago, the NCAA schools had to recruit players and develop them, with the occasional transfer adding a little bit of oomph on the way to rebuilding a team. Now, it’s just about buying “student athletes” each year to reload and try to win a hollow crown, really. The Red Raiders were 8-5 last year after losing the Liberty Bowl to Arkansas. But they turned it around this year, eh?

Texas Tech won the Big XII for the first time ever, and this was also the school’s first conference championship in football since 1994 when a 4-3 record in the Southwest Conference got the Red Raiders a piece of a title. The school also won a share of the SWC crown in 1976, but its last outright conference championship? That was in 1955, and it was the Border Conference … and everything that name implies.

Yes, that’s right: no winning tradition here at all, yet now the team is in the College Football Playoff after sinking untold amounts of money into its program. Alums with cash to burn certainly can help a school recast its entire narrative overnight: in 94 years of college football, this is the first major achievement by this school’s football team. That’s not the issue as much as how it was done, because we’re all for underdogs.

When you go out and simply throw money at the problem, it’s the same principle as college students today using AI to do their work: there’s no process behind it to legitimize the experience and provide the sense of accomplishment and achievement. As the fictional Ian Malcolm noted, “… it didn’t require any discipline to attain it … You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could.” Bingo.

There may be instant gratification involved, but it’s unsustainable when so many others can do the same without much effort; when it can’t be replicated, guess what happens with the alums and fans in Lubbock, Texas? Their entitled, privileged, and spoiled attitudes will end up turning on the very same people who brought this initial success so easily, and the whole university basically will cannibalize itself. Watch for it.

This isn’t just about Texas Tech, of course. It’s about the college-sport landscape as a whole. We knew this was the beginning of the end years ago, and we stated it here. When most of the alums and fans realize their schools have no chance to compete with these colleges that spend money hand over fist to win superficially, they will tune out. Many people—us included—already have started doing so. Tick tock.