College Football: What the Big Ten Stipend Plan Means for the Future of Football

The Big Ten Conference has made some quiet news by discussing an idea of giving players a stipend of around $2,000-$5,000 a month for football players.

This proposition is one that surprisingly has some support from the NCAA which has been adamantly against student-athletes receiving money of any sort in the past few years.

The biggest thing that this deal does is it ultimately means that there will be less sympathy for student-athletes that look for extra money outside of what the schools would give them.

Make no mistake, this is not like signing players to a contract for as much money as possible.

This will probably be a fixed amount of money every month for the duration of their collegiate careers.

But this will ultimately change the way all of college athletics are done.

What this could inevitably lead to is the same thing that people were worried about when the great college football realignment of 2010 happened: the separation of college football from the NCAA as a whole.

One reason is as simple as a piece of legislation from 1972 known as Title IX.

Title IX is part of the reason why some men's sports have to be axed due to financial problems instead of women's sports, such as the baseball and rugby programs at Cal-Berkeley.

If football players got financial stipends from the NCAA each month, Title IX which prohibits discrimination based on gender would possibly require such stipends to be paid in multiple other sports.

And even with such money-rich athletic departments such as Texas and Ohio State making nine figures of revenue, they would be running themselves into the ground.

To top it off, what happens to the schools that do not have the type of athletic revenues that the big schools have in the BCS conferences such as Utah or Northwestern?

If enough schools aren't able to do this, they could very well be done with the NCAA at least as far as college football is concerned.

It does seem odd that the NCAA would be behind this notion considering how the association holds 100 percent of the profits from all college athletics at the moment.

But the NCAA does need to do something because right now they lack credibility and a sense of power, especially after the most controversial offseason in recent memory.

Whether this is a way to get the good graces of the schools or ultimately giving in to what's going on right now with college football, the NCAA lacks the punch it once did.

The college game is very corrupt in some circles, from Ohio State's tattoo scandal to Auburn's pay-for-play scandal and in many places in between.

Like Batman, the NCAA doesn't seem to have jurisdiction. Only in this case, that's a bad thing for the NCAA.

The NCAA's investigating power is extremely weak which makes it much easier for schools to cover up violations. But occasionally, as was the case at Ohio State, stuff eventually leaks out.

At this point, it seems nobody fears the NCAA.

That means the NCAA needs to do one of two things: compromise or drop the hammer on all the violators.

And money drives the sport more than anything else.

With that being the case, whichever side the NCAA decides to take in supporting or opposing the Big Ten's plan is going to be the issue that ultimately tells the fate of college football forever.

More heavy-handedness from the NCAA could ultimately lead to the separation of the NCAA from college football.

For more college football news and information, visit The BCS Blitz and follow me on Twitter @bielik_tim.