College football payoff: What was once considered cheating is now standard practice in NCAA

You want a good college football team?

Buy one.

Not kidding. Find some 1-percenter alums — top of the money-pyramid guys (and gals) — and get them riled up. They’ll purchase your star quarterbacks, receivers and linebackers, who then will lay waste to foes.

You remember when SMU got the so-called NCAA “death penalty’’? It was 1987, and the school had cheated so well (and flagrantly) with what would now be paltry amounts of money — buying players with cars and cash — that from 1981 to 1984, the Mustangs’ record of 51-5-1 was the best in all of football.

Star running back Eric Dickerson got paid, but so did many other players. It was considered cheating back then. Bad, bad. In fact, SMU’s penalty was so severe that it didn’t even play football in 1987 and 1988.

But look who’s back! Because it’s all legal now. SMU essentially bought 18 Power Four transfer players this year — from Georgia, Ohio State and Texas — finished 11-2 and made it to the national championship playoff tournament. Sportico reported the SMU backroom power move thusly: “One gathering of a dozen backers brought together a net worth of more than $15 billion. In the room that day was Chiefs owner Clark Hunt as well as his uncle Ray Lee, who’s worth an estimated $10 billion.’’

Indiana, a school that had one winning record in football in the last 17 years, suddenly is 11-1 and ranked ninth in the country. How did it do it? New coach. New portal players. New way.

Name, image and likeness pay is the carrot. As eternally crabby former coach-turned-congressman Tommy Tuberville said with disgust, “Look at Indiana. They went out and bought them a football team, and look where they’re at.”

Look at it.

And learn. Few people like that college players are now age-group professional athletes (I have long suggested “young pros’’ as their title rather than the silly mouthful NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision players), but the courts have mandated it. When adults treat the games as big business, the college athletes are, by reason and law, workers who must get paid.

Of course, once you buy a star, you have to keep him happy or he might enter the transfer portal and take a better offer elsewhere. South Carolina freshman star pass rusher Dylan Stewart recently agreed to return to the Gamecocks next season for a reported $1.7 million. South Carolina quarterback LaNorris Sellers gets a reported $2 million.

Michigan liked beating Ohio State so much this season that to continue the -whupping, it seduced superstar high school quarterback Bryce Underwood to decommit from LSU and play for the Wolverines for the astounding figure — reported even by Underwood himself — of $10 million. Take that, Nuts!

Conversely, Ohio State is so enraged over Michigan players’ attempt to plant their school flag in the middle of the Buckeyes’ field after last month’s gigantic 13-10 upset that state Rep. Josh Williams introduced a bill to make such flag-planting a felony. You’ve been warned, Michigan. And, of course, Ohio State is out buying more guys to maybe someday actually beat Michigan in a game.

It’s an arms race, folks, and a free-for-all. The NCAA is clueless on how to stop it. That organization had its fun for more than a century, never willing to let the young working men in on the piles of cash the old men were accruing.

“This is the plantation mentality,’’ said former longtime NCAA chief Walter Byers in his 1995 book, ‘‘Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes.’’ Thanks for that, Walt, seeing as how for 40 years you made the rules.

Weird, nasty, suddenly chatty old pro Bill Belichick will be, bizarrely, coaching North Carolina in his first college venture. Why? Because college ball is now the pros. Consider that Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders has an NIL figure reported at $6.2 million, while 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy will make $985,000 this year.

You want chaos? Marshall coach Charles Huff abruptly took a better deal at Southern Mississippi, 36 of his players entered the portal, including all three quarterbacks who played this year, and Marshall bowed out of the Independence Bowl because, basically, it doesn’t have a team.

I think we should salute Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter, the wide receiver/cornerback from Colorado. The kid makes some good coin, but, man, did he earn it, playing both ways. In one game, Hunter was on the field for an astounding 161 plays. Hope he punched the time clock for overtime. In America, we get paid for work.