If private equity money seeps into the Big Ten, the Ohio State Buckeyes and Michigan Wolverines will be on a separate tier from the conference's bottom-feeders, the Rutgers Scarlet Knights and Purdue Boilermakers.
Cleveland.com's Stefan Krajisnik made sure to differentiate the haves, like Ohio State, from the have-nots, like Rutgers. Krajisnik also shared the silver linings for the B1G's underbelly if private equity money flooded the conference.
"If teams are allowed to sell advertising via jersey patches, some schools (Ohio State) would find much more lucrative deals than others (Rutgers)," Krajisnik wrote.
"Instead of those schools finding separate deals, the conference — with its new private entity titled Big Ten Enterprises — could sign a league-wide jersey patch deal.
"The money would be dispersed in a tiered manner, meaning Ohio State and Michigan would still make more money than, say, Rutgers or Purdue.
"However, the profit for the smaller brands would likely still be larger than if those schools signed deals individually."
Before college football becomes an even bigger business venture through the infusion of something known to kill entities, or at best, strip them of their raw, unique traits, the sport needs to get a hold on NIL. Thus far, it's changed fortunes across the country, but there's no rhyme or reason to it. There's certainly not been clarity.
OSU AD Ross Bjork has navigated it well, putting the Buckeyes ahead of the curve in the pay-to-play era. It's unclear if things would change with a conference partner with a vested interest in its biggest brands. It sounds like it would, but who knows what kind of competitive balance regulations would be put into place in this brave new world.
Either way, the rich will get richer, the gap will widen, and college football will continue to be a bellwether for how the world at large is moving in these uncertain times we live in.