Take a bow, college sports. You are broken in almost every way possible.

It’s easy to attack the leaders of college sports for allowing their industry to spiral into all-out dysfunction, but give them credit for one thing.

They managed to come up with arguably the worst business model on the planet.

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Here’s how it works:

– Create an open bidding system for coaches and athletes that is not regulated by anyone, allowing them to change jobs at will, regardless of the length of their contract, effectively encouraging them to exert their influence to get a better deal every year.

– Don’t pay players for their ability to play football as that makes them employees. Instead, paying for their “marketing rights” avoids employment conversations but complicates legal recourse in contract disputes, ultimately leaving schools more vulnerable to deception and breach of trust.

– Create a system that requires a third-party clearing house to approve trades that don’t comply with their rules, and then instructs that clearing house to ignore most of the rules they wrote because they might lose the lawsuit, creating a system that supposedly regulates payroll costs and ensures competitive balance.

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– Asking your most successful and loyal customers, the donors, to continue throwing money at these players without any real benefit other than the fleeting pleasure of watching them play without knowing whether they are worth watching. Then, after those players decide to play leverage again, ask your wealthiest fans to contribute more money to a new group of players who will leave after a year.

Take a bow, college sports. This is true brilliance at work.

While the College Football Playoff and March Madness always feature high-profile drama, including the highly anticipated semifinals on Thursday and Friday, the inner workings of college sports have never been more unpleasant, disorganized and destined to be an anvil of failure hanging around the necks of those in charge.

About a third of our college football players are in the transfer portal.

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We have quarterbacks on contracts worth $4 to $5 million — basically the NFL rookie salary of the No. 11 pick — but they’re not even guaranteed to become stars.

We have schools petitioning for rules and guardrails to give the ecosystem sanity and structure, using marketing firms to create financial packages for players that would allow them to exceed the revenue-sharing caps agreed upon in the House v. NCAA settlement last year.

We had a situation in Washington where quarterback Demond Williams signed a revenue-sharing deal to stay in school, then turned around and announced he wanted to enter the transfer portal because he might have gotten more money elsewhere (cough, LSU, cough). Stay tuned to see how this issue is resolved!

We have a college basketball product open to professional athletes playing in the NBA G League or Europe, including former NBA draft players. Good luck to the NCAA lawyers, because inevitably people who have signed NBA contracts in the past want to go back to college and get big paychecks, but are denied eligibility because that is An arbitrary bridge is too far.

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We have the NCAA holding its hands on most of these things, waiting for Congress to pass legislation giving it the legal protection to enforce its rules. Good luck given that congressional lobbying efforts have yet to bear fruit since former NCAA president Mark Emmert started them more than six years ago, now that we’re in another election year, and various domestic and international crises are likely to occupy much of their time.

Oh, and as bad as things look based on the public, the environment behind the scenes is much more chaotic and distrustful.

Here is an example.

A power conference administrator passed along a document signed on Dec. 3, National High School Recruit Signing Day, that looked like a no-deal agreement between the Tennessee Volunteers and the recruit who committed to the Vols that day.

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But the reason the contract is circulating among angry executives is that it provides an $85,000 stipend, a paid-for apartment in Knoxville and a $25,000 agent’s fee without asking for anything in return and was allegedly signed by the athlete’s grandmother.

Tennessee’s rivals viewed it as a blatant attempt to circumvent revenue-sharing caps. The document was sent to the NCAA, SEC and the College Athletic Commission, which is now the responsible party overseeing the matter. No one knows what to do.

Sources connected to the deal told Yahoo Sports that the document was written in error by an inexperienced agent who didn’t know whether the state allowed minors to sign contracts and terminated the contract later that day. Yahoo Sports has reviewed a copy of the termination letter as well as the more standard NIL agreement dated December 5 signed with the player.

The point here is not that anyone did anything wrong. But it does provide insight into the inner workings of a business that was so unregulated that errors like this were allowed to happen in the first place, while being a story of potential cheating so credible that other schools are actively trying to go after Tennessee’s CSC enforcement officers.

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Once again, it’s worth emphasizing that the entire purpose of the House settlement and the creation of the CSC was to put entities like volunteer clubs out of business and prevent such transactions, or at least create a solid wall between recruiting activities and the money flowing through the supporter-funded collectives.

After millions of dollars in legal fees, the power conference couldn’t even address that part of the problem once the lawyers started fighting back and accusing them of collusion in limiting revenue.

So what do you have now? In the talent acquisition system, some play by the rules, some find loopholes to do things they think they can defend in court, and others completely ignore the rules and have the audacity of a weakened NCAA/CSC to come get them.

Because there is so much ambiguity about who pays players through revenue sharing and who pays through third-party commitments, which may or may not be entirely within the rules, coaches and administrators at many schools feel that their only option is to exploit the fragility of the system to their own advantage or else be exploited.

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No one should want this.

But it’s the product of many choices college presidents, athletic administrators and NCAA leadership have made over the years to avoid facing the reality that they need to tear the amateur model apart and start over.

It is now clear that they would rather go through this chaos than create a system that pays players fairly, treats them as professionals, and holds everyone accountable to the contracts they signed through collective bargaining.

This is just one more choice, and both paths are difficult to take. There will be real challenges in trying to build this system for college sports, but as we can now clearly see, as things stand, there are no magic solutions.

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Every time they tried to fix the leaks, six more popped up from the bottom of the boat. So each year they just accept the abyss sinks a little deeper, hoping to see a bottom they never see.