Ben Gilbert

Because if kids are playing flag football in other countries, it's only a short number of years before we see a meaningful presence of NFL stars who are not from America because they sort of grew up playing flag.

And then when they hit

13, 14, 15 started playing tackle football.

And that's going to be huge for the international growth of the game.

Yep.

But we're a short number of years away from, I think, seeing a giant breakout star who started in flag football because it was a part of their school or YMCA program from another country.

Also, flag football is going to be in the Olympics.

Yeah.

You could not have made it more disorganized and done more of a disservice to their sport, their game, than how this has all played out.

I mean, if your goal is pay the players, there are a thousand better ways to do it than the way it has actually played out.

So yeah, what actually happened?

Okay, so forever, college football, it was illegal to pay players because they were amateurs and they can't receive gifts or cars or endorsement deals or anything.

And then there was a Supreme Court ruling a few years ago where name, image, and likeness became legal to monetize.

And what sort of ended up happening is these booster groups popped up where groups of alumni or people with vested interests in the school

Yes, would pool money, not through the school, completely different than the school.

And they had funny sounding named organizations and LLCs and websites that looked a lot like the school's colors, but weren't actually affiliated.

And they would do these weird deals where they would tell the AD, the athletic director or the coach of a team, hey, we've raised X money.

Go tell that high school recruit that if that recruit plays for you, then we will do a private side deal with them to pay them money while they come and play for your team.

So you have this strange structure happening at the very same time that they created the transfer portal, which for a very long time, the college game had this role where if you're going to change schools, you have to sit out for a year.

So it was a big penalty.