The college football season is in danger. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Big 10 has decided to postpone its football season to, at earliest, the spring of 2021, the Pac-12 has called off all fall sports for the remainder of the 2020 calendar year, and several non-Power 5 conferences. Most notably, the Mountain West and Ivy League, as well as the FCS, have cancelled seasons. The financial ramifications will be monumental.

According to an ESPN report, the cancellation of the football season would cost the sixty-five Power 5 schools (the schools that make up the SEC, Big 12, Big 10, ACC, and Pac-12 conferences) an estimated four billion dollars--$1.2 billion from a loss of ticket revenue. However, aside financial losses, the NCAA's very existence is in jeopardy.

For years the National Collegiate Athletic Association has presided over college sports in a manner that has stripped players of likeness rights, exploited the physical talents, and been called a "modern day Jim Crow." The organization has also been involved in numerous suits over the illegal use of likenesses. Most notably, the famous Ed O'Bannon case in which the NCAA was ordered to pay $46 million in attorney fees after a U.S. district judge ruled that the NCAA cannot prohibit athletes from profiting off the use of their names and likenesses, a prohibition that had been in place since the organization's conception.

Amateurism and an empirical-like control has been what has maintained the NCAA's reign over college athletics for so long. But in the year 2020, we have to ask ourselves what purpose the NCAA serves, especially in the sport of football, where the term "NCAA" is never used.

It seems as if the historically oppressive organization only serves to hand down sanctions and suspensions. Even right now as those in power are laboring for a solution for playing the upcoming football season amid the coronavirus pandemic, where is the NCAA? Not making decisions. That is being left up to the individual conferences, which is why the state of college football is in such disarray as we speak. Conferences like the ACC, Big 12, and SEC are still pushing forward with plans to play in the fall while four other conferences have pulled the plug; it't total chaos.

Amidst all this, NCAA president Mark Emmert has failed to provide real leadership, consistently deflecting to the conferences for any real decision-making. The only real presence the organization has had since the pandemic hit is, in the words of ESPN's Heather Dinich, "that of advisor, issuing medical guidelines and protocols, while adjusting rules and granting waivers to provide conferences with more flexibility than usual."

The National Collegiate Athletic Association serves little purpose in 2020, especially in the sport of football. As seen during the pandemic, the power lies in the hands of conference commissioners. Conferences are the entities that are deciding the fate of the fall football season, some smaller conferences following the leads of the Power 5 leagues.

Furthermore, as the power is shifting from the governing NCAA to the conferences, the student-athletes are becoming increasingly influential and a more formidable threat to the NCAA. As the war against amateurism wages on, the NCAA becomes even more imperiled because amateurism is dying. Players are now being paid for the organization's use of their likenesses, and state governments have made decisions that further cripple amateurism.

Backtracking to the present circumstances, if a college football season is cancelled at some point, the NCAA's dysfunction will be brought into the spotlight not just because the real leaders are the conferences, but also because the formation of a players union seems immanent.

A players association already exists, but the pandemic, which has been the cause of some players opting not to play this season, is giving athletes a renewed sense of power, power that they desperately need in their fight for appropriate compensation and likeness rights. The cancellation of the 2020 football season could be the proverbial tip of the iceberg that could bring the reign of amateurism to a collapse.

Don't get me wrong, I want a college football season to be completed just as much as the next fan, but if a cancellation means the interests of the student-athletes and their appropriate compensation is taken more seriously - subsequently toppling the NCAA -then I will sacrifice one season of football during a global pandemic.