At this rate, college football fans might not recognize the game in a year or two.
The sport has been hit by waves of change since 2018, and they’re threatening to become a tsunami.
Now, granted, the biggest of those recent changes — loosening restrictions on players transferring from one school to another and allowing athletes to benefit financially from their name, image and likeness — were well-intended and overdue.
In the past, it never was fair that schools could make millions of dollars off “amateur” players who weren’t allowed share in the profits produced by their talents, or that college athletes were restricted in their ability to change programs, while coaches could come and go as they pleased.
Those inequities were addressed with the opening of the transfer portal, and the rules change granting NIL rights to players last summer, as the NCAA folded in the face of legislation in a number of states.
The NCAA’s current one-time transfer rule allows immediate eligibility for first-time transfers moving to a new school. Previously, transfers who hadn’t already graduated were required to sit out a year before playing for their new team, unless they received a waiver (some of which were granted for pretty flimsy reasons, while other requests were denied). The new rule evened up the playing field.
Still, the loosey-goosey way in which these reforms have been enacted has resulted in some unintended consequences.
Athletes unhappy with not getting enough playing time, chafing at waiting their turn to start, or looking for a better chance of showcasing their talents for the pros, are jumping in and out of the transfer portal in a way that makes it very difficult for coaches to manage their rosters.
Also, the creation of school-specific “collectives” of donors — who raise and pool funds to entice high school prospects and transferring players, by promising big NIL paydays — has turned the sport into what many have compared with the “Wild West” — meaning wide open and lawless.
That Wild West vibe even has coaches drawing down on each other at high noon, as in the recent case where Alabama’s Nick Saban openly accused Texas A&M of buying its No. 1 ranked recruiting class, and A&M coach Jimbo Fisher reacted with a snit fit of a press conference in which he slammed “narcissist” Saban and hinted that Saban’s dealings with recruits should be investigated. The SEC reprimanded both of them.
Fisher also disingenuously denied that NIL millions had anything at all to do with his program’s sudden rise in the recruiting rankings. (It’s not for nothing that Fisher is known as one of the sport’s biggest hypocrites.)
As for UGA, some of its supporters also have gotten on the NIL collective bandwagon. (Collectives theoretically operate independently of the university and athletic departments, but the close connections between many of these supporters and the schools make it a fuzzy area.)
However, head coach Kirby Smart doesn’t like this trend, saying recently he’s worried that recruits may end up “going to the highest bidder.” The Georgia coach added: “If we could control that some kind of way, it would be much better.”
Jere Morehead, president of UGA, also is president of the SEC and a member of the NCAA’s executive committee. He agrees with Smart, lamenting this week that “NIL has evolved in a way that was not intended. … I think we have to make sure that guardrails do exist, that it doesn’t become a situation where student-athletes are making choices based upon the highest bidder in choosing colleges.”
Said former Georgia quarterback Aaron Murray, who heads up a company that connects current college athletes with NIL income opportunities: “I think the NIL rule, along with the ability to play right away once you transfer, was just too much all at once. I think that has snowballed into some issues we are seeing across the country, where kids are having a great year at maybe a smaller school and then getting $3 million to go play somewhere else, leaving teammates behind. But, you can’t blame them. I’m all in favor of NIL, but I’m in favor of it being done correctly. A lot of these collectives, in my mind, are essentially just saying ‘give us money and we’ll funnel it to players and they don’t really have to do anything.’ That was not my vision of NIL.”
Morehead and others in the NCAA keep hoping that some sort of federal legislation governing NIL rights will be enacted by Congress, but the odds of that happening any time soon appear slim.
The NCAA did make a relatively vague announcement recently that it considers the collectives to be “boosters,” which means they must follow the rules governing what boosters are allowed to do in terms of recruiting — which, basically, is nothing.
(UGA season ticket holders know that, thanks to the notes we periodically receive from the university reminding us to stay out of the recruiting process.)
“NCAA recruiting rules preclude boosters from recruiting and/or providing benefits to prospective student-athletes,” the NCAA Board of Directors said in a recent press release.
In other words, any promises of NIL compensation that are being made to unsigned recruits by collectives allied with a particular school definitely are a violation of long-standing NCAA rules.
Supposedly, the association is looking into some of the more high-profile cases where collectives appear to be offering money directly to prospects, but no actual investigation of a program or collective has been announced, and the NCAA doesn’t have as large an enforcement staff as it did in the past, so, even if a probe is announced, it’s likely to be slow going.
As for the transfer portal, Morehead noted that “student-athletes are jumping in and out of the portal in a way that’s creating a lot of instability for teams and their team rosters, and that’s not really good for the sports that they are a part of. So, I think, again, we need a reasonable framework to govern the transfer portal.”
Limiting when an athlete can enter the portal to a couple of times a year is a popular idea among college football’s coaches. (Under current rules, an athlete can enter the portal at any time, but, for college football players to be immediately eligible at their next school without a waiver, they need to enter the portal before May 1.)
Todd Berry, the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, told ESPN that the coaches will propose implementing two windows — one after the regular season in the fall, and the other after spring practice — in which players can put their names into the transfer portal. ESPN reported that members of college football’s NCAA oversight committee consider such a change to be a “foregone conclusion.”
However, quite a few observers of college athletics will be surprised if the NCAA really goes all-out on enforcing its booster rule regarding NIL. The thinking is that, ever since U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted last summer that “the NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” the association has been wary of taking on the really controversial money issues surrounding college sports, for fear of being hit with an anti-trust suit.
But, despite those fears, if college football’s Wild West is going to be tamed, a couple of things need to happen. First, the NCAA (or something replacing it) needs to crack down on collectives and make it clear that, as boosters, they should not contact, negotiate with or make offers to unsigned prospects, or else the schools will be penalized. If, as individuals, these businesspeople want to sign NIL deals with players after they have signed, that’s different.
Basically, these collectives need to be forced out of recruiting.
As for the transfer portal, I agree with the college coaches who want it limited to a couple of windows of opportunity. The current year-long model is too chaotic. Two chances a year to change programs is sufficient.
Bottom line: If the NCAA is going to continue to exist (and, yes, that’s a discussion college athletics probably needs to have), then it needs to come out of hiding and address these issues with specific action. Waiting for Congress to act means doing nothing at all.
As for the future of college football, it might be time for the Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision schools to go ahead and act on a proposal that’s been in the works for several years: splitting off from the NCAA for governance of the sport, an idea that has been endorsed recently by a couple of Power 5 conference commissioners.
Then, the schools themselves need to tackle the portal and NIL problems head-on. Otherwise, the Wild West could get even wilder.
