In today’s college sports world, it’s difficult to go even one day without hearing the terms “transfer portal” or “NIL.”
Both of these changes to the sport were presented as progress. At the heart of both, they are beneficial to athletes, which should always be the main priority. However, more adaptations or changes are needed. In solving a few problems, rules around NIL and the transfer portal have created many more issues.
The issue here isn’t that the powers that be in the college football world aren’t creative enough to solve their problems. The issue is that they are too creative and found solutions to issues a long time ago. It doesn’t matter what new rules and regulations the NCAA or whatever governing body comes up with because college football is too good at breaking those rules.
For years, many of the rules in college football have been less of a hard salary cap and more like a luxury tax; it hurts a bit in the bank account, but it’s a calculated cost. While people may give lip service to the rules of the sport, in practicality, they are more like guidelines that can be ignored or worked around, which coaches, administrators, or others have been doing so for most of the time the rules have been in place, whatever they may be.
Name, Image, and Likeness
NIL was a good idea in theory, but it really became a legal way for boosters to funnel money to players, which was already happening at a lot of schools
It would be great if college football paid players for their performance. It’s more complicated than this, of course, but if every player got a base salary, starters got paid more, and there were performance bonuses for all-conference selections, award finalists, and so on. Everyone would be compensated, and it could be uniform across the sport.
However, even if this were instituted, it wouldn’t matter. Now that paying players through NIL exists, it won’t stop. If schools paid players legally, there would still be under-the-table money coming from boosters as there is now.
And this is because even before name, image, and likeness were created, bagmen were prevalent within the sport. Therein lies the actual issue. In many schools, getting money and other benefits to players has been done in illegal ways for decades in one way or another. NIL was an attempt to allow players to be compensated in some way, but the legal way still paled in comparison to the illegal way. Due to this, NIL just became the agreed-upon avenue to get money for players to come to a specific school. No matter what the rule is, the solution to getting players money has been established, and it will continue.
Transfer portal
The path of the transfer portal is a bit different than NIL, but the end result is the same.
For years, players were pretty much at one school for their college careers. There were transfers each year, but unless they transferred down a level, they had to sit out a year before they were able to play.
The problem was that coaches could move about freely. Head coaches had no restraints if more money came calling from another school, and many assistants changed schools every year or two. Players got left behind, and it wasn’t always for the better. If a new coach came in with a new system, the player may no longer be a good fit and be stuck at the end of the depth chart.
Over the past decade or so, public opinion began to shift as fans realized this wasn’t fair to athletes. Then, some individual cases started to gain support, and a hardship waiver was born. Putting it as simply as possible, if a strong reason for transferring could be made, immediate eligibility was granted. This gained momentum quickly as hardships were realized or manifested, and lawyers were able to argue precedents.
In response, the NCAA recognized what was happening and granted a one-time transfer rule. They basically legalized what was already happening and hoped it would give athletes a mulligan to find another school. They even created a transfer portal to streamline the transfer process and match players with schools. But instead of producing satisfaction, it led to a slippery slope. Once players were allowed to transfer one time without any penalty, it was only a matter of time before multiple transfers were allowed. And that isn’t the only troubling by-product of transfer rules.
Allowing players to find better fits is a good thing. Allowing a way for bigger schools to have another chance to recruit players they missed out on the first time around is harmful to smaller schools and harmful to the sport.
Players commit to a new school within days of entering the portal, which illustrates they have a destination in mind when they enter, meaning tampering is abundant through backchannels and third parties.
Now that there is an established way to contact and entice players to leave one school for another, it will be difficult to get a handle on the transfer process. Tampering may not exactly be legal, but it’s rampant and being left unchecked, rendering it practically legal. Players being able to look for new opportunities is a good thing, but schools being able to incept the idea in the heads of players is not. And now that it’s started, it’s hard to see it stopping.
As long as the benefits of breaking the rules outweigh the consequences, the status quo will continue. As long as the people on the receiving end are punished more harshly than the people actually breaking the rules, people will keep working behind the scenes to find loopholes. As long as the alternative solutions suggested are lackluster compared to the gains from rule-breaking, college football will continue to operate one way in the spotlight and another way in the shadows. And the sport is comfortable with the dual-front because it is too good at breaking the rules.
