Hayes: April 16 is college football's doomsday. Brace yourself accordingly
Imagine a handful of NCAA employees standing around a fire hydrant, dutifully believing clean, fresh water is the only way to wash away the sins of the past.
So they crank open that hydrant and the rush of water, bursting with new life after lying dormant for more than 100 years, screams from its purgatory, reaching and flooding everything in sight.
And now they can’t turn it off.
“Just a really stupid system,” Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said.
Hang tight, bud. More stupid is around the corner.
The spring transfer portal opens April 16, and because the NCAA lost 2 critical court cases in the past 4 months, college football is on the verge of complete chaos.
Because after those 2 losses in court, there are no restrictions on the formation and foundation of NIL deals, and no restrictions on player movement.
Translation: When April 16 arrives, anyone can pay any player any amount of money, and any player can freely transfer to any other school — no matter how many times he has previously transferred.
Within the confines of the transfer portal, of course.
And by confines, I mean, one of the many bad decisions that continue to be implemented by a governing sports body that has no clue how to turn off the damn spigot.
There’s a 15-day “window” to enter the portal, but once you’re in, you don’t have to make a decision about where you’re playing until the first day of classes in August. The art of the deal, baby.
And if you think that’s stupid (it most certainly is), wait until teams/coaches desperate to win big and reach the Playoff and/or save their jobs begin tampering with other rosters and throw huge NIL deals at impact players to get them to flip.
It’s sort of like the OG of high school recruiting, prior to the new frontier of college sports — where late “flips” meant a player magically found a bag of cash in an Amazon locker. Allegedly.
Now players can openly and freely negotiate with other schools, and if you thought the past 3 years of change was the Wild, Wild West, wait until the spring transfer portal opens.
“I would say blatant cheating,” an SEC coach told Saturday Down South. “But there’s no such thing as cheating anymore. There are no rules.”
Beginning April 16, there will be — in the parlance of NFL free agency — legal tampering until the beginning of the 2024 season. Because there are no NCAA rules governing tampering, and the last thing the NCAA wants to do is try to legislate it and lose in court again.
So unhappy players — or just players who want a better financial deal — can shop themselves to the highest bidder. As long as they can academically move from one school to another, and classes they’ve taken can transfer, and they’re on track to graduate and stay eligible.
Because, you know, a school has to have standards after all.
Look, players earning off their name, image and likeness isn’t the problem. Unlimited free player movement is.
We saw the beginnings of this movement in January, when former Alabama offensive tackle Kadyn Proctor left the Tide for Iowa and signed an NIL deal to play for the Hawkeyes.
He enrolled in classes, and according to the Iowa Collective Swarm, “received a portion of his Swarm Inc., contracted payment from a sponsoring business.”
Then he told On3 that he was headed to the spring transfer portal, and would re-enroll at Alabama, no doubt with another healthy NIL deal.
This is the play now. If you’re not happy for whatever reason — financial or emotional — you walk and find another team/coach who makes you happy.
“It’s good for (players) financially,” Kiffin said. “I don’t know that it’s really good for them that they can leave every time something goes wrong. They’re just gonna run no matter what.”
But instead of proactively finding a way to control the looming storm, the NCAA doubles down with more reactive moves that will eventually lead to more problems. The latest idea: unlimited coaching staffs.
Because 10 assistant coaches isn’t enough, especially when you’re babysitting 85 players who may or may not bolt at any time. All in the name of player development, of course.
It’s all a shell game of procrastination. A stall tactic to avoid staring down the barrel of the inevitable.
There’s only one thing that fixes this mess, but that involves universities sharing billions in media rights revenue with players and finding a suitable employee/employer system that won’t be challenged in court every other month.
It’s utterly comical that college football has avoided sharing massive revenue deals since the explosion of media rights in the early 2000s. But instead of proactively doing the hard work to develop a logical and coherent system that includes collective bargaining, we’ll just keep reacting to the latest fire.
I can see the NCAA’s latest reactive move now: “Players who sign an NIL deal with a school must play for that school for at least 1 season.”
Yeah, that won’t lose in court, either.
For 3 years now, the NCAA — and by NCAA, I mean the collective universities — has avoided the inevitable with hope.
Hope that the NIL market will flatten, or that boosters will stop giving when they don’t see a favorable rate of return.
Hope that NIL and free player movement will keep players happy — and blissfully unaware of the annual billions on the table.
Hope isn’t a plan, everyone.
It’s like opening that fire hydrant and hoping it won’t flood and damage everything in sight once you can’t turn it off.
You can’t keep losing in court, over and over, and continue to expect different results. There’s only 1 way out of this mess for universities, one system that allows control of player movement — the contagion threatening the entire system.
Stop stalling and share revenue with the players.
That, or keep doubling down on stupid.
In a recent interview, CKS said he’s fine with NIL and has no problem with players getting paid. He went on to say his problem is with coming out of spring ball and not knowing for sure who was going to be on the roster in the fall. He wants to know for at least a full 12 months who is and is not going to be on the team. I believe most coaches feel the same way and probably also want an end to tampering with their rosters. There needs to be guardrails and minimum commitments. We need to stop thinking 18-22 year olds are perfectly mature adults capable of making rational decisions that are in their best interest long term, especially in the face of unprecedented sums of money and the ability to freely switch team.
Agree, and we need to stop thinking the NCAA deserves to continue running and policing college football. The NCAA is inept. I see no real reason why it can’t continue running other sports, but it’s wholly incapable of running CFB due to the size and scope of the product on the field and the revenue it generates.
Whatever form the next phase of CFB governance takes will be better than what we’re seeing now.
One option to keep the NCAA in charge would be to have student athletes become employees of the university, but that would most likely have to include paid positions for all mens’ and womens’ sports. Maybe they could find a way around it, but the non-revenue generating sports could become very expensive if not handled the right way, and if the NCAA excluded them, we’d probably see another round of lawsuits, and the NCAA doesn’t handle those well.
The alternative is for the NCAA to cede control of D1 CFB to a playoff committee very much subservient to the broadcast networks. There are good things and bad things that would result from it, but it’s a way to improve on the “NCAA has no balls” issue.
Kirby has it right. It’s not just a disservice to coaches that they don’t know how their team’s players will be until fall semester starts. It’s also a disservice to the student athletes.
What’s coming next month is going to be very bad, but probably necessary to either get the NCAA to finally fix the problem or cement consensus to move away from the NCAA for governance of CFB.
Either way works. It can’t stay like it is.
Exactly. What the hell do these guys think is gonna happen when they offer some kid 10 million in oil money?
He’s never going to know 12 months in advance who is going to be on his roster. The portal isn’t going away.
How dare you contradict King Kirby!
Stand by for incoming rounds from the drooling UGA hordes!
FINALLY. A FOOTBALL ARTICLE, WE ARE SO BACK.
M’lady, in just a few weeks we will see which schools have the deepest pockets.
This is a safe space from Donk due to him/her not having the testicles or knowledge to step outside of the Bama comments. It’s truly pathetic and all fanbases (even his/her own) see it.
Have you seen the new platform (I forget the name) that allows recruits to enter their name into the database and allows boosters to throw as much cash as desired for the recruit to commit? Basically bidding on athletes at this point, which is what NIL already is.
Good to see you back around ma’am, hope all is well with you.
I haven’t seen that platform. That’s wild. I’ll have to look into that and see what it’s all about.
NCAA wrecked itself by challenging TN. Dug its own grave. They dug their own grave.
I’m doing well buddy. Been busy lately between work and kids. My son’s lacrosse season just got started so that’s a 4 day a week thing. Main thing I’ve been doing on this site is pushing Donk to the brink of a mental meltdown. That’s been pretty enjoyable. I should go post something off the wall on a Bama article and see what happens.
How rude of me. Hope all is well with you and yours m’lady.
I think TN is the bad guy here. Not the NCAA.
VFL – The platform is called FanCave just fyi. Also glad everything is well for yall, hopefully your son’s season goes smoothly with no injuries. Donk is as Donk does, still the same old retard screaming “bAmA eNvY” at everything.
JTF – While what Tenn did might’ve been illegal… court rulings have virtually rendered the NCAA invisible when it comes to actually enforcing rules. Case in point Kadyn Proctor.
Well melch, you join an association, in this case the NCAA, and agree to abide by the rules. Am I right so far? Then when you break those rules you sue the association that you voluntarily joined because you don’t like the rules. Isn’t that weird?
That’s how sad the NCAA is… they have no control over their own rules.
JTF, from everything I read, TN was doing XYZ (just like other schools including Georgia and other current elites) and then the NCAA said hey, you can’t do that. There was never a line in the rulebook that said they couldn’t do XYZ but NCAA pressed the issue and TN said hold my beer.
There was literally nothing TN was doing that every other school within the NCAA was doing. Saban talked about it. Deion Sanders is a walking talking NIL deal. Just because YOU dislike TN, doesn’t make them anymore in the wrong than other schools. We just have a spine to tell the NCAA to f*&k off.
Well that’s just not true. But, if you makes you feel better……
Online Bidding for players. As Lane Kiffin stated “It’s Free Agency, just like in the NFL”. But buying the best elite athletes does not always equate to winning big.
Note” Jimbo Fisher @ A & M buying that class of elite athletes…They bought ’em but did not win. It will still require a competent Head Coach & Staff to form these elite athletes into what’s called a “Team”.
Not sure if you’re blind JTF or just ignorant. Every single school talked to kids about the potential to make money at that respective school and in doing so, used NIL as a recruiting tool. If you don’t believe that, you are ignorant.
Sure, Boosters from every school are flying recruits around on private jets in direct violation of the NCAA’s NIL rules. But the NCAA decided to single out TN. OK.
His vision is fine …
“FINALLY. A FOOTBALL ARTICLE, WE ARE SO BACK.”
Are you now going to talk about puffing peters?
That f#cker is so adorable. Comes running up to my comments demanding attention like a biitch. I only give it to him for personal enjoyment.
I’m sorry for your reading comprehension issues.
NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL athletes have agreed, via their respective unions, to restraints on transfers.
Next lawsuit coming, a player(s) suing the NCAA for restricting transfers to only December and April and not giving players carte blanche to leave anytime for any reason; mainly money.
Like the days when the NY Yankees used to take all of the then-Kansas City Athletics’ decent players just before the start of the World Series if a CFB team is in the running for a playoff spot why not poach a player with a solid PFF grade from a school with no chance at making the playoffs mid-season or later?
Without the consent of a CFB Players Union, why would the courts allow any restriction on a player’s ability to earn money? Not only in football but in every other sport.
What we see today is a recipe for coach crazy-making that could get worse.
its not on the verge of total chaos because they lost two court cases. Its because they had no vision and didnt get out in front a loooong time ago when TV rights ballooned and coaches salaries ballooned and university revenues ballooned… There havent been any enforceable rules and plenty of teams bypassed those unenforceable rules. This isnt just happening now. Its been happening since NIL day 1. It stinks. I hate it. Give me the good ole days any time. But those are gone and I cant blame anyone for trying to make as much money as they can. Its called capitalism. I have no idea how this mess will get reigned in or if it will. So far college football has still been pretty enjoyable. When that ceases for me then I will move on and leave it to the younger generations to enjoy in whatever structure exists.
Well said.
fuzzy…That post just may be your best ever. Keep up the good work.
You nailed it fuzzy. If anything could make me start watching the NFL again (which I won’t) it would be the complete demise of college football as we know it. I guess I’ll take solace knowing at least LSU had a few good years – and a really entertaining personality for a coach – in the final days.
TIGAH…Coach “O” and his personality are likable. Even though his Win/Loss record at LSU was not great he did bring that 2019 Magical-Season to fruition. Even some of us Tide fans were cheering for Joe Burrow & Co. in 2019. It was wonderful to just behold a SEC team that had a run like that.
It seems like collective bargaining is the only workable solution at this point. That will be another mess in itself.
“Imagine a handful of NCAA employees standing around a fire hydrant, dutifully believing clean, fresh water is the only way to wash away the sins of the past.”
Are they dogs?
They have the brains of a god d@mn pit-bull. Probably.
Why take God’s name in vain on a public site. Why say that at all?
They have the brains of a pit bull. Probably.
Better?
Yes. Thanks.
The sky is falling again. I agree paying the players is the only way to get free agency under control. But free agency is not the end of college football. It just makes coaches earn their salaries.
There is really no solution. As soon as there is something that is agreed on, whatever it is will fail because traditional cheating will resume. If anyone has a clue about labor law you will already know what real headaches that brings. It is one thing to manage relations with an adult workforce and an entirely different thing to engage in collective bargaining with teenagers and their assorted agents, handlers, parents, etc.
There will have to be a union, and hopefully a longish term contract. We will eventually have a strike, which will send people over the edge. The players will always want a larger share. It’s going to be a mess. We may as well just leave things as they are for as long as possible. The NCAA has never been much for getting ahead of situations anyway.
I think the teenagers would grow up in a hurry. The system would be basically the same as the NFL system, and NFL owners would expect them to honor their college contracts. Most of these kids know what’s expected of them and behave accordingly.
bayou…just wait until these teenagers begin paying the IRS a chunk of their NIL $$$$$. They will grow up fast at that point in time. I can hear it now…”Taxes ? I spent all my money already”. Now they will learn something called “Getting a Loan”.
Maybe these 18-22 year olds do need another coach. Or a DI like boot camp. Being coddled since 8th grade surely hasn’t helped them.
Something no one seems to be talking about is that all these rulings have opened a work around to scholarship limits, right? You don’t have to get a player an actual scholarship. Just get them NIL deals that cover all their costs. No real impediment to just grabbing everyone you can as long as you can afford it.
Why give athletes a scholarship anymore if they are being offered high 6 figure, and 7 figure deals to come to whatever school they want to go to on a particular day? They could pay their own way to school instead of taking up space with a scholarship.
It’s wasteful on the academic and university side of things.
That’s what I’m saying. That 85 player limit won’t matter anymore. Teams could easily grab all the players they want if the money is there. Then, this would all have the opposite effect on parity. Teams with money will grab everyone.
Pretty much NFL free agency in college. Who can give me the most money? I don’t care about the school or team I leave or go to.
Yet, the NFL is even more popular than CFB. We old fashioned fans tend to make too much of the school affiliations.
For the modern fans it’s just about winning and losing as a team. Who cares who the warriors are, as long as our tribe beats your tribe to a bloody pulp.
Except that the NFL has salary caps to keep the above concern from becoming a reality.
The NFL also has a draft
At the center of the college sports paradigm is the concept of the STUDENT-athlete (emphasis on the student part.) To date, universities have held the line on to only using their own funds in strictly defraying the costs to a student-athlete of attending, progressing through and eventually graduating from their university with a degree, in exchange for their full participation in extra-curricular activities called “sports.”
The student-ATHLETE (emphasis on the athlete part) may profit from his/her on-field fame by entering into NIL promotional agreements with individuals and organizations outside of the universities. NIL compensation comes from sources outside any universities they choose to attend and play for.
The Transfer Portal today is driven by the ACADEMIC calendar, not by any particular sport’s calendar. The fall TP window opens up at the end of fall semester and players must sign their new scholarship and NIL agreements and be enrolled in classes before the spring academic semester begins in mid January. The spring TP window opens up at the end of spring semester and players have to sign their new scholarship and NIL agreements and be enrolled in classes before the fall academic semester begins in mid August.
As long as no universities (like Notre Dame) go rogue, decide to turn their student-athletes into employees and starts paying them for their athletic services whether they attend classes or not, the scholarship/NIL agreements model for CFB will settle down and become workable mainly because there is a limit to the depth of booster pockets (big oil money aside.)
The glaring weakness of this paradigm lies in the huge TV deals specific conferences and individual universities are entering into for football only. That wad of cash may tempt individual universities (e.g. Notre Dame) to over emphasize football at the expense of all other scholarship sports and begin using TV money to pay their football players, thereby gaining a NY Yankees like recruiting advantage over other schools, particularly public universities that are constrained in what they may do to compete athletes by state and federal legislation.
When the Tennessee NIL lawsuit against the NCAA finally gets decided or settled in court, the last strings the NCAA has to limit what individual universities may do in the realm of player compensation will be cut. At that point, the Notre Dames of the CFB world will be liberated to do whatever they deem desirable in terms of football player compensation and commensurate TV broadcast deals. THAT will be the day the real wild-wild west of college sports will begin in earnest.
The NCAA has rules on academics. Schools can’t be a part of the NCAA if their players aren’t taking and passing classes. I don’t see that changing even if some major schools form a super league and break away from the NCAA.
Part of my point is that by the time Tennessee and Virginia get done with the NCAA, their “rules” will have about as much import as the laws in the Confederate Constitution.
Conferences, by virtue of controlling the TV money, will still have some clout over their member schools. But, ND (for example) has its own TV football contract and isn’t a member of any conference. If they choose to start paying their players in order to field an all-star roster, all the other conferences will have left as leverage is their option to avoid scheduling ND. However, such a move would be tantamount to an act of financial war.
ND is probably a poor example, but it makes my point that, after the NCAA is fully neutered, it’ll take just one arrogant university to break ranks on the 100+ year agreement of not paying players to bring real chaos to college sports. ND is certainly arrogant enough.
Once football breaks ranks on that old paradigm, all the other college sports will be sucked into the vortex created. Not much good will come out of it.
Without rules, you have anarchy. Fans aren’t going to support that for long. If these schools, state legislatures, and biased judges don’t come up with a plan, they will just kill the sport. Is that really what Tennessee wants? I don’t think so, but not a lot of foresight is going into any of this.
If and when the court system gets around to declaring that Athletes are employees, and I think they eventually will, that will make any rogue University’s decision moot.
I think TN has shown time and again that they do not want rules.
Which athletes? Schools will drop sports like crazy if they declare them all. What about schools without media contracts? How would they pay them? The players will have to get that ball rolling with unions. What happens to Title IX? Paid employees will most likely be exempt. This will all take quite some time, and it’s going to get ugly. Very ugly.
Marine, I agree with you about the need for rules. However, I don’t believe most P2 universities are ready to give up half or more of their TV loot to the football players in exchange for rules. Threatened chaos in the form of a few rogue schools trying to buy NCs will be needed to force them to come to the negotiating table.
Never underestimate the greed factor when arrogant people are in charge of the purse strings and the rules. That is how we ended up in this mess in the first place.
JTF, we football fans take a very dim and parochial view of other college sports. However, for the court system to declare that athletes are employees, entitled to a larger share of the TV pie, they have to deem a free education, including room, board and a stipend for other expenses, insufficient compensation for representing the schools at ALL sporting events.
While that may be true for football players, the universities can clearly show that they put ALL their revenues from ALL sports into a single pot and then divide it up among all the sports proportionally, in the form of scholarships and other expenses to run the programs. A football scholarship is not worth more or less than a swimming scholarship.
Note that excess salaries for some coaches are funded by boosters, via the same mechanism that now funds NIL for players.
So, I don’t see any bleeding heart judge declaring football players employees in order to turn them into instant millionaires at the expense of losing funding for Title IX ladies’ sports.
Free TP player movement and full exploitation of NIL opportunities will be compensation enough for football players… at least until some arrogant boosters drive some power hungry AD to unilaterally expand the meaning of a valid stipend expense doled out to some players. Some may claim that buying parents a big house near the university, so they can watch junior play ball, is a valid expense for junior to expect as part of his scholarship.
That’s when the real chaos will be unleashed!
Unfortunately I think you are naïve in what the left will do to burn down established institutions.
What does those have to do with ‘the left’?
Money motives are pure pro-capitalism and always lean hard right.
Many will disagree, but the employee model followed by unionization will be a better system than the NCAA. When the NCAA had power, they still had to investigate and enforce AFTER the fact. Under Fair labor standards act, state and federal labor laws, and union contracts; there will be a level of accountability and transparency that doesn’t exist now. Plus, union contracts work both ways…. the school, now the employer, would have a say in time window when players move from job to job. For example, employment may be on a 12 month pay cycle and work performed in a standard 10 month cycle, allowing two months for transfers.
How about the cost factor? How many Universities do you think can afford this and continue providing Olympics sports?
I should also add the distastefulness of spending the off season reading about negotiations: “in progress hoping to stave off the pending strike.
I’m so diapointed in the NCAA. They could have had a plan and/or ruling (either way) once that Obannon case left the Supreme Court. Instead – they did absolutely nothing and is trying to play catch-up and the courts are shooting them down.
HENCE – The mess we are in now. And – it sounds like it’s about to get worse
How far can things go?
Missouri
Football recruits can start earning NIL money once they sign with an in-state schools.
.
Heading to no limits on high school recruiting soon. The “in-state” clause is just bizarre. Yep, anything goes is coming in ways we can’t imagine.
“Imagine a handful of NCAA employees standing around a fire hydrant, dutifully believing clean, fresh water is the only way to wash away the sins of the past.”
Imagine using the same line in multiple articles on SDS.
So how many comments on here are reposts from other previous articles? My post about halfway down through all the posts was one I posted on a column weeks, maybe months ago. I didnt repost it today.
Matt are you reposting my stuff? Thats copyright infringement. You owe me $20!
Gotta love it:
Media hack complains long and loud about coaches ability to change teams at will vs. players inability to do the same.
Demands unlimited free transfer.
Gets it.
Hates it.
You sound like a child or my ex-wife.
Doomsday? Hyperbole, yes. I don’t see very many starters on good teams moving. Good players on bad teams may understandably want to move to better teams when there is an opportunity. Young players may move for the opportunity to start somewhere else instead of showing patience. Neither situation is doomsday.