Ubben: There is one clear way to stop the chaotic roster turnover taking over college football
By
David Ubben Jan 6, 2022
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The complaining is deafening and everpresent.
“It’s chaos right now. Tampering galore. Adults manipulating young men,” said Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney, long the most prominent opponent of the transfer portal, who recently softened his stance and offered Louisiana transfer O’Cyrus Torrence this week. “Education is like the last thing now.”
“Out of control,” one Power 5 coach told
The Athletic.
Neither is wrong. College football got a lot less exploitative in the past year, but it also got way, way more chaotic. In the past two months,
more than 1,500 FBS players have entered the transfer portal, seeking a new home to continue their college football careers.
As he built his new staff, Florida head coach Billy Napier hired former
NFL scout Bird Sherrill to essentially oversee all recruiting of the transfer portal. It’s currently a rarity, but it’ll become very common soon.
Oklahoma quarterback
Caleb Williams led Oklahoma to an Alamo Bowl victory on Dec. 29, then, less than a week later, turned down the opportunity to be the Sooners’ starting quarterback under new offensive coordinator Jeff Lebby in 2022. Like
Spencer Rattler, the preseason Heisman candidate he usurped as starter midseason,
Williams entered the portal.
Oklahoma’s response? It first
released an unprecedented joint statement extolling the benefits of staying. Then it flipped
Dillon Gabriel, who had
committed to UCLA and is now on his way to Norman.
Meanwhile, one former NFL quarterback
publicly offered Williams $1 million to go to Eastern Michigan, his alma mater. (Note: That arrangement, as phrased, is almost certainly illegal, although it’s highly unlikely to be an offer Williams accepts. Name, image and likeness deals cannot be based on pay for play.)
College football has barreled headfirst into a new world, and NIL money has teamed up with the NCAA’s now-allowable one free transfer to produce the single most roster upheaval in any one offseason in college football history.
There have been more shifting allegiances than in a season of “Cobra Kai.”
It feels a lot more likely to be a negative development for college football than a positive one, but college football today is a far less inherently exploitative enterprise than it was a year ago. That’s a good thing, even if the sport requires further adjustment to reach a serviceable stopping point for its current state of upheaval.
Preventing the sport from becoming more fair and equitable is never the right decision if maintaining the sport’s health comes at the cost of continuing to allow everyone involved to benefit except players.
In short: Player freedom is good. But this amount of turnover is not likely to help the sport, and it’s even more likely to cost players scholarships and degrees as they enter the portal but
struggle to find a serviceable way out.
The unprecedented player movement might leave fans less invested. It worsened an already barely sustainable quality of life for coaches, who are left recruiting high school prospects and now their own rosters and opposing rosters with players who elected to transfer.
There’s a fix, and it’s a familiar refrain: Pay the players.
It always has been the right thing to do. But now it’s the price of returning to some level of sanity in roster construction and maintenance.
College football, as currently constructed, leaves programs with zero right to decide where players are allowed to pursue their education and play out their careers. The free transfer was long overdue. Coaches weren’t subject to non-compete clauses when they left for better jobs or were told they weren’t good enough to continue doing their current jobs. And yet, unpaid players were. It was the definition of a power imbalance.
And while free agency has arrived in college football, it’s a lot more like an annual fantasy draft for 130 programs, especially for those who believe tampering is rampant. But there’s a reason free agency doesn’t run wild every offseason in professional sports.
Contracts. That pay real money. (Sorry for getting you excited about restricted, free labor, NCAA.)
That gives a program (dare I say, employer) a right to restrict a player’s movement without exploiting that player. College sports are at a crossroads: live with the chaos, tampering and impossible roster management or take the final step toward making college football a truly equitable enterprise and make players sign contracts that require them to remain at a campus for a set period and also allow them to earn money.
Now, the impact of NIL money on players’ free trips into the transfer portal might push decision-makers to finally employ a long-overdue fix.
Unlike NIL, there are a host of issues in turning the concept of player contracts into reality. Title IX is a hurdle. The entire economic structure of college athletic departments is a hurdle. Smaller programs might not be able to keep up. News flash: They can’t keep up now.
There are no easy answers to those fair questions. But college sports’ economic model long has been broken and is badly in need of a reset. And hurdles can be cleared.
Again, it’s not simple. But it’s the only way to calm the roster pandemonium.
And it’s the right thing to do, and when major athletic departments routinely clear nine digits in annual revenue, the “we don’t have the money” complaints ring extremely hollow.
“Finding the money” would require a budget overhaul that completely changes how athletic departments are run. That’s a good thing for the future of college sports.
And those who cry about the “professionalization” of college sports have an admirable amount of willful ignorance toward every other aspect of college sports. What, pray tell, is amateur about
getting paid $2.64 billion for six years of TV rights? And why shouldn’t athletes, whose work those companies are paying to broadcast, get a cut?
This amount of roster turnover every year isn’t a positive development for the sport. But there’s no going back now. And we shouldn’t.
The only way to fix it is to take another step forward into a place where college football should have lived a long time ago.