NIL and the transfer portal are entwining demons of college athletics.
They happened about the same time, but athletes being paid for their Name-Image-Likeness while allowed to transfer and not sit out a year have taken the corruption in college sports to a new level.
UNC football coach Mack Brown said so in his pre-spring Zoom conference Tuesday.
“Somebody on a national committee said there’s so much cheating within NIL,” Brown said. “And there’s so much tampering. Having it tied into the transfer portal even makes it worse because you can leave tomorrow for a deal. That’s just not the way this thing was supposed to be.”
The confusing and ungoverned practice of having third parties paying athletes NIL money, on its own, is a veritable playground for payoffs. The NCAA has washed its hands of it so, generally, universities are left to police how and what is being done.
Athletes making thousands of dollars on NIL sponsorships are part of the recruiting pitch to prep stars as is raiding other schools for their best players who might be tempted to transfer.
“We can’t promise anybody any money for play,” Brown said, “but just about every transfer I talked to was being offered money. So it was a little ridiculous. We’ve got to find an answer here, to put some guidelines on this, or we’ll never see college sports again the way we’ve seen it.”
North Carolina coach Mack Brown watches a replay on Friday, Nov. 26, 2021, in Raleigh, N.C. Brown shared his thoughts on Tuesday on how the combination of name, image and likeness compensation and the transfer portal are reshaping college football’s recruiting landscape. (AP Photo/Chris Seward)
The urgency in Brown’s voice indicated the problem has become whether any, if not all, of the toothpaste can be put back in the tube.
“Everybody’s looking at it, and the problem is how do you fix it and how do you fix it quickly?” Brown went on.
It is worse in football, where managing 100-player rosters from the season to spring practice to summer training camp has become nearly impossible. Coaches can’t decide how many kids to sign in their next recruiting class, or transfers to pursue, because they don’t know how many who are in the program will leave, suddenly.
“I’ve been told the only thing we can explain to a recruit or his parents is what opportunities our players are currently getting, and how that works,” Brown said.
The stories may differ from one school to the next.
Some are enlisting big corporations to provide millions of dollars in NIL money to spread around to athletes and recruits. Brown said UNC is not among them, using a strictly donor-based program called Heels4Life.
“Recruiting people off your team and trying to pay them money is not best for the sport, not best for the kids,” Brown said. “It’s not what we all grew up in this business for.”
Photo via Photo by Rick Kimball/Irish Sports Daily.
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