Dabo Swinney proven right about NIL, NCAA must act soon

Dabo Swinney had a good handle of where the current NIL system was going early.

by Ryan Kantor - Contributor - Tue May 03 08:00:06 GMT-04:00 2022

Back in February, when we were first beginning to see how the newly available NIL (name, image and likeness) opportunities were impacting college football, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney shared some words of warning:

“The portal is good from the aspect of kids being able to go somewhere else. I think that is good. I just think that there should be some parameters. The combination of the portal and NIL and tampering, we’ve created this environment in college football that’s not healthy. Any adult that is really involved in it knows that. Very few people will say that because they are worried about getting criticized or somebody is going to write a bad article about them. But it’s just not healthy…

“We have to have some type of barrier to prevent them from making irrational, emotional, decisions based on the wrong things, and more importantly, it would stop the tampering. The tampering we have in college football is sad.”

As you might expect, many in the media and on Twitter used it as an excuse to fling digital arrows at Clemson’s head coach. Alas, just three months later, news of a superstar’s reported NIL-driven transfer has made it clear that Swinney was right. The nation’s top returning wide receiver, Pittsburgh’s Jordan Addison, is expected to enter the transfer portal. Reportedly, the reason he is doing that is because USC staff or boosters contacted him about bigger NIL opportunities should he transfer to Southern Cal.

As of this writing, he has not officially been announced as entering the transfer portal. Nevertheless, the story has begun to change the narrative about NIL.

When NIL was initially explained to college football fans, it was said to be about local businesses – guided by free markets – offering legitimate marketing agreements to popular athletes. Perhaps a star player doing a local TV or radio spot. The previously banned autograph sessions and football camps would offer players an opportunity to make money and be in the community. Unfortunately, in just a matter of months it has devolved into a vanity spending competition among mega-donors to buy the best roster.

To be clear, you can hardly blame the players. Even seemingly elite college players can end up not getting drafted. Justyn Ross is a perfect example. He played like a superstar as a freshman, regressed a bit the next year, and then struggled through injuries the last two seasons and went undrafted. As such, you cannot fault Addison for jumping at the chance to get the kind of money that, with wise investing, will ensure him a strong financial future.

While the players must do what’s best for their future, college football must do the same. Almost everyone now sees what Swinney saw several months ago, NIL needs significant regulations. It's not that NIL is bad, nor is the transfer portal bad, but in combination without proper regulation, college football is rapidly devolving into free agency.

While this is good for players in the moment, it is not good for future players. Scholarship offers to high school players are down. In some extreme cases, like Utah State’s 2021 recruiting class, most of the incoming players are transfers. With star players from non-blue blood programs like Pittsburgh and Georgia Tech transferring to blue bloods after years of development at their former college, will those programs turn into feeder schools? If so, can we really expect fans to maintain the intense interest that has made college football what it is? If this continues and players' ties to the universities erode, the popularity of the sport will likely suffer.

It is unfortunate that the NCAA has put itself in such an utterly weak position at this critical point for the sport’s future. Years of enforcing archaic amateurism rules that banned players from having their own YouTube channel, getting involved in hot-button political issues, and failing to punish the schools who are actually cheating – most notably in the North Carolina academic scandal – undermined their credibility. Even a divided US Supreme Court united to vote 9-0 against the NCAA when they foolishly restricted players from receiving paid internships.

We all saw during the pandemic that the conferences are unlikely to work together to solve sport-wide problems. As such, it likely must be the NCAA, with a new incoming president, to put together rules that allow players the benefits they deserve (and that the US Supreme Court guaranteed), while regulating the process enough to maintain the integrity of college football and prevent it from rapid decline. Now, we must earnestly hope they can find the courage and leadership where they so publicly failed before.