Mack Brown is 72 years old. His first season as a college football player was 1969 and his first year as a college coach was 1973. He is the only person to win 100 games with multiple programs, first at Texas, then at North Carolina, his current place of employment, and in 2005, he led the Longhorns to an undefeated season and national championship.
He has been involved with the game as a player, coach or analyst for all of his adult life, which means his words have credibility when he discusses the game he loves, like earlier this year after a loss to rival North Carolina State.
“The world of college football is so typically untypical right now,” he said. “There’s nothing that is the same as it was two years ago.”
Some believe that’s good. Others contend it’s awful. The truth is, both are right.
College football is changing faster than anyone can keep pace with, and it doesn’t figure to take its foot off the gas pedal anytime soon. USC and UCLA joining the Big Ten? Northern California rivals Cal and Stanford jumping to the Atlantic Coast Conference? A transfer portal that allows participants to switch schools without sitting out a season? Players being able to profit off their name, image and likeness?
These things were unfathomable a few years ago, but today they’re accepted as the price of doing business. Plaintiffs call it greed, defendants call it survival. The truth says both are right.
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College football is going through an evolution that is simultaneously ugly and beautiful. It stinks that things like tradition and geographic rivalries are going by the wayside, but it’s amazing to see player empowerment. There was never any credible reason for universities, administrators and coaches to cash in on the work of “student-athletes” while acting as if the workforce should be happy to get a “free” education.
But this is also a scary time for the sport, largely because a strategic plan is missing. There is no central governing body to oversee NIL issues. Some schools have multiple collectives that operate under different rules, with coaches publicly imploring their fans to donate.
It used to be that coaches could take a day or two to celebrate big victories, but not anymore. After this season’s triumph over North Carolina, NC State coach Dave Doeren was as focused on bringing in dollars as he was tallying wins, believing it is becoming less likely to have the latter without the former.
“I’d love to see 5,000 people donate $1,000 (each) to our NIL and get us to a point where we can recruit, retain and develop and have a program in the NIL world where the guys on our roster are able to benefit from that,” he said. “There needs to be a financial commitment.”
Schools are not allowed to directly pay players under the current rules, which could be changing if NCAA president Charlie Baker has his way. He presented an economic proposal Tuesday that, if ratified, would allow Division I schools to directly pay athletes through NIL agreements and uncapped education-related funds.
For now, though, university collectives manage NIL payments, which is why nearly a dozen prominent coaches have publicly solicited contributions from fans.
“It’s literally open free agency for all of college football, and so our guys are no different than anyone else’s that are going to be in that conversation,” Mike Elko said before leaving Duke to coach Texas A&M. “(NIL is) a piece. It’s not the whole thing when you talk about a retention strategy, but it’s certainly a piece of the retention strategy.”
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One complication is that there is no universal oversight involving NIL agreements, which sometimes results in players signing paperwork without fully understanding what’s included.
For instance, as a junior defensive tackle at Florida, Gervon Dexter Sr., signed an NIL deal with Big League Advance Fund II, LP that reportedly called for him to be paid $436,485 during an “initial term” and an “extended term.” Included in the agreement was a provision that Dexter, now a member of the Chicago Bears, would allocate 15 percent of his pretaxed NFL earnings to the agency for 25 years. Dexter filed suit in September to invalidate the agreement.
Then there’s the case of Jaden Rashada, a highly recruited quarterback who committed to Miami in June 2022, signed with Florida six months later, and then asked for his release in January reportedly because of broken promises with his NIL agreement. Rashada is now at Arizona State.
Until there is greater regulation, horror stories are sure to continue because athletes are a lot like coaches; they’re going to chase the best deal. That said, not every player transfers over money. Some, like Ohio State quarterback Kyle McCord, enter the portal for a better fit elsewhere or a chance at more playing time.
The reaction was predictable from some fans after more than 500 FBS scholarship players put their names in the portal Monday when the window opened. There were cries of college football being ruined and loyalty being nothing more than a seven-letter word.
Interestingly, those are likely the same fans who will cheer the loudest when their favored team secures a potential impact player through the portal.
Bottom line, college football is changing and will continue to change, and anyone who believes this is the beginning of its demise is kidding himself. People said the same thing about the NFL when it emphasized defenseless-receiver rules (You’re making it flag football!) or when it experienced one of its semi-regular off-field controversies (I’m never watching again!). And yet its viewership numbers continue to dominate the ratings.
The masses are not going to turn away from college football. It’s too deeply impeded in the fabric of communities across the country. I would argue the relationship is more personal, more familial. How many times have you heard a city being referred to as a “university town”?
If fans begin to struggle to tell the difference between colleges and the pros, the likely reason will be money. College football has already raised the possibility of breaking away from the NCAA to form its own league and have greater autonomy and more control of the purse strings, which is why coaches like Brown are uncomfortable with what the portal and NIL have wrought.
“The (transfers) that you all know about are all asking for money, and that’s a problem,” he said. “We don’t have much money.”
They might not have it now, but they’ll need to get it if they’re going to keep pace in the ever-changing world of college football.
(Photo of Mack Brown: John Byrum / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
2023-12-07 18:53:09
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