College football on a slippery slope with NIL
EVANSTON-When asked about the impact of Name Image and Likeness deals in college football, the first thing out of Pat Fitzgerald’s mouth was a joke.
“I’m jealous,” said Northwestern’s 16-year head coach. “I would have made a lot of money in the mid-‘90s.”
He’s right, of course. One of the biggest stars on the 1995 Northwestern Rose Bowl team that captured the nation’s attention, there’s little doubt that Fitzgerald would have been able to use his notoriety to put some money in his pocket as an undergrad.
However, as Fitzgerald continued to talk to a small group of media on Thursday afternoon at the Walter Athletic Center, it was clear that the ungoverned, Wild West of NIL is no laughing matter. It’s gone from a way for players to get compensated during their college careers to exactly what it was intended not to be: a recruiting tool.
“We’re on a rocket ship to inducement for recruiting,” said Fitzgerald. He then corrected himself, saying that the NIL rocket ship has already landed. “That’s there now.”
Plenty of evidence that schools are using NIL money to entice prospects is already out there. Several schools have formed collectives, groups of donors who pool resources to help raise money to pay players.
At Texas A&M, boosters are said to have committed some $30 million to NIL deals to help recruit players. It’s probably not coincidental that the Aggies, who went 4-4 in SEC play last season, landed the No. 1 class in the country in 2022, a group that included six five-star prospects, the most in the nation.
The biggest news around NIL, though, is the tale of five-star 2023 quarterback Nico Iamaleava. The Athletic recently reported that the Rivals’ No. 9 player in the nation has been promised $8 million to go to Tennessee. That will buy him a lot of ramen noodles.
Inducements like that are still technically illegal, but as Fitzgerald points out, “we’d be naïve to think that’s not happening.”
Fitzgerald didn’t have to point out the slippery slope that college football is on with NIL, and the danger of donors wielding all that power. The red flags are obvious.
What if, for example, Iamaleava doesn’t turn out to be the player that he is expected to be? Will Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel feel pressure from donors to play him, even if he isn’t ready? If he doesn’t win the starting job, will the starter demand $8 million? For that matter, will star quarterbacks around the country start asking for that much?
Fitzgerald wants to make it clear that he is in favor of anything that benefits players. “I think it’s awesome,” he said of the idea of NIL.
The problem, he says, is that “there are no guardrails around it,” so it’s already become something that wasn’t intended.
What particularly rankles Fitzgerald is that he and the American Football Coaches Association tried to warn college football power brokers before the rule was enacted last year. He sat in AFCA board meetings that foresaw that NIL deals would quickly devolve from college athletes signing jerseys or posting on Instagram for money while they’re in school, to a way to attract those players to colleges with promises of cash. But no one listened, or took any action, before it turned into reality.
So here we are.
Fitzgerald says that many players are no longer making a “40- or 50-year decision” about what is the best college for their futures. They are basing their choice on how much they’ll get paid now.
The NCAA, after fighting against NIL in court for years, seems content to remain on the sidelines, unwilling and/or unable to provide any guidance around NIL to rein it in. That task will probably eventually fall on the Power Five conference commissioners to regulate it.
But as of right now, no one is in charge.