Mack Brown identifies biggest issue with NIL, transfer portal

North Carolina head coach Mack Brown has been around college football for a long time. But the newest changes in the sport have been some of the most drastic

The Tar Heels head coach also isn’t afraid to call it like he sees it. He did that recently about NIL and the transfer portal.

“The biggest problem is tampering,” Brown said after a recent practice. “Now people say well, why don’t you say who’s calling them? Well, the agents are calling them now so you can’t even figure out who it is. It never gets back to you. The players just come and tell you. I’ve been contacted by somebody’s agent and that’s impossible to trace. We might have a really good player leave Saturday or Sunday. I don’t know. But I haven’t really felt that since January.”

Brown has talked about tampering previously in regards to Drake Maye, a potential top pick in next year’s NFL Draft and one of the best players in college football. Brown said in December that teams were tampering with Maye during that time trying to get him to leave Chapel Hill.

The head coach wouldn’t name the teams at that time but said if you wanted to know who take a look at the recruiting rankings.

“I do feel like things are settling down with NIL,” Brown said. “There was a lot less talk about it this year than there was last year. People are having to be much more careful now because the NCAA is watching it very closely. They’re asking more questions than they did last year. We’re back on track. We got a new boss and they don’t like all the stuff that’s out there that’s being talked about. I do feel like that they’re gonna make some changes fast. They’re talking about making players ineligible if the player agrees to take some money and they can prove it. So I said hurry. It would help us a lot if you’ll hurry up and do that.”

Mack Brown likes the rule that you can’t transfer twice as an undergraduate without sitting out

Mack Brown said one thing that he really likes that has happened with the transfer portal is that players cannot transfer twice as an undergraduate without sitting out.

Previously, almost all transfers had to sit out a year

“The other thing they’ve done with the transfer portal, which I think is good, is they’ve said that you can’t transfer twice undergraduate without getting a waiver,” Brown said. “We look at some of these basketball teams and they say all five are transfers. We got a little carried away there. I think we’ll see all of this slowed down a little bit. When 40% of the guys that go in the portal don’t have a place to go, you’re gonna also see fewer people get in the portal I think. Now if a high profile player goes somewhere else, the NCAA, if and when they can prove that an agent was involved that was representing another team, then the player will be ineligible.

“If there’s a player here, and his agent reaches out to another school and that school takes him, our player’s ineligible for reaching out. If we can prove that somebody reached out to him and he took money to transfer, which is usually the case, then the school could be in trouble that offered the money and also the player could be in trouble because he took the money illegally before he transferred. There’s a lot more NCAA eyes on this stuff than there was last year. And I do think that’s going to slow some of it down. It’s gonna make some people be a lot more careful.”