Pat Narduzzi calls for a 'lid' on NIL

Pittsburgh head coach Pat Narduzzi wanted stricter NIL policies in place, but it’s unclear if the NIL space will ever get to his desired destination.

Take a look at the NFL, where there’s a salary cap on paying players. Each franchise makes it so they are under the salary cap in order to, you know, actually pay their players.

Is there something similar coming to college football? Narduzzi made the case for it to come sooner rather than later.

“Good to have you down here. I think the most important thing is if I had to — there’s got to be a lid on it, right,” Narduzzi said. “I think everybody wants to play under the same rules. National Football League, they have a salary cap. I think you want to have some type of salary cap.

“This is what you are allowed to spend, but you can’t have universities that maybe have 75,000 students, those guys are all former alumnus at some point. When you have 16,000, all that thing is going to — it’s going to matter.”

Narduzzi said it should be an even playing field among academic institutions.

“It can’t be based on how big your university is because we’ll start building more dorms and what are we doing,” Narduzzi said. “We have education that is a priority, and we’re not going to have classes full of thousands of kids. We’re going to have small class sizes and, again, we’re going to have small alumni groups as they matriculate through the University of Pittsburgh.”

Narduzzi left his statement on NIL by reiterating his main point: a type of salary cap on what you can do.

“I think there’s got to be a lid on the thing,” Narduzzi said. “There’s got to be some type of, if you are going to leave the portal open, there has to be a salary cap so people can’t just go overspend.”

In addition to NIL, Narduzzi slowed down the talk about the transfer portal as well. Narduzzi had the old school approach of recruiting high school players and developing them throughout their tenures.

“Again, we tried not to make a living in the portal,” Narduzzi said. “I want to recruit high school football players. I think we’ve got some 21 or 22 committed to us for the ’24 class. You go off of need, and if someone ends up leaving your program, you’re able to supplement it with an older guy.

“I think the rules are good. I think the portal window hopefully will shrink a little bit as far as figuring out — 90% of the kids go in the portal the first five, seven days anyway. Let’s shorten the windows and move on.”