Chip Kelly suggests college football should follow NFL model with NIL, transfer portal

UCLA head coach Chip Kelly wants college football to follow the NFL model in the world of NIL and the transfer portal.

Kelly’s reasoning? College football could become the wild west more so than it already is and the sport needs more of a level playing field like the pros.

Kelly joined the Pat McAfee Show and expanded upon his original take of where college football should go.

“I’ve always believed that the secret to victory lies in the organization of the non obvious,” Kelly said. “It’s a real football thing. The best sports league in the world is the NFL. So follow their model. I mean, they’re printing money. Players are making money. Fans are enjoying the games, every game is close. If you win, you pick last. If you lose, you pick first, you all have the same salary cap.

“They’ve had it down for a long, long time, but we just won’t look at them and use their model. And I don’t know why we don’t want to use their model.” 

NIL allows players to profit off their name and make money at the collegiate level. But Kelly thinks that well has barely been tapped.

“But if we’re still going to have our head in the sand and say that student athletes aren’t allowed to make money and that we’re still on the amateur part of it, that’s out the window,” Kelly said. “So then let’s treat them the way they should be treated. The product is the players and if we don’t take care of the players, then we’re not going to have players much longer and that’s the travesty of it. 

“You know, the Pac-12 built a $100 million business and it just went out of business. And if you’re at any business school in this country, they’re going to study what happened to the Pac-12 and say, How did that happen? We went away like Bed Bath and Beyond went away. I mean, it’s a million dollar corporation. And we couldn’t figure that out.”

As far as the current college football is concerned, it might not be sustainable the way Kelly sees it.

“Really smart people try to figure it out, but we got to do something,” Kelly said. “Because I think when the Pac-12 went down, which I never thought was going to happen, we better use that as a light and say, wait a second, we gotta figure this thing out or something’s going to happen. And we’re going to turn around and say there’s only 60 schools playing football now no one else plays football.”