Dan Mullen: NCAA said 'we don't want to listen' to coach warnings about NIL, transfer portal

When NIL came to be in 2021, Dan Mullen was on the NCAA oversight committee. The discussions began about the impact of players profiting off their name, image and likeness as the transfer portal also emerged as a key part of the landscape.

During those conversations, Mullen recalled coaches voicing concerns about how everything would go. But as more started to speak out, he said NCAA officials seemed like they didn’t want to hear what they had to say. As a result, there became a “disconnect.”

Nearly three years into the NIL era, the term “chaos” gets thrown around when discussing the landscape. Mullen said coaches were worried about the issues college sports are currently facing.

“As the coaches started to make statements – ‘Hey, this is what’s gonna happen,’ it was, ‘Here’s the bad part of everything that’s going down’ – is [the NCAA said], ‘We don’t want to listen to you. You guys, we don’t want to hear what you have to say,'” Mullen told Outkick’s Trey Wallace. “And so, I think what happened is a lot of what was gonna happen on a daily basis got swept under the carpet in the administrators, lawyers at the NCAA looking at the practical use of NIL and what it was actually designed for, and the practical use of [the] transfer portal and what it’s designed for. And they didn’t want to hear the reality of what was actually gonna happen, and I think that’s where the disconnect is.

“That’s how it started to get a little bit out of control. Now that all of those prophecies have kind of come true, now everyone’s like, ‘Oh, boy, well how did this happen?'”

Dan Mullen on NIL and recruiting: ‘Coaches knew this was coming’

When the NCAA instituted its NIL policy, it said collectives couldn’t be involved in the recruiting process and the topic couldn’t come up until athletes signed. Those rules came under legal challenge when the attorneys general in Tennessee and Virginia filed a lawsuit, and judge Clifton L. Corker granted a preliminary injunction late last month that led the NCAA to update its guidelines and pause investigations into NIL-related infractions.

Dan Mullen said the sense from the coaches was that approach – keeping NIL out of the recruiting process – wouldn’t work. That’s why he’s not surprised about the latest developments.

“I think if you go back to coaches, everyone knew this was coming,” Mullen said. “I go back – I was on the college football oversight committee around then, 2017-2018. NIL was coming up, and transfer portal was coming up. … I said from the coach’s perspective, the transfer portal how you wanna do it moving forward is gonna basically lead to free agency. And they were like, ‘No it’s just taking paperwork away from the NCAA, instead of us having to approve everything.’ I said, ‘That’s the intent – which is the right intent – but it’s gonna lead to free agency.’ I said NIL is solely going to be about recruiting. They were like, ‘Well, it’s not going to have anything to do with recruiting.’

“The problem comes – I think the coaches saw this coming down the road. A lot of times, administrators didn’t because they weren’t dealing with the daily basis of what goes on. I think a lot of times, you could see it happening, you could see what was gonna come.”

With the way things were going, Mullen said coaches had their fears about the portal becoming a “free agency” and NIL becoming a recruiting tool even though the NCAA didn’t want those to intersect.

“Maybe you didn’t know exactly how it was going to play out, but you knew generally that transfer portal would lead to free agency,” Mullen said. “NIL was going to be solely recruiting-based, not based off of – Livvy Dunne has 3 million Instagram followers as a model, and she should be able to make some money as well as being a gymnast. Or Tim Tebow jerseys being sold in the bookstore as this larger-than-life figure while they’re in college. Should they be able to profit a little bit off of that as a one-off compared to everybody?

“Now, it’s the third-string center needs a couple-hundred thousand dollars. I think the coaches could see there was going to be an issue with what they were proposing coming down the road.”