Kirby Smart, Brian Kelly react to Matthew Sluka redshirting: How to fix NIL, promote revenue shares

As NIL and the transfer portal continue to change the fabric of college football, a newer trend of players opting out of the season after four games and redshirting — with the intent of transferring — has started to crop up. The latest instance has been UNLV quarterback Matt Sluka, apparently due to lack of promised NIL payment.

And the whole ordeal was the topic du jour on the SEC coaches teleconference on Wednesday. And neither LSU’s Brian Kelly or Georgia’s Kirby Smart think much can be done short of revenue sharing to put the kibosh on this new phenomenon.

“The NIL, because it becomes a third-party piece, you lose control,” Kelly said. “And that’s why the revenue sharing piece is so important and getting that legislation passed now puts that back through the universities. And now those contracts can be written a lot differently. When you’re dealing with a third party and collectives and NILs, the universities are at arms length. And so it’s much more difficult to put in the kind of language necessary to kind of see that a maybe a quarterback doesn’t leave halfway through the season or, you know, a guy doesn’t opt for a particular bowl game. Revenue sharing changes the dynamics.”

Smart, speaking just after Kelly, concurred.

“I can tell you that I don’t think it’ll be the last and the way we’re moving into this abyss of unknown, and I’m talking about fiscal responsibility, financial commitments, financial promises, people sometimes make promises, and I know I’ve come across it in our recruiting that they can’t keep and there’s no — sometimes there’s no rebuttal for the athlete,” Smart said. “Sometimes there’s no rebuttal for the athletic department or the collective or whoever’s involved. And it’s sad that there’s not just a better, a way to police it better. Because it’s unfortunate and when — I’m not suggesting UNLV made promises they can’t keep. I’m not saying that. I don’t know that situation. I want to be clear on that.”

He continued, noting that revenue sharing on it’s own doesn’t fix the problem, but that it gives schools the power to include contractual language that protects them.

“What I’m saying is it happens more and more and it’s going to happen even more and more as we move into this revenue share where I feel like, unless there’s a contract and there’s a set contract where Person A has to stay a certain amount of time or they’re going to have to pay back this contract, we’re never going to get to where we want to get to,” Smart said. “There’s probably going to be more and more of this going on, especially as the year goes on, November, December. Athletic departments are going to struggle to be able to make their commitments come to fruition and I think we’re going to see some really tough times in college football when all this is said and done.”

Kelly also thinks that revenue sharing and the contractual controls schools could then put in place would be the biggest step forward to solving much of this problem.

Further, Kelly also spoke to the need for players and families to be advised by real, certified agents.

“The first thing is you should never give up your name, your image and likeness exclusively,” Kelly said. “You should hold on to that. And I think that’s the first thing. I think the second thing is any time we’re talking to the young men, we want to make sure that when we talk about agents, that they’re certified. And I know that’s difficult in most instances, but a certified agent versus somebody that does it as a part time job — those should be red flags for families and they should be very, very cautious relative to signing anything if they are not a certified agent. Or, if they want your name, image and likeness and that, to me, are the kind of things that we try to educate when we have the young men on our campus.”