Tom Herman bemoans impact of NIL, Power 5 programs poaching players on Group of 5

College football coaching is a remarkably tough racket right now, especially for a guy like Tom Herman at FAU in the American Athletic Conference.

Wednesday morning, Herman joined Andy Staples for an offseason chat on the On3 YouTube channel. As part of their conversation, Staples asked what it’s like for him to step back into a head coaching role for the first time since these massive transfer portal and NIL changes occurred.

“As much as the word ‘untenable’ has been thrown out here the last six months or so, it’s truly what it is,” said Herman.

To really illustrate the difficulties of roster management in college football, he explained what the NFL equivalent would be and how outlandish such a model would sound to the decision-makers in that league.

“The analogy I use is: you got 31 billionaires that own NFL teams, with the Packers being publicly owned. If you went to those owners and you said, ‘Hey, we want to start a league and everybody is going to have 85 players, but they’re all going to be on one-year contracts — oh excuse me, no, six-month contracts with player options every six months and there is no salary cap.’ They would laugh at you and say ‘that model is ridiculous.’ Yet, here we are, and that’s what college football has become.”

NFL executives would scoff at such a setup, per Herman, and those are billion-dollar franchises with more resources than any college program could ever dream of.

Andy Staples then noted how that new reality is particularly harsh for Group of 5 schools like FAU, who are still in a solid conference with the AAC, but yet had a slew of players pillaged Power 5 programs while grabbing a few of their own imports as well.

For instance, FAU lost top wideout LeJohntay Wester to Auburn, who posted 1,100+ yards last season. The Owls also lost their second leading receiver Tony Johnson to Cincinnati as well as some offensive linemen to the portal. But then again, they used the portal too and landed a multi-year starter at QB from Marshall in Cam Fancher.

With NIL and the portal, it’s just hard to predict what your roster will look like, especially with some of the money floating around out there from the top dogs.

“It is unique. I never thought I’d see the day where schools are paying $75,000-100,000 for backup players, and here we are, and that’s what’s happening,” said Tom Herman before downplaying the portal losses.

“Other than LeJohntay, the guys that chose to leave here, a lot of them were asked, some of them we probably won’t feel a negative impact. But certainly that one (Wester) hurts.”

However, Herman still believes FAU and the AAC offer major selling points to recruits, especially when there’s now a legitimately viable path to the College Football Playoff for the first time for teams in leagues like the AAC.

“We certainly believe, with the 12-team playoff, and we’re in the American Conference, the odds will tell you that the winner of the American Conference is going to be the highest-ranked Group of Five champion. So if you win the American, you’re going to the playoff,” says Herman.

“So we have the opportunity to sell that fact, to sell Boca Raton, to sell Palm Beach County, to sell the fact that you can compete to go play for the playoff every year by staying at home. And it’s such fertile recruiting ground.”

He used a similar pitch at Houston with a certain talented defensive lineman named Ed Oliver. Herman explained that Oliver knew he could play his into the NFL Draft wherever he went, but was sold on winning with his home team and his own people at Houston rather than playing in a major conference. But nowadays, the FAU coach says that Oliver would have likely ended up elsewhere since it wouldn’t make sense to turn down the money he’d be offered by other schools.

Who knows what the right answers are, but clearly, current college football coaches don’t believe the current system is sustainable.