Kirby Smart calls out Congress while addressing House settlement uncertainty: 'Not a lot gets done quickly there'

Kirby Smart gave an honest take about Congress and how they relate to current issues in college sports, particularly with NIL. There are virtually no rules when it comes to the space.

The Georgia coach simply wants consistency and a sustainable model when it comes to NIL, which some coaches consider pay for play at this point. But as Congress mulls it over, coaches and players are left waiting.

So what are Smart and the rest supposed to do? Scream into the void and just go about their business, it seems. That is, until a decision is made.

“Very little has happened,” Smart said on The Paul Finebaum Show. “It just shows you how hard it is to make changes and correct things, probably when they’re needed, because … people have talked about Congress. That’s not easy. Not a lot gets done quickly there and where we are right now. Like, I think every coach agrees we’re in a good place with being able to compensate players. Call it pay for play, call it NIL, I don’t care what you call it. 

“We’re all in a good place for that. We just want it to be in a way that’s sustainable. I just want to be able to have a freshman come in and not make more than a senior and I’d like for other sports to be able to still survive. You know, we’re on the brink of probably one to two years away from a lot of schools cutting sports. What’s the pushback going to be then when you start cutting non-revenue sports? I don’t want that to happen.”

Cutting sports is nothing new, but there’s essentially a new version of schools cutting non-revenue athletics. If you can’t pull in a positive number in terms of dollars or generate enough, the program could be on the chopping block.

Smart wants a sustainable model and maybe revenue sharing is the way to go in that scenario. But some of these big schools rely solely on football or basketball, or both, to feed the others. What happens to field hockey, wrestling, or gol,f for instance?

So these thoughts aren’t new from Smart. Ironically, he recently commented on the current NIL landscape after losing top recruit Jackson Cantwell to Miami.

“A lot of misleading information out there,” Smart said, according to a report from CBS Sports. “Nobody really knows what’s accurate. A lot of schools are approaching it in different ways. We hear something different from every school. So I don’t think anybody really knows.”

The NIL landscape has certainly made things more challenging for coaches. Without a well-regulated system, it’s often word of mouth in trying to determine who has what legitimate offers from whom.