You’re a college football coach and you’re worried about NIL

You’re Mark Stoops and you’ve made Kentucky a winner. Twice in the past four seasons, your Wildcats won 10 games. That’s as many 10-win seasons as Kentucky had in the previous 102 seasons. You find talent and you develop it. You created a culture that demands accountability and rewards hard work. You are a lifer – the son of a high school coach, the brother of a College Football Hall of Fame coach – and you find yourself at a crossroads.

“I take pride in development. I have to,” you say. “We’ve never had the history to be able to recruit off a logo.”

You’re Mark Stoops and you say the current state of NIL is not the coaching you signed up for. NIL is not supposed to be used as an enticement. It says that in the NCAA rule. It says that in state legislation. And in the course of one recruiting year, the NIL concept has been corrupted by the recruiting industrial complex.

“Anybody that tells you that this is not about the money is a liar,” Stoops said. “It is now about that. The people with money, the people with boosters willing to pay money to sign players — to act like that’s not the case, you’re a flat-out liar.”

You’re Kirk Ferentz and you’ve been the coach at Iowa longer than any other active FBS coach. In 23 seasons, you’ve won two Big Ten championships and 178 games. You coach football that Iowans appreciate – smart, plain, error-free. You don’t have a 100,000-seat stadium and the resources that flow from it. Yet you’ve found a way to compete with the schools that do.

Now you’re not so sure.

“With NIL and some of this stuff we’re all reading about,” you say, “‘I think the gap is going to start to widen between those 8-10-12, whatever that number of teams is that we’ve all heard of, we all knew when we were 5-years old – everybody has heard of USC, everybody has heard of Alabama. To me, the gap is going to widen.”

You’re David Shaw and you became the most successful coach in Stanford history by flipping your greatest recruiting liability – Stanford’s admissions demands – into your greatest recruiting asset. You identify prospects with academic and athletic talent early in their high school career, and you dangle the carrot of a Stanford education in front of them. The 40-year decision, you call it.

You’ve won three Pac-12 championships by showing recruits the big picture. But you worry whether a lifetime of earning power retains its allure when compared to the enticement of NIL cash.

“Some of these are not Name, Image and Likeness deals. Some of these are, ‘Come here and we’ll give you money,’ ” you say. “I don’t think there’s a lot of question around the country as far as that going on, regardless of what anybody says. If you want to keep a secret, don’t tell a bunch of 17- to 20-year-olds.”

NIL has changed the rules of the sport

The rules have changed. Not the on-field rules, but the rules that have been part of the Magna Carta of college football. You sign up for four years. You get tuition, room, board, books and fees. Depending on the era, you might get pizza money. That’s been the way college sports have worked for decades.

In a matter of months, it stopped working that way. Student-athletes have the freedom to transfer without redshirting. Student-athletes can make money off their name, image, and likeness. College football has spun off its axis, and coaches’ heads are spinning, too, right up to the top of the list. Georgia’s Kirby Smart calls what’s going on with NIL “scary.” Alabama’s Nick Saban has made his displeasure known.

TV crippled the movie business over the course of a decade. That’s about how long it took the internet to overrun newspapers and magazines. But we didn’t even get through a full recruiting year before schools began using NIL as an enticement, despite what the NCAA rules and various state laws say.

The NCAA came out Friday and said it will look into the improper use of NIL. We’ll see what that means. It’s been a while since the NCAA has done anything to rules violators besides gum them.

Coaches aren’t against their players getting money. Coaches aren’t against the transfer portal. They’re against being the suckers who play by the rules while their competition does what it wants. That means recruiting players off other rosters. That means NIL deals inching closer to the old-fashioned no-show job.

“There’s supposed to be a quid pro quo,” Shaw said. “ ‘Hey, I’m signing this deal, and here’s what I am going to do, and what you’re going to pay me.’

“So much of the money is, ‘Hey, you want to come to school here? Here’s how much you’re going to be making. We’re going to hand it to you. You don’t have to do much for it. Right? We created an LLC. You’re going to be an employee. We’ll work out what you do later, if you do anything.’ ”

‘This is a runaway train’

It has thrown out of whack everything coaches have learned about recruiting. You find a player who is right for your schemes on the field and right for your culture in the locker room. It’s about player development, meeting a 16-year-old boy and turning him into a 22-year-old man with a college degree.

These days, development is the word that college athletics uses to raise money.

“Is this what you signed up for? Do you like this?” Stoops asked. “I’d like to see somebody who thoroughly enjoys this.”

Coaches are becoming general managers. “Roster management” has become a necessary skill in college football. Coaches don’t want money to play a bigger role than it does. Good luck getting that toothpaste back into the tube.

“Not to say we all don’t want more for the players,” Stoops said. “I’m not sure this is exactly what we had in mind. This is a runaway train.”

It’s hard to find a coach who believes the train is running in the right direction. The resources are lopsided enough as it is. The level playing field may be a myth, but it has remained a goal serviced by the NCAA Manual. Schools may not sign an unlimited number of high school players. Student-athletes must maintain academic standards to qualify for and keep an athletic scholarship. And now they may earn money for their NIL rights but it can’t be used as a recruiting enticement.

That may be a distinction too fine for the real world, but the alternative may look a lot like a minor league. Ferentz heard the story about Texas A&M’s $30 million NIL fund, the story that angered Aggies coach Jimbo Fisher. That’s the gap that Ferentz worries about, the sinkhole that will swallow any hope of the Iowas of the world winning a national championship.

“If people do have those kind of resources, then great,” he said. “You just kind of recognize that, and our focus is going to be more on people in our tier, in the same neighborhood that we live in, and staying competitive with those folks. That’s what you’ve got to worry about.”

You’re a college football coach. A lot of what you have learned over your decades-long career has suddenly become obsolete. You’ve become a coal miner in a time of clean energy, a buggy salesman when the world stopped using horses. You’re a college football coach and you wonder if there is no turning back.