Financial incentives in college football are short-changing athletes | Opinion

As I watched the College Football Playoff semifinal games, I was reminded of Nick Saban’s comments about the state of the sport these days.

Saban, the former Alabama coach and now TV commentator — and star of commercials — expressed concern that the transfer portal encourages players to move from one team to the next, thereby discouraging consistent academic development and making it more difficult for them to graduate. He complained there is far less concern for life after football for the players.

It’s hard to believe it was university presidents who created the current money-grubbing system for players and coaches, which relegates a college education to the sidelines of college football.

Commentators have heaped lavish praise on Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, and no one can doubt his success and the coaching expertise he brings to Indiana University. But Cignetti brought 13 players with him from James Madison, where he coached successfully before moving to Bloomington. He signed an additional 17 players from other teams, thanks to the transfer portal.

With the relatively new transfer portal in place, athletes are free to move from program to program with relative ease, which, as Saban noted, makes graduation a much more difficult objective. By 2024, the NCAA authorized unlimited transfers, apparently with little or no concern for how that might impact a player’s academic success.

Before the new rules, college football fans followed players through their years of eligibility. (And in other sports as well, notably basketball). Now it’s difficult keeping up with who’s on what team, and that must affect fan loyalty as we knew it before the changes.

Prior to the arrival of the transfer portal in 2018, players had to get permission from their current school to contact another school, which gave the coaches a degree of control over players jumping ship to other programs. Especially limiting was the requirement that the athlete sit out a year before competing in the new program, which counted as a year of eligibility.

Under the new system, athletes may play as soon as they make the move to the new school. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see how intercollegiate athletics mimics professional sports now, especially when Cignetti referred to himself at Big Ten media days last July as “the GM and the head coach,” an obvious reference to the role of the general manager on NFL teams.

The football players who left James Madison and those who transferred from other schools did not leave without significant financial support they would not have enjoyed under the old NCAA rules. Here’s where another supposed reform keeps players moving from school to school.

The NCAA created the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) policy as the result of a lawsuit contending players weren’t profiting from the team’s success, so the NIL creates a cash cow for student-athletes to profit from the university using athletes’ name, image and likeness. Now these football players are paid by newly created NIL collectives for their commercial deals with cars, cash and apartments.

This gives a huge advantage to the largest and richest universities, who can draw upon wealthy alumni and a community fan base to stash hefty piles of cash that can lure athletes away from programs with less robust NIL collectives.

For moving from the University of California, Berkeley, where he played football for three years, to Indiana, quarterback Fernando Mendoza now has $2.6M in his NIL package, not out of line with the top 20 NCAA football players in NIL funding, all of whom make more than a million dollars a year.

The University of Miami’s quarterback, Carson Beck, transferred to Miami from Georgia for an NIL package exceeding $4 million dollars.

Billionaire boosters are critical to the success of the NIL collectives by offering significant financial advantage to players moving from the team and university that recruited and invested in them. Nike founder Phil Knight famously does this for the University of Oregon. Mark Cuban, as an Indiana alumnus, came to Cignetti’s rescue by providing what he called a “big number” for Indiana’s NIL collective, which probably played a role in so many transfers heading there.

Boosters run these collectives, thereby exerting control over athletics that belongs in the president’s office and the athletic director, not wealthy football fans.

The NIL policy is justified by the excessive salaries the coaches are paid and the fact that students whose athletic efforts are also responsible for the team’s success receive no compensation historically. But that hardly justifies a solution that makes it even more difficult for players to graduate and moves those so-called student-athletes around like checkers on a checkerboard.

The NCAA, governed by university presidents, has made a mess out of college athletics and transformed it into a development league for the NFL, without the NFL having to put forth one dime for the considerable expense universities incur for players with no loyalty to the team and the coach who first recruited and welcomed them to college football. And universities today still pay outrageous salaries to football coaches for what was once called amateur athletics.

There are other sports in intercollegiate athletics that do a better job of living up to the student-athlete designation simply because it is difficult to raise NIL funds for sports that do not generate revenue. But the NIL policy and transfer portal are there for all coaches and players to use and abuse.

Only a small percentage of football players who aspire to the NFL make it. Those left behind who devoted more time to football practice than their studies wonder how they will spend their careers, when they did not devote enough time to their academic pursuits. Those who do make it to the NFL spend a few years taking body blows that can incapacitate them mentally and leave them wondering what to do when their short football careers are over. There are only a few seats available for those former players we see as commentators.

President Donald Trump proposed changes to the current system by executive order, but like most of his day-to-day distractions, he just moved on to another shiny thing. Not a word since.

Championship games like the one coming up next week pitting Indiana vs. Miami will result in a winner and loser, but when it comes to cold, hard cash, some players and all the coaches have already walked off winners, thanks to the NCAA and its corrupted policies.

Bob Kustra served as president of Boise State University from 2003 to 2018. He is host of Readers Corner on Boise State Public Radio, a regular columnist for the Idaho Statesman and a contributing columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He served two terms as Illinois lieutenant governor and 10 years as a state legislator.