Mark Wiedmer
The fears have run through college coaching circles from the first seconds Name, Image and Likeness deals became part of the New Normal in college athletics.
But they’ve mostly been voiced out of public view, perhaps afraid that verbalizing those fears for all to hear might scare recruits away, or cause boosters to withhold their offers of summer jobs and endorsement checks for everything from praising a restaurant to the best place for an oil change.
So coaches, ALL coaches, have lived with some players making more than others, and some being promised more than others - think former Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava being promised more than $8 million while still in high school, then deciding, rather stupidly it turned out, that such money wasn’t enough after the Vols’ playoff appearance last season - nervously waiting for this insanity to blow up in their faces.
Well, according to seventh-year University of Maryland football coach Mike Locksley, the Terrapin locker room both splintered and imploded last season precisely because of his players’ uneven NIL deals.
“I own the fact that I lost the locker room,” Locksley, the former Alabama assistant under Nick Saban, told ESPN earlier this week.
“And this is coach Locks, the locker room king, telling you this landscape, I had to choose between paying young players who were coming in or reward the older players who have been through the fire, three bowl wins, and I tried to do both with limited resources. And that’s what you get: a locker room with the haves and the have-nots."
What we’ve got in college athletics right now is a colossal mess of haves and have-nots any way you want to slice it. Everybody at the Power Four conference level is supposed to have $20.5 million this year to divide among its athletes. But no one believes that Maryland, a member of the Big Ten, has the same resources as conference brother Ohio State, which reportedly spent more than $20 million a year ago to win the national championship.
That $20.5 million has to be split among football teams and men’s basketball teams and women’s basketball teams and baseball and softball teams. And we haven’t even gotten to the Title IX lawsuits that are sure to be filed when there is no equity in how the men’s and women’s programs are treated. Talk about the haves and have-nots.
NIL may have indeed wrecked the Maryland football program last season - the Terps, who went 4-8 on the field, had more players selected for the NFL Draft (six) than wins - but it may also have cost them their talented basketball coach, Kevin Willard.
After guiding Maryland to the Sweet 16 last season, Willard took the Villanova job, which appeared to be something of a lateral move at first glance. But Willard, one of the game’s brighter minds, had done his homework. Villanova plays FCS football, like UT-Chattanooga, but the Wildcats compete in the basketball-mad Big East. A lot more money will be available for Willard’s Wildcats in the Big East than at Maryland, whose NIL resources are apparently pretty pedestrian in a Big Ten that includes Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and the like.
So now Willard is coaching at a basketball “have,” so to speak, as opposed to an athletic program “have-not,” if you believe Locksley’s lament.
As University of Tennessee football fans painfully learned for the second time in four months earlier this week, such player unrest is not confined to Maryland.
After waving goodbye to greedy quarterback Iamaleava in April - the common sentiment from Big Orange Country was “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” - it was reported this week that Chattanooga native Boo Carter is pulling the same shenanigans as Iamleava in not showing up for team functions.
Given that Carter supposedly secured a very lucrative NIL deal after reportedly flirting with transferring to Miami, this problem reportedly centers on an altercation Carter had with his teammates over him not showing up for the team activities. When practice officially begins next Tuesday (July 29), head coach Josh Heupel is supposed to address the media and will surely discuss Carter.
In case you’re wondering what happens to Carter if Heupel takes the Iamaleava playbook and shows him the door, an NCAA loophole might allow him to play somewhere this coming season, perhaps Miami or Colorado. While the transfer portal is closed, should Carter drop out of school and enroll as a regular student at a new school without an athletic scholarship - in other words, as a walk-on - he could conceivably play.
As recently reported by CBS Sports, this maneuver is what’s allowing cornerback Xavier Lucas to leave Wisconsin for Miami and quarterback Jake Retzlaff to exit BYU for Tulane. Of course, Wisconsin is now suing Miami for tampering, since Lucas had recently signed a sizeable two-year revenue share contract with the Badgers.
Given Heupel’s history with Iamaleava, it seems doubtful that UT would go down a similar path with Carter should he bolt for Miami, Colorado or elsewhere.
It’s all been enough for one UT friend of mine to say over lunch Friday, “I just don’t care anymore. This wasn’t the college athletics I fell in love with as a child. It’s all a business now, the players care about themselves a lot more than they care about the school I love, and I’m about done with all of it.”
It would be nice if that was the majority opinion among college sports fans rather than the minority one. And at some point, if more fans feel that way than don’t, we might regain some sort of sanity.
Until then, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Or do you think President Trump injecting his voice is going to solve the problem? Does government ever solve a problem?
Yet there it surfaced Thursday, his executive order titled “Saving College Sports,” in which he wrote, much to the chagrin of highly paid college athletes such as Iamaleava, Carter or BYU freshman basketball player AJ Dybantsa (reportedly making around $7 mil): “The third-party market for pay-for-play inducements (NIL) must be eliminated before its insatiable demand for resources dries up support for non-revenue sports.”
He may be right. Saban praised his plan. And some serious fiscal sense needs to be brought to this sooner than later.
But at the Atlantic Coast Conference media event last week, an ACC head coach told ESPN: “We continually ask for help and guardrails - and then when we get them, we complain about them, find ways around them, and then we sue the NCAA. Sooner or later, coaches are going to have to decide what they want this ultimately to look like. And if we’re going to continue to find ways around stuff, or sue, then it’s just going to be chaos.”
Ah, what an awful mess we’ve made of a once enormously pleasurable distraction from real-world messes.