A lot of college football coaches are pocket-watchers, according to the first year of NIL.
As the market continues to grow and shift, and as we approach our second college football season of the NIL era, the obsession over how much some players are making is showing us the hypocrisy that exists in a sport in which some coaches make hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
You can still sense the one-sided greed despite the fact that there has always been enough.
You can give a young man $8,000 a month or $6,000 a month. At the Texas High School Coaches Association annual convention in San Antonio, UGA head coach Kirby Smart said that if he earned it, he might deserve it. Taking care of guys that have been part of the program is something I am all for. It is a reverse system where the bottom is getting rewarded more than the top. It's really difficult because of that.
This is easy to understand. The players are not in a union because they don't have a salary. The players don't get a piece of the billions of dollars of revenue that they make for their schools and conferences off apparel and TV deals. Realizing that everyone has to get what they can get based on who they are is a simple concept to understand.
Do you think he is doing anything with that? Incoming freshman make more in NIL money than upperclassmen. Is that going to make him a better person? If you gave me $10K a month in my freshman year of college, I wouldn't be where I am now. I think that's true.
Smart thinks that teenagers getting a jump on real-world money management is a bad idea because he would have messed it up. A man that just agreed to a new 10-year, $112.5 million deal that makes him the highest-paid coach in college football said these words. Smart isn't the one making tackles, throwing and catching the ball, or setting blocks on the outside
The issue here isn't Smart's new deal, it's the coaching contracts skyrise LSU's Brian Kelly, Texas A&M's Jimbo Fisher, Alabama's Nick Saban, Michigan State's Mel Tucker, and USC's Lincoln Riley all have contracts that pay them $9 million per year. The problem is when the amount that players are making is getting out of hand because they are allowed to keep getting raises.
The coach threatened to quit if players weren't paid. He signed a 10-year, $92 million deal and still hasn't submitted his resignation. The Ole Miss head coach referred to the NIL as legalized cheating. In May, the coach who brings in arguably the best recruiting class in the country every year started a war of words with Fisher and Jackson State as he accused them of "buying players."
The University of Alabama announced four years ago that they were going to spend $600 million on their athletic facilities. If you tried, you wouldn't be able to make it up.
If NIL hasn't exposed enough of the greed and selfishness some of these coaches embody, there will be more to come. California's governor wants UCLA to explain its decision to join the Big Ten, which plays sports on the other side of the country, as well as how coaches will address conference realignment in the future. Last week, the NCAA announced that the Division I Council has recommended getting rid of rules that restrict players from transferring multiple times which would open up the door for players to change schools and make the best business decision for them without sitting out a season
Football money is the reason why college sports will change in the future. Hopefully the players will get a bigger piece of the pie by that time. It will most likely be because their coaches haven't advocated for that part of the system's evolution.
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