Fixing College Football Part 4: Governance
Everyone's favorite part of college athletics: the billable hours
Welcome back to the fourth of five editions on how I, a lowly college football newsletter writer with a sport management degree and experience working in higher education and college athletics, would build my perfect college football world.
We’ve already looked at conference realignment, the postseason, and the overall calendar earlier this week. Today, we’re going to make all the nation’s lawyers upset.
That’s right, it’s time for governance. Everyone’s favorite part of college athletics. There isn’t a fun way to break this up to make it easier, so we’re just going to start hitting details and bulldoze our way through the NCAA bylaws to make things better.
NIL and payments
This is, obviously, the hot button issue. One of the ones people feel the strongest about. Should these athletes be paid?
Unequivocally, the answer is yes. And they are going to continue to get paid.
I may be in the minority, but I feel that the current set-up in terms of payment isn’t that bad. We’re going to keep it.
Revenue sharing between schools and athletes are going to continue. I think the revenue sharing cap is a good thing as well. It doesn’t completely open up the field for parity, but it helps so that the mega spenders like Alabama and Ohio State and Texas don’t fully outpace the smaller teams.
I also think that having third-party NIL deals go through a clearinghouse like NIL Go is a good move. Sure, it outsources some of the regulatory teeth the NCAA has, but it allows for clear investigations and rules. Even with some hiccups in the NIL Go system and College Sports Commission, CSC CEO Brian Seeley has been willing to adapt to find the best system possible.
To me, that is a sign of a good, working system. Willing to adapt to how the landscape is changing, but still trying ensure that teams aren’t fully trying to circumvent the cap on revenue sharing. They will, don’t get me wrong, but keeping the more egregious examples in check is paramount for this to succeed.
Transfer portal and eligibility
From one hot-button issue to the next, let’s tackle the transfer portal and eligibility requirements.
Currently the rules are a mismash of nonsense with no way to enforce them. We’ll get into this a bit later with how everything will be governed, but we need firm rules.
We’ll start with eligibility. We can’t have players playing on indefinitely with no end in sight. Look, I’m all for players getting multiple degrees and furthering their education. There are plenty of athletes that are getting Masters’ degrees in this new system.
But, if we’re being realistic here, most athletes are trying to have as little of the “student” part as possible. And having careers go on and on indefinitely is not a way to promote better education in these higher education institutions.
So, I’m rolling with the flat five-year plan where athletes get five years of eligibility and that’s that. They can play every game of five years if they want, but once they hit five years, that’s the end of the line. It doesn’t matter if they played in junior colleges, or were set to be on a video game cover. Rules are rules.
As for the transfer portal, we’ll also reign in that a bit. Players will get one transfer in their undergraduate career that is completely penalty-free. They can just move schools like they can now. Players can also transfer penalty-free upon graduation, provided they still have eligibility remaining.
For that graduation-related transfer, it is not capped at one move. If a student graduates with their Bachelor’s in three years, they can transfer. Say they’re in a pathway program that leads to an accelerated Masters’. Boom, another transfer. Sure, it can open up loopholes where athletes may pursue a two-year Associate’s degree to transfer early, but it also then has the player earning a degree. Graduation success rates are important to continue to further the educational values of each institution and their students, and athletes are no different. If anything, this incentivized education for some athletes that are just looking for playing time.
Athletes will also maintain the ability to transfer in the event of a head coaching change, because if coaches can move at will, so too can their players.
And, we’ll clarify that players are able to enter their name into the transfer portal without any penalty. It’ll be the actual process of completing a transfer that would be regulated.
These rules are pretty rigid, though, and in the interest of being student-focused - something I strive for in my position and I firmly believe anything related to higher education should be - we have to account for the various circumstances that will come up.
That means Hardship Waivers are here to stay. It allows students to apply for an exception to either eligibility or transfer rules. They would be reviewed on a case-by-case basis by an oversight committee, with one Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR) from each conference and independent forming the committee. Any conference with a tie to the student - be it their current conference or one they are looking to transfer into - would have to recuse themselves.
Then, the convened committee - ideally 13 members - would listen to the application for the waiver. They would then determine if the athlete’s circumstances did significantly impact their participation for the season and, if so, would award another year of eligibility to an athlete.
Things that may get approved are season-ending injuries suffered early in the season or in training camps, unsafe environments within programs, being a caregiver to a family member with a major disability or illness, or others like that. Essentially, we’re looking for something that came up outside of the athlete’s control.
For once, Dabo Swinney seems to have a good idea as he detailed a very similar outlook on the portal. In this case, Dabo is right.
Agents/tampering
We’ve all seen it at this point, pretty much every student-athlete has an agent helping them through the portal, NFL, and on NIL deals.
But did you know that anyone can be acting as an agent on behalf of an athlete?
They don’t even have to be registered anywhere as the player’s agent. These people can just start talking on behalf of players and schools, potential NIL connections and coaches have to listen to them.
Already, we’ve seen issues with this system. Two high profile quarterbacks, Nico Iamaleava and Demond Williams Jr., received advice from a non-agent that threw them into uncomfortable situations and led the internet to turn on them. Even more concerning was the fact that Williams had an actual agent, who he elected to ignore.
We can’t stop things like that. There will be people in the ears of most players that may not have the player’s best interests in mind.
However, we can curb the faux-agents that are running amuck as of late.
Looking at professional leagues, the Players’ Associations have rules that agents have to follow. I looked at the NFLPA and NBAPA in particular, who have education requirements, an application and tests to become certified with the Players’ Association as an agent, and requirements to maintain eligibility.
I feel like that would be a huge step in the right direction to ensure that only real, licensed agents are able to be leading these discussions for players. We can go even further and follow the NBAPA’s lead by establishing an agent database for players to find an agent in.
We’d also work to add more tampering rules. The narrower eligibility for a player to transfer helps with that, but the NCAA Division I Oversight Committee actually has a pretty good framework to stop schools from abusing that one-time transfer that is in our new system. And, I think it would be a huge benefit for the real-life college athletics world, but it’s just a proposal that hasn’t been decided upon yet.
These rules would have to define what tampering is, but for our purposes we’ll go simple. Tampering would be contacting a player enrolled at another school that does not have their name in the portal. Easy, right?
The Oversight Committee’s proposal includes plenty of potential penalties for tampering, including:
Up to a six game suspension for a head coach if anyone in the program is convicted of targeting that includes both on-field and administrative duties;
A fine of 20% of the football budget;
A reduction of five roster spots for the next season.
These are some hefty penalties. Pairing those with much more limited options to even tamper would make everything move smoother in my eyes.
Tiny tweak
And, because everyone hates this, there's one more thing to change: we're ending the commercial-play-commercial. Once a drive starts, unless there’s a timeout, the drive will finish without any TV timeouts.
How will this work?
These are some massive changes, so we have to have something that will be able to enshrine these rules and ensure that they can be followed.
To me, there’s only one path: a Collective Bargaining Agreement.
I’ve talked about a CBA in the past and reached out to some contacts in the sports world to gauge the temperature for the idea. Surprisingly, nobody was willing to put any major opinion on record, with most saying that the environment was too volatile now to consider something that drastic.
After all, that would likely have student-athletes certified as university employees.
But, if the schools are willing to budge on that, there are plenty of school-friendly protections, such as the limited transfer rules.
Putting a CBA in place where the deal is collectively bargained between the players and school representatives is the only way for a deal to work like this in practice. But, because this is fantasyland, we’ll just assume it went off without a hitch.
Sure, we’d have the threat of labor issues in the future, like we’re seeing with the MLB now, but it would put the sport on much more secure footing. The constant strain of lawsuits would be nullified as the CBA would be clear about all these points. It also keeps college athletics away from politics, which could be a recipe for disaster as different administrations value different things and constantly take a wrecking ball to undo what the previous administration did. Just save us the mess and sign the CBA.
I’d also like to see sport-specific administrators take over the governance at the NCAA level in concert with CSC. Would that be a commissioner or a board of commissioners? That’s up to whoever presents the best option to be knowledgeable, yet impartial. All the sport administrators would report to NCAA president Charlie Baker, allowing him to guide the big-picture strategy of the NCAA.
So, we’ve got three major tenets to help fix the off-field products. Tampering? Nullified. Agents? Fixed and certified. NIL? Regulated but still accessible.
There’s one big thing left to cover that I know most sports fans are upset about: media deals. Let’s close the book on our new college football world tomorrow by fixing the media deals and financials on the conference and institution level.
Check out the rest of the Fixing College Football Series!
Part 4 - Governance
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