MAILBAG: NIL, the playoff, transfer portal and more

Answering your burning questions

Welcome back to SID Sports everyone!

I know I’ve been MIA for a while, new jobs and moving will do that. To answer your first question, yes, I’m still working on Historical Portal stuff. Again, getting a new job and moving takes up a lot of my time, but I’m hoping the next one will come out soon. After that, we’ll get back to the biweekly posting schedule for Historical Portal and more regular content overall.

In the meantime, I needed to write something in the short periods of free time I had. What better than a mailbag to do that? I tossed out the post on Substack Notes, Bluesky and Facebook and collected the best questions.

If you all like this format, let me know and we can do more mailbags!

I know it seems dumb, but how does NIL work? - Smayan S.

Like I said in the reply to your note, it’s not a dumb question at all!

NIL, at its simplest terms, stands for “Name, Image and Likeness.” In common usage, NIL is student-athletes being able to be paid for schools and brands using their names, image and likeness.

We see that in things like the EA Sports College Football 25 video game, which paid all the players that opted-into being in the game $750 and a free copy, while locking other players into larger marketing deals like the cover athletes. This also falls under any commercials, autograph signings or other events you see marketing an athlete.

And that’s great and all, but how does it work?

In the spirit of full transparency, when I left college athletics full-time, NIL was still in its infancy, so I don’t know a lot of the deep nitty gritty about how it works now.

Most every school has an NIL database for interested business owners to reach out and connect with student athletes about possible brand deals. That could be anything from an appearance at a local car dealership to television deals like we saw with Quinn Ewers in the Dr. Pepper Fansville commercials.

Right now, the main player in that NIL marketplace space is Opendorse, which manages a national marketplace on their websites and offers team-specific marketplaces housed by the programs. This is similar to what you’d see with Cameo, anyone can request a video, social media post or autograph and the player gets a chance to accept as few or as many as they like.

But that’s not the NIL you’re asking about. That’s the simple, base level.

Institutional NIL, the kind like you see thrown around with the $20 million price tag on Ohio State’s national championship roster, is different. This is run by collectives, a third-party group that manages finding and signing NIL deals for student-athletes. A key piece of the puzzle here is that the collective cannot, in any way, be affiliated with the university’s athletic department.

To get around that, boosters will form their own collectives. Most schools have one. If we continue with the Ohio State example, the Buckeyes have two: THE Foundation, a 503(1)(c) non-profit managed by Brian Schottenstein and Cardale Jones, and the 1870 Society, a for-profit collective. Collectives, once again, cannot be affiliated with the schools, so any deals are just boosters shooting their shot at a prospect.

Now, all of this will change with the House v. NCAA settlement that can be fully approved and put into effect in April, but we don’t need to get into that here.

How is the CFP Selection Committee chosen? What are their terms, qualifications, etc? - Jill C.

It makes sense that the secretive group like the CFP Selection Committee would draw some questions.

For those that don’t know, the Selection Committee is the group of people that are tasked with making the College Football Playoff Rankings and ultimately selecting who is in and who is out.

The Selection Committee is made up of 13 people across all walks of college football. Members serve a three-year term and are not eligible for reappointment to the committee outside of some extenuating circumstances.

In terms of selecting the members, committee members are chose by a group of university presidents and conference commissioners to ensure fairness and no biases.

In 2024, the Committee featured former coaches, former players, athletic directors and media personalities.

Of the 13 members, four were coaches. Chris Ault, the founder of the pistol offense, accumulated a 234-108-1 record across 28 years leading the Nevada footabll program, alongside 10 conference championship. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2002 while still actively coaching. Jim Grobe has over 40 years of coaching experience, including two decades as head coach at Ohio University, Wake Forest and Baylor. He has an ACC title and National Coach of the Year honors on his mantle. Gary Pinkel compiled a career record of 191-110-3 across his career at Toledo and Missouri and is still the winningest coach in both programs’ history. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2022. Mike Riley has 48 years of coaching experience across the college and professional ranks, serving as head coach at Oregon State and Nebraska with a three-year stint leading the San Diego Chargers. He is the winningest coach in Oregon State history.

Two more were former players. Randall McDaniel is a former All-American guard at Arizona State, a former first round selection of the Minnesota Vikings and 12-time Pro Bowler. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2008, Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2009 and named to the NFL “All-Time” Top 100 Team in 2019. Will Shields is a former Outland Trophy winner and consensus All-American guard at Nebraska before becoming a third round pick by the Kansas City Chiefs. Shields has a Chiefs record 12 consecutive pro bowls, and was the 2003 Walter Payton Man of the Year. He is a member of the 2011 College Football Hall of Fame class and 2015 Pro Football Hall of Fame class.

Six are active athletic directors. Chet Gladchuk has been leading the U.S. Naval Academy’s athletic department for 22 years following stints at Houston, Boston College, and Tulane dating back to 1987. Warde Manuel is currently in his eighth year as Michigan’s athletic director following a four-year run leading UConn. Manuel is also a former player under Bo Schembechler at Michigan. Mack Rhoades is in his seventh season leading the Baylor athletic program and was named NACDA’s 2019-20 Athletic Director of the Year and Sports Business Journal’s 2021 Athletic Director of the Year. He also has AD stops at Missouri, Houston and Akron. David Saylor leads the Miami of Ohio athletic department since 2019 with 56 total conference championships over that time. He previously led South Dakota’s athletic department for two years. Carla Williams is the athletic director at Virginia, where the Cavaliers have won eight national championships and 17 total ACC Championships under her purview. Hunter Yurachek is the athletic director at Arkansas, where the Razorbacks have three-consecutive top-15 Director’s Cup finishes. He previously served as AD at Coastal Carolina and Houston.

Finally, our last member previously spent time in sports media. Kelly Whiteside spent 14 years with USA Today covering college football, the Olympics and the World Cup. She was the first female president of the Football Writers Association of America and is currently a Professor in Sports Media and Journalism at Montclair State University with previous experience teaching at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Rutgers.

The committee does require members to recuse themselves when the committee discusses schools they’re affiliated with to remove any bias.

Glachuk, Grobe, Manuel, Shields and Whiteside will have their terms expire this month.

How successful was the first expanded playoff? And what changes could be coming next? - Kyle D.

In all honestly, the success of the playoff depends on who you ask.

If you’re talking pure TV ratings, it wasn’t that big of a success. For example, the National Championship between Notre Dame and Ohio State drew 22.1 million viewers, according to ESPN, a 12 percent drop from the season before. Some of that can be attributed to large swaths of the nation feeling apathetic about the programs in the title game, but it ranked as the third-lowest audience of the 11 CFP title games.

Rating declines also carried through to the semifinals, where a 17 percent drop was seen.

But TV ratings aren’t everything. For one, the schools made a ton of money off of the playoff. Especially when you include the ticket sales for opening round games.

Most of all, the expanded playoff made it accessible to all teams. As I mentioned in my National Championship preview, neither of Notre Dame or Ohio State would have made the four-team field. Arizona State and Boise State, who fought well in their quarterfinal losses, wouldn’t have sniffed the field.

You might hear some complaints about regular season rivalries not mattering - after all, Ohio State lost to Michigan but still won the national title - but I’d say the playoff made more games impactful. For example, a Palmetto Bowl between 8-3 South Carolina and 9-2 Clemson suddenly had the drama of a play-in game. The Big 12 race went down to the wire. More teams will have a chance to make the dance and win a title - and that’s a good thing.

Now, what’s going to change? In all honesty, I don’t think much will be immediately different. The CFP’s contract runs through this season, so they’d need unanimous approval to make any changes. The only change I can see coming in 2025 is to the seeding, where the conference champion auto-byes go to the wayside or there’s reseeding after the first round to avoid No. 1 Oregon somehow drawing Ohio State.

Past that? I’d assume expansion is on the table. I’ve seen numbers like 16 teams thrown around, but I really think 14 is the sweet spot. It doesn’t extend the season any longer and only has two well-deserved byes for the top two teams. You may also hear some talk about conference auto-bids, such as the 4-4-2-2-1-1 Model where the Big Ten and SEC each get four bids, the ACC and Big 12 two, one to the Group of Five and one at-large (cough cough Notre Dame). I don’t see it happening, but who knows anymore.

What are programs doing to have less injuries to players and are they succeeding? - Paige O.

Injuries are tough because you can’t really prevent them. We are seeing more usage of guardian caps, especially in workout settings, but the jury is out on their effectiveness in decreasing head, neck and brain injuries.

The main issue surrounding player safety is more around personnel. There’s currently an athletic trainer crisis where there aren’t enough trainers to cover everyone. The National Athletic Trainers’ Association (NATA) ran a survey with their over 1,100 members working in college athletics and more than 50 percent of respondents claimed they were working with over 100 athletes on their own. Additionally, 65 percent said they received additional responsibilities on top of working with their athletes with no increase in compensation.

That’s leading to burnout, which leads to mistakes and trainers just leaving their posts. The NATA survey saw that 18 percent of athletic trainers made a mistake in the 30-day period before taking the survey.

Now, at the schools I’ve worked at and talked to people at, there’s been a major push to hire and retain more of their athletic trainers. One source I talked to recently said that, when the university’s athletic department was restructuring, other departments insisted on raises to the athletic training budget and prioritizing hiring athletic trainers before any other positions were posted.

And there’s evidence behind this. Research shows that overall injury rates drop 9.5 percent and concussion rates drop 6.7 percent when schools have one standard deviation below the median rate of 118 student athletes per trainer. Just hiring one more athletic trainer can help prevent injuries to athletes and help them recover faster.

And that’s just physical health concerns. According to the May 2022 NCAA Student-Athlete Well-Being Study, student-athletes reported nearly twice as many mental health concerns as before the COVID-19 pandemic, which particularly high anxiety and burnout concerns. To combat that, we’re seeing a lot of athletic departments expanding either their Sports Medicine or Student Athlete Services departments to include mental health staff such as counselors, sports psychologists and more.

There isn’t a lot of data on the effectiveness of these efforts, but I’m in the camp that having mental health resources directly available to student-athletes is never a bad thing.

How will college football adapt to the NIL and the transfer portal to stop larger schools from abusing the system? - Cody B.

This really is the big question on everyone’s mind, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a firm answer right now. There’s so much in flux between potential Congressional rulings, the House settlement and more, the NCAA is seemingly in a holding pattern. Based on prior injunctions from lawsuits, the NCAA can’t enforce their transfer portal or some of their NIL rules.

I believe the solution will come once the House settlement is approved in April.

As an overview, the House v. NCAA settlement is going to open up direct athlete compensation via revenue sharing if approved. Within that settlement is provisions from the NCAA’s side about establishing an independent third-party enforcement agency to monitor both the direct revenue sharing deals and any potential outside NIL deals.

The NCAA really pushed to eliminate pay-for-play in the settlement, with the only allowed enticement to be the revenue sharing directly from the schools.

Yahoo! Sports’s Ross Dellenger reported last week that many college football coaches think this new enforcement arm will have actual teeth to enforce the rules of the settlement. According to Dellenger, everything from fines, suspensions, and reductions in revenue sharing pools are on the table.

That’s cute and all, but you might be wondering how that’s different from the current system where the NCAA can hypothetically impose those same penalties on a program?

There’s one main difference: the current system is just operated by the NCAA. The one in the House settlement would be brand new and agreed upon by the NCAA, its member schools, and the players. You could say its as close to being collectively bargained as possible.

You see, the NCAA cannot enforce their own rules right now due to various lawsuits and injunctions against them. Collectively bargaining omits the possibility of those lawsuits even coming up. Because all sides agree on it before it’s put in place, the new agency and its policies are all but immune from legal challenges.

Once this new enforcement arm is up and running, we’ll see programs tighten up the ship, so to speak. As for the transfer portal, that’s still something the NCAA and its member schools are looking at. There’s not a clear solution on the horizon, but setting up a de facto salary cap is a good start.

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