Virginia Tech’s Brent Pry understood his colleague’s frustration. This fellow ACC football coach was alerting Pry that a third party with Hokies ties was tampering with one of his players.
The player was not in the transfer portal. Nor, according to Pry, did he play a position of need for Tech.
“We had no clue” this was happening, Pry said.
It’s happening hourly throughout college sports, and until some entity — the NCAA, Congress, National Labor Relations Board — crafts enforceable guidelines, subtle tampering, and even brazen purchasing, will flourish.
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Expecting wisdom from the NCAA or Congress seems foolish, and although some administrators resist the concept, collective bargaining with athletes may be inevitable, especially if, as many legal experts anticipate, the NLRB and/or federal courts classify them as employees.
“How do you control it?” Pry said of tampering. “Because it’s just not right. We didn’t lose anybody because of it, but we dealt with it. It was a young man that was not in the transfer portal and had offers and opportunities from other places outside the league.”
Indeed, Division I athletics has become the land of unintended consequences — especially in football and men’s basketball.
Hounded by public opinion and/or ordered by courts, the presidents and administrators who control the NCAA gave athletes more freedom to transfer. They also green-lighted athletes monetizing their names, images, and likenesses, making NIL a household acronym.
Both actions were long overdue.
But paralyzed by legal rebukes, most strikingly from the Supreme Court two years ago this month in the Alston Case, the NCAA offered no guardrails it was willing or able to enforce.
Having led Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) programs at Richmond and Fordham, Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson appreciates the challenges across the Division I landscape. And during the ACC’s annual spring meetings in May, he voiced the group’s concerns.
“There’s a growing frustration with the lack of structure in college football,” Clawson said. “It’s a new world order and an old organizational model. There’s got to be a governance structure that changes with the times...
“There really are no rules. And the rules that are there, I don’t want to say they’re not being enforced because I don’t know if they are enforceable. ... I think the intention of the rules and the application of them are just in dramatically different places.”
Exactly. NIL was designed to reward athletes for activities such as teaching at camps or endorsing products. Instead, in many cases, it’s direct compensation. Pay for play.
“We’re in a period now of absolute chaos,” Pitt basketball coach Jeff Capel said. “There are no rules, no restrictions. That’s the reality of what we’re dealing with. I wish we’d stop calling it NIL. It’s not that. It’s pay for play.”
Hence, college athletes are tempted not only by the prospect of more playing time elsewhere but also the promise of more money. And with relaxed transfer restrictions, annual free agency is not uncommon.
Tampering is “not supposed to happen,” Clawson said, “but all of us have stories about guys getting bought off our teams or others who aren’t in the portal having multiple offers. It’s hard to substantiate it, and there’s always some degree of liar’s poker going on with this, but there are certainly cases where you have pretty hard evidence that it happened.”
Clawson has reported cases to compliance officials and reached out to coaches whose programs he suspected of tampering — to little or no avail.
“A lot of it involves third parties,” Clawson said, “and you can’t necessarily trace it back to the coach. We lost two of them. There’s no question it’s tampering when players have multiple offers before they’re in the portal.”
Richmond coach Russ Huesman said he doesn’t believe players who have transferred from his program were unethically poached. In fact, when graduate defensive tackle Kobie Turner and freshman safety Malik Mustapha entered the portal, he encouraged them to select Wake Forest because of his faith in Clawson — Huesman was Clawson’s defensive coordinator at UR.
Mustapha was the Deacons’ fourth-leading tackler last season, while Turner earned third-team All-ACC honors and was drafted in the third round by the Los Angeles Rams.
“For the most part,” Huesman said, “when these kids show up and get to their sophomore year, the light at the end of the tunnel is, ‘Man, I’ve got a chance to get a Richmond degree.’ ...
“Here’s the way I (saw) it when I lost Kobie Turner and offensive lineman (Joe More) to Syracuse. You gave me five good years. You gave me four good years. Thank you. You didn’t bail on me after the first. You didn’t bail on me after the second. You gave me these years, and that’s really all I can ask.”
Like many of us, Huesman wonders what the end game is. He appreciates the NCAA establishing two offseason transfer windows, one each following the regular season and spring practice, but still called the current climate “nuts.”
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips agrees and spent time last month lobbying members of Congress for federal intervention. On the wish list for him and other commissioners: a national registry of agents and NIL deals, plus a standardized NIL contract.
“Everybody’s howling,” Phillips said. “... They just want some structure to this. ... I think we’re all exasperated.”