| Did you hear about the Utah football player who was reportedly offered around $1 million to transfer?
How about Boston College wide receiver Zay Flowers, who was offered $600,000 to go to another school … and $300,000 to go to yet another?
The offers come from collectives, booster and business-driven entities that have sprung up to offer Name, Image and Likeness money to college athletes. While schools can’t officially offer a player anything, a private collective can — i.e. come to our favorite school and we’ll give you x-amount in “endorsement” money. It’s a work-around.
While Utah, Boston College and the sport as a whole expressed everything from concern to frustration over these offers to transfer, this is actually a sign that everything is fine, even if College Sports Inc. would want you to believe otherwise.
College coaches and leaders have dubbed these offers as “inducements” and called it “tampering.”
A clear mind would see it as something else — a cause for celebration. A college kid being offered life-changing money is a great thing, not a problem in need of federal regulation.
Exactly what kind of person, and what kind of industry, would villainize another person after finding out that someone wants to pay them a million dollars to do something?
College athletics is a recurring exercise in Chicken Littleism. The egomaniacal groupthink is breathtaking. You have to give them credit, though, they never waver and never retreat no matter how many times they are told and proven wrong.
They opposed player stipends, academic awards, transfers, NIL opportunities and pretty much everything else. Each one of these was supposed to ruin college sports and destroy interest in the games.
NCAA lawyers once actually argued — all the way to the Supreme Court — that allowing athletes to receive monetary academic awards would make fans see college football as a professional “minor league” and since professional minor leagues have very few fans, interest would plummet.
Saturday’s Alabama-Tennesse game drew an audience of 11.6 million people, the third such 10-million plus viewership game already this season. (As recently as 2019, just a single game prior to the playoffs cracked the 10 million mark.)
No one cared about the transfers, NIL deals, stipend money and academic award cash on both teams, let alone Alabama quarterback Bryce Young actually starring in Dr. Pepper commercials that aired during the game.
The sport is booming despite everyone’s past concerns and fears. Attendance is expected to be up nationally for the first time in seven years. Leagues are signing billion-dollar plus television deals, which means networks are betting on the sport getting increasingly popular. Coaching salaries rose 15.3 percent year over year, according to USA Today. The playoff is about to be expanded and even more lucrative.
And yet … there is always “concern.”
Right now they are obsessed with “tampering,” which is an interesting way to frame it.
If someone wanted to let you know that they’ll pay you a million dollars to do the same job you are currently doing, would you want your boss to collude with the other boss to prevent you from even hearing about it?
Well, you aren’t a college coach or administrator, apparently.
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