Reactions to Ole Miss, Miami, and Alabama this week are telling.
Since we’re all snowed in today, and Vanderbilt doesn’t have a basketball game until tomorrow night — if that even happens, what with all of us still buried in snow and ice — I wanted to take stock of three separate and yet extremely related developments in college sports over the last week and change and how they relate to the brewing blowback to the current state of college sports.
In one event, Duke quarterback Darian Mensah announced that he was transferring a few hours before the deadline to enter the transfer portal — and entering the second year of an NIL contract with Duke. Rumor was that somebody — the assumption is Miami — had offered him more money to induce him into the portal. Duke, rather than enter his name in the transfer portal as NCAA rules require, took him to court and got a temporary restraining order.
In another event, Charles Bediako — who played at Alabama three years ago before declaring for the NBA Draft, went undrafted, and has bounced around the G-League for three years — went before a judge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who also happens to be an Alabama booster, and got said judge to rule him eligible and issue an injunction against the NCAA preventing them from declaring otherwise. Bediako played against Tennessee on Saturday night. (In a twist that would be hilarious if it weren’t Tennessee, Alabama lost the game.) Alabama was universally condemned for literally bringing in a ringer from the G-League to play basketball for them.
Finally, Dabo Swinney went nuclear on Ole Miss and an agent after the agent tried to extort additional money from Clemson for a linebacker enrolled at Clemson, with a direct threat that the player had an offer from Ole Miss. Clemson did not match the offer, the linebacker transferred to Ole Miss, and Swinney pretty directly called out Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding for tampering.
(And a few weeks ago, Washington quarterback Demond Williams tried to pull the same thing that Mensah did, only to pull back and return to Washington under threat that Washington would go to court to enforce his contract.)
It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly public opinion shifted. Some will tell you the NCAA was always an illegal organization, and they’re probably right, and yet the organization persisted for decades because of what basically amounted to voluntary compliance. Sure, there were rules violations, but the basic system in place persisted because everybody agreed to swallow their medicine when the NCAA told them no. Transfers were ineligible to play for a year, so schools didn’t play them. A player was declared academically ineligible, he didn’t play. You were caught paying players and got probation, you accepted it. One reason the NCAA used to be fond of postseason bans was for the very simple reason that since the NCAA controlled the postseason, they could directly enforce that by not selecting a team on its naughty list regardless of their record.
It might have been against the rules for athletes to get paid, sure, but the good ones (and even a fair number of not-so-good ones) were being compensated under the table, often through increasingly-elaborate schemes to evade the NCAA rulebook. The NCAA cracked down on boosters funneling money to players, so schools worked the system so that the payments were coming from people who technically didn’t count as “boosters.” The NCAA increasingly allowed various exceptions to the one-year transfer sitout rule starting with the graduate transfer rule; schools figured out a way to drive an 18-wheeler through the loopholes.
Part of the problem here was that while schools did occasionally sue the NCAA and win, they often ended up worse off by doing so. Oklahoma and others sued the NCAA over its television contract, which limited the number of games that could be televised — then found out that television networks didn’t really have an interest in signing television contracts with individual schools not named Notre Dame and the big conferences actually made less money on their subsequent TV deals than they would have if they’d simply stuck with the NCAA’s TV deal. In theory, somebody slapped with NCAA probation who was good enough to play in the NCAA Tournament could have sued the NCAA over it and probably won; everybody also understood that that would kill the golden goose, and nobody wanted to do that.
What actually turned the tide was the athletes, and here, I can pinpoint the moment it changed: the UNC academic scandal (and a couple of similar, less-remembered ones that are less remembered only because the schools involved agreed that what was going on was fucking embarrassing and acted quickly: Georgia had basketball coach Jim Harrick Jr. teaching an utterly fake class for course credit, and Auburn had a similar “independent study” program abused by athletes in its sociology department.) Everybody always sort of knew that most college football and basketball players, even at Vanderbilt, were enrolled in less demanding majors (ask any of us about “Human and Organizational Development.”) But the social contract of college athletics was that while it was probably bullshit that the athletes weren’t getting paid, getting a free education for playing college football for four years wasn’t actually a bad deal assuming you were getting a real college education. If you were getting a degree everyone knew was fake by taking fake classes and getting A’s for essays that could have been written by a third-grader — well, that was a different story. When called on it, UNC pointed out that the classes in question were also open to regular students and therefore not the NCAA’s turf, and the NCAA backed down (though UNC did have major problems with their accrediting body.)
The golden goose probably could have lived forever if the schools had kept up their end of the bargain, I guess. The original lawsuit that started the house of cards tumbling down, O’Bannon v. NCAA, was brought by a former college athlete who hadn’t played college basketball in over a decade and a video game that used his likeness without his permission — in other words, an utterly collateral attack on the system. Shawne Alston, the plaintiff in Alston v. NCAA, was likewise a former college athlete. Suits brought by former, rather than current, players had the advantage that their schools couldn’t actually do anything to stop them.
Now that we’re on the other side, everybody hates the current system except maybe television executives who see the big ratings that more helmet games and the College Football Playoff draw. On the other hand, private equity is constantly threatening to get its dirty hands into the business of college sports, nonrevenue sports are under constant threat of extinction, and we’re left with what’s basically a professional league — only, without the collective bargaining agreements that prevent those leagues from being the Wild West. (Even European soccer, which doesn’t really have any sort of collective bargaining agreement to speak of, still has some sort of system in place to prevent it from being a complete free-for-all.) Congress isn’t acting; courts, if anything, are consistently coming down on the side of “rules? What are rules?”
(For the record, you’ll recall that my reaction to Diego Pavia getting an extra year was basically “I like that he gets to play for us again but dislike the precedent this sets.” Of course, Langston Patterson didn’t get an additional year.)
What’s happening now is that with no help coming from courts or Congress, coaches and schools are going to start taking matters into their own hands. Tampering has been rampant for years — hell, remember Sheldon Jeter? Yeah, that was 2013 — and aside from general lack of NCAA enforcement on, well, anything, the reason why it couldn’t be enforced was as simple as “the school’s NIL collective communicating with the kid’s agent doesn’t actually break any rules,” even though everybody knew it was going on. And it’s no coincidence that Ole Miss and Miami have long been assumed to be among the most egregious offenders here, which is why the “everybody’s doing it” defense is ringing so hollow. Duke won’t get Darian Mensah back in the fold, but showing that athletes who break contracts will get taken to court is intended to deter future athletes from trying it. Dabo Swinney won’t get Luke Ferretti back; going nuclear on Ole Miss is about increasing the cost of doing business for coaches who wish to win by tampering with players on other rosters.
Charles Bediako comes on the heels of Baylor bringing in James Nnaji, who was actually drafted by an NBA team though he never even played in the G-League, never mind in the NBA. At that point, it did seem that the NCAA was going to draw a line in the sand that guys who had actually signed an NBA contract were not eligible to play college basketball any more… only for Alabama to bring in a guy who’d signed a two-way contract with the Spurs in 2023 and basically tell the NCAA “fuck you, what are you gonna do about it?” The condemnation has been swift and universal, but in the past, a school in a similar situation would have said “that’s fine that a judge said that, but he can’t make us actually play you in any games, and we’re not gonna do that until the NCAA says it’s okay.“ (Penny Hardaway refusing to hold out James Wiseman was a notable exception.)
Now, a lot of the problem that’s happening now is that systems of voluntary compliance don’t work when a uniquely shameless generation of athletes and coaches comes along. For decades after Curt Flood sued MLB to end the reserve clause, baseball players staying with their drafting team for their entire career was hardly unheard of because it was happening in the context of a generation of players and managers who didn’t view relationships as strictly transactional. It’s no coincidence that Pete Golding is 41, the same age as LeBron James (and myself), the megastar who’s spent his entire career basically leveraging his teams for short-term maximization of his bank account. This is the generation that created the expectation that players under contract who demanded a trade should have their demands met, regardless of whether it’s in the team’s interest or not. Of COURSE they don’t think contracts should be enforced. That’s all come into contact with a generation entering college who seems to have decided that if you can ChatGPT your way to a college degree, you do it, and a generation of adults telling them that “fuck it, burn everything down” is a rational response to the world.
And yet, finally, we’re reaching a line in the sand that’s causing people to finally say they’ve had enough, and a coaching community recognizing that the only way out of this is to name and shame the offenders. Which should have been done a long time ago, but “everybody’s doing it” was the excuse for too long.
Category: General Sports
