ALTOONA, Pa. -- Raise your hand if you saw this coming. It really wasn't too difficult to foresee, once the double-edged sword Pandora's box of NIL and the transfer portal were unleashed upon college football a couple of years ago.
Name, image and likeness -- done right -- could be a great thing for college athletes. They deserve to get paid for their brand, and the more money they can actually earn, the better.
The transfer portal sounds like a good thing, because college athletes deserve the right to be able to move from one school to another without being punished, just like any other college student can.
And like any coach can, usually for lots and lots of money.
The problem is that the geniuses who run college football -- and I'm being completely sarcastic because these folks truly are idiots -- were unable to predict the cesspool that would be created by allowing the combination of unsupervised NIL and free transfer portal movement. They took two good things and soured both by allowing them to be used together.
As a result, that lethal combination of NIL and the transfer portal are now ruining college football. What NIL really seems to be all about right now is this: Nasty Insufferable Liars.
There's a lot of money out there, to be sure, for college athletes to make with NIL. But there also are so many shady people who already have found ways to manipulate the system, and will get better and better at it until there's some kind of oversight put into place to control the chaos.
Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi, always one to toss out interesting and oftentimes wacky comments, was on fire talking about these issues during his signing day press conference Wednesday.
"It's sad that we're in this space even," Narduzzi said. "There's nothing tracking anything out there. Things you hear, you don't know what's true, you don't what's fake.
"Even when you hear someone's getting money, then you find out there's a lot of lying going on out there. So, I think through the years we're going to find out the kids have been (told), 'Hey, you're gonna get this much,' and they aren't getting it. And I've talked to enough name, image and likeness agents out there that give me feedback that there's just, what they're being told is not true. And then they get there, they find out, and they're kind of disappointed, a little bit disengaged. Then they'll wind up in the portal a year, calling us back saying, 'I want to come Pitt.'"
The Panthers, of course, were affected greatly by all this stuff last year, when star receiver Jordan Addison allegedly was paid off to come to USC. The price tag reportedly was $3 million, but really, there's no way for any of us to know if Addison was promised that much or will ever receive it.
The Pitt camp felt USC tampered in getting Addison to transfer, and Trojan coach Lincoln Riley denied that accusation.
Nobody can say for sure what happened in that particular case, but the bottom line is the whole thing essentially destroyed the notion that NIL would be anything other than paying guys to play.
"Sometimes it's tampering, paying guys to play," Narduzzi said Wednesday about some NIL deals. "And again, that is not what name, image and likeness is. It should be name, image and likeness, and you should earn your deals the right way, like a Kenny Pickett, Calijah Kancey and Brandon Hill and some of these other guys on our football team.
"We got about 90 guys that have deals," the coach noted, "but they're all done the right way."
I'd like to think most schools are doing it the right way. But I'm not naive. College football -- and basketball to an even higher degree -- is filled with so many slimy, unscrupulous individuals that, even if schools are indeed trying to take the high ground, my belief is that many of them still have individuals working to undermine the system.
And all it takes is for one bad seed to spoil the bunch.
"There's more tampering going on than you could ever imagine," Washington State coach Jake Dickert said last week. "We've had guys contact our players' parents. We had a coach from another school contact one of our players and offer him NIL. A coach.
"So, there’s more things going on behind the scenes that you can’t even imagine. You can’t even imagine the things that are happening to try and pry our players away from this place."
And there's no one around to police it. Any of it.
Because the NCAA is an absolute joke -- always has been, always will be -- since it's an organization more concerned about red tape and petty rules violations at certain schools than actually overseeing and addressing serious problems that potentially threaten everybody.
I had a caller on my radio show last year make this comparison: Say there's a speed limit on the highway, but everybody knows there are no police around to stop you and give you a ticket. No, not everyone will speed, but a whole lot will, and some will be flying around like crazy with no regard for anyone else.
That's really where we are with all this NIL and portal stuff.
James Franklin addressed the state of college athletics during his press conference Wednesday. While his sound bites weren't quite as strong as Narduzzi's, Franklin expressed serious concern.
"A general consensus of coaches that I talked to ... there's major concerns with what's going on in college football right now," Franklin said. "There's really no guardrails. There's not a whole lot of guidance and governance. It's concerning.
"Again, I think I've been very clear on my beliefs in NIL and my support of the student-athletes and us coming up with some way, whether it's NIL how it's structured right now, or whether it's a collective bargaining agreement, wherever this goes to. I don't have an issue with that. But I have an issue right now that there's no guardrails, there's no guidelines.
"I hate to use the expression the wild, wild West, but it's a little bit of the wild, wild West."
Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft offered this insight:
"What you are hearing in the recruiting space is -- and it happened with us just this week -- people just won't come. They're throwing half a million dollars or $700,000 if you come to X school. We're not going to do that. That's just not how it works.
Kraft later noted: "We're just not going to come and try to pay you to come here."
That's the right way to go about it for Penn State. And for any school. That's the way all this stuff should be done.
But let's be realistic here: Even if Penn State isn't willing to just pay guys tons of money to come play, we all know that there will be schools out there which will do that. And then the Nittany Lions will have to compete with some of those schools to achieve their highest goals, such as making the College Football Playoff or winning national titles.
So, in essence, doing things the right way very well could end up hurting Penn State in the grand scheme of things.
Which is just messed up.
But if there are no repercussions for people doing things in unscrupulous ways -- and right now, there are no repercussions at all -- then what you end up with is a corrupt system where nobody knows what to do or who to trust.
Welcome to the modern era of college football.
