It’s early January in 2016. People are celebrating the new year, reflecting on the holidays, but most of all getting ready for the college football championship. The 2016 college football season was one to remember.
With so many star standouts, such as Penn State’s Saquan Barkley, Ohio State’s J. T. Barrett, Alabama’s young Jalen Hurts, and most notably Clemson’s Deshaun Watson. These players were all big recruits that committed to big schools and stuck with them.
They weren’t chasing money; they were chasing rings. After the new college football playoffs got established in 2014, the Alabama Clemson rivalry was at its peak. Crimson Tide quarterback Jalen Hurts was young but had confidence and made big plays with talented skill players like Calvin Ridley. Alabama was coming off a big win in the Peach bowl against Washington, so they were ready to face Deshaun Watson and his Clemson Tigers.
The Tigers went 14-1 on the year and had just shut out the top ranked Buckeyes 31-0 in the Fiesta bowl. In the championship, Deshaun Watson threw for over 400 yards with 3 touchdowns, and the Crimson Tide ultimately couldn’t keep up. The Tigers won their second consecutive title in a thrilling 35-31 victory.
The Tigers’ successful run and championships went down as one of the best that college football has ever seen. Their success was largely due to great coaching, and team chemistry. The guys that were on Clemson went to Clemson because they liked Dabo Swinney, and the Clemson environment. They all came together and played in consecutive seasons together where they established their offensive and defensive schemes.
Fast forward to 2024, college football is an entirely different game. For starters, nobody has talked about Clemson since Trevor Lawrence was drafted following the 2020 season. This isn’t due to a decline in fans or a new coach. Clemson still offers the same package that it did in 2016. The only difference from 2016 is that now players get paid through NIL, (Name Image and Likeness), and the transfer portal is bigger than ever.
Because of the effects that NIL and the transfer portal have brought to college football, nobody even knows who the stars are on the big name teams. With how big NIL has gotten, players just chase numbers and go from school to school at their own will. This needs to be fixed. Fans loose interest when there’s too much scrambling to even keep track of what guys are on what team.
If players want to be paid and treated like professionals, they need to be fully treated like professionals. Instead of being able to go to a new school each year on a new amount of NIL money, players need to be on contracts. When players get their NIL deals, they should be forced to sign a two-year contract with that team. This would ensure their commitment to the team for at least two years and ensure the donors that their money is being well spent and invested in their teams.
Prior to 2018, if a player was looking to transfer schools, they had to go through a very lengthy process. First, they had to get permission from their coach to transfer, then take it up with the athletic director. If both of them allowed the athlete to transfer, a waiver request would then be submitted to the NCAA. After the waiver got processed, if it was accepted the athlete would have to sit out a year of eligibility and then go play for the school they wanted to.
Then in 2018, the NCAA added the ‘transfer portal’ where athletes were allowed to transfer without requesting permission but still sit out a year. In 2021, athletes were granted immediate eligibility upon transfer. And now, in 2024 the NCAA has let everything loose. Players are now allowed to transfer as many times as they would like, with immediate eligibility!
This is a huge problem for college football. By allowing the players to transfer as many times as they want with immediate eligibility, it makes the game so much harder to follow for fans. Football is widely known for being a team sport where everyone on the team grows together like family, and they work so hard all offseason together so that they have the proper chemistry to perform well in the fall.
This is what fans love! Being able to watch the team you love grow together and get better over a series of years is the most fulfilling thing in the world for a diehard fan. The transfer portal rules completely ruin this.
With players switching teams every year it not only makes things hard to follow on your team, but it ruins rivalries. When you are following a team so closely, you grow to love certain players on your team. You know everything about them. Who their parents are, how many siblings they have, their favorite place to eat…… But the same goes for the teams you play. You hate the team, you hate their coach, and you hate their players.
With the current transfer portal rules in place, it takes out all of the passion for fans. On top of the extensive rules in the transfer portal, comes NIL money. This is like the transfer portal on steroids! It just makes the same problems worse.
Because players are allowed to transfer at will for just a year at a time, they no longer chase rings, they chase money. This makes it so that the same five schools, (Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Oregon, A&M) get all the recruits. This has nothing to do with the college environment of the school or their fans. It is all due to how much money their boosters have. Players just chase the highest digits, then the next year they’ll go to the next highest bidder.
This is why a change needs to be made, where players are forced to sign contracts for at least two years to play on a team and get NIL endorsements.
