The quarterback played for a Bay Area high school, rode the bench for two years at a Big 10 college, and as a starter led his team to a 20-5 record over two seasons. He was good enough to be selected in the sixth round of the NFL Draft.
But would Tom Brady repeat that game plan today? Would he wait his turn at the University of Michigan or step through the transfer portal and take his game — and his future — elsewhere? We’ll never know, will we?
Once upon a time college athletes worked campus jobs and summer jobs to earn enough to cover their expenses. No longer. The best and most visible of them are capitalizing on their reputation — even in high school — and signing lucrative deals that make the part-time jobs of the past look quaint.
Livvy Dunne, a gymnastics star at LSU and social media mega-star, will appear in Sports Illustrated’s annual Swimsuit issue this spring, boosting her estimated market value to $3.5 million, according to On3, an index that calculates such things. Bronny James is finishing high school this spring and already has a market value of $7.4 million and sponsorship deals with Fast X, Beats by Dre and Nike. Being the son of LeBron James probably helps.
Are open door transfer and open checkbook policies good for college athletics? I say no, but we should have a better idea in two or three years.
Welcome to college athletics in the 21st century, where athletes can come and go as they please, no strings attached. Where they can send money home to mom and dad rather than the other way around.
Welcome to a world where lawyers, accountants, and agents have descended from professional sports to higher academia. Sorry, scratch academia and insert big-time athletics – because academics are moving toward the rear of the lecture hall at places like Louisiana State, which now has a chief brand officer to advise LSU athletes on the finer points of name, image, likeness, or NIL.
Effective since July 1, 2021, NIL is re-shaping intercollegiate athletics at the highest level, the Power Five conferences, where football is king and basketball queen. Simply put, college athletes can get paid for lending their name, image or likeness to well, almost anything. And they can charge what the market will bear. On3 has developed an algorithm it says can determine an athlete’s market value based on three sets of criteria: performance in competition, influence on social media and exposure through endorsements, appearances and the like.
The big money in big-time college sports used to go to schools, then to high-profile coaches like Nick Saban at Alabama (football) and John Calipari at Kentucky (basketball). Now the athletes are cashing in. How much is anybody’s guess. Numbers fly like forward passes.
“What’s true? What isn’t true? Is player X getting this and player Y getting that? We really don’t know. We need transparency,” Thorr Bjorn told me this week. He is the longtime director of athletics at the University of Rhode Island and must lead his coaches, players, administrators, alumni, and boosters into this new world that his counterpart at Providence College, Steve Napolillo, describes as the “wild, wild West.”
“Everything changed in 2021 with all the new rules and regulations. You got to adapt,” Napolillo told Sam Wood of the Providence Business News in his excellent cover story in the April 14-27, 2023 edition. “It’ll take some years to see how it all shakes out.”
“I agree,” said Bjorn, who came of age as a football player at the University of Massachusetts when an athletic scholarship alone was a big deal. “It’s very different. The portal. The collective piece. These are things that are all different. We got to embrace it, and let’s be great at it.”
URI, PC, Bryant and Brown, the four Division I programs in Rhode Island, are rungs below the big schools and conferences that drive the discussions in college athletics. Their athletes aren’t signing six-figure shoe deals. Still, except Brown, they have formed collectives so boosters can pool resources to make NIL money available to athletes.
The transfer portal is a bigger disruptive force to programs in Rhode Island. Revised twice since its launch in 2018, the Transfer Portal is an online database in which an athlete can opt to change schools once without sitting out a full year, which was the previous policy.
The result is that college rosters are in a constant state of flux. Coaches in Rhode Island must worry about who is leaving after a season. They must monitor the portal to see who is available to fill a hole or strengthen the team in general. They risk the possibility of developing a player and then watching him leave for a bigger program that offers more exposure and, potentially, more NIL money.
Bjorn doesn’t have a problem with a one-time transfer. He worries that the NCAA will start approving waivers for a second transfer. In that case, he said, the athlete should sit a year.
If NIL money becomes more important, he said, programs at URI’s level may suffer the consequences.
“Collectives are not sustainable,” he said. “Fans will get tired of it. We’ll keep losing kids. Fans have to get to know our players and coaches. At some point they’ll just watch the Patriots or stay home and watch the Celtics on TV. If it gets to the point where these kids are getting paid, the whole thing will blow up.”
Farther down the college sports ladder in Division III, NIL and the Transfer Portal are not headaches for administrators. Kiki Jacobs is the athletics director at Roger Williams University in Bristol.
“We might have a student-athlete get a $25 deal from a pizza place,” she told me last week. Athletes who want to transfer just have to sign a self-release form, Jacobs said.
“Division I has gone crazy with NIL and the Transfer Portal. I am so glad I am in Division III. I don’t have to deal with it. I don’t have millions of dollars or a star quarterback,” she said.
Jacobs worries about players who transfer for the wrong reasons, “who are playing not because they love the school but because they don’t want to sit the bench.”
