A transfer portal that never seems to actually close. NIL war chests. Schools “stealing” players already on active rosters at other NCAA programs.
Welcome to the world of college football in 2024.
First-year Arkansas offensive line coach Eric Mateos opened up about those topics in a podcast interview Friday. Let’s just say that Mateos didn’t hold back regarding his anxieties about being a coach in the current landscape of the sport.
Mateos, who became the Razorbacks’ line coach in December after spending three years in the same post at Baylor, said that he lived in a “constant state of paranoia” over losing players in the portal by illegal means.
He mentioned Fernando Carmona, who officially transferred to Arkansas from San Jose State in January. Carmona was ranked as the No. 12 offensive tackle in the portal this off-season by 247Sports.
“Guys are trying to steal our left tackle from us already, and he just got here in January,” Mateos said on Coaches & The Mouth, a podcast devoted to Razorbacks athletics. “That’s the challenge with it: how do you manage people trying to come get your guys? My goal is to get players who love playing here at Arkansas. They love playing for me, and they love playing with each other so much that the cheating going on doesn’t really faze them.”
Mateos added that Carmona had assured him that he was committed to the Arkansas program.
“With Fernando, I called him, and I was like, ‘Hey man, I know people are coming after you, trying to get you to leave again,'” Mateos said during the podcast. “He’s like, ‘Coach, you don’t have to worry about nothing. I’m riding with you.’ I knew he would say that, but as a coach you just live in this constant state of paranoia.”
Mateos also said that NIL collectives were allowing schools to offer money and other incentives to players already on active rosters in an effort to entice them to enter the portal.
“I had somebody tell me two days ago that there was a collective from a university calling kids at another school who were not in the portal and offering them money to go into the portal. The collective is recruiting. The collective is recruiting players. It’s like, what is going on?” Mateos said.
As 247Sports’ Grant Hughes noted in his writeup of Mateos’ comments:
“NCAA rules state that coaches are not allowed to contact prospective transfers until after they enter the portal, and boosters are not authorized to recruit high school recruits or transfers. Mateos said NIL collectives have become involved, and rules are being broken across the nation.”
The topic of roster-poaching has become a hot-topic debate. In the past year, Colorado self-reported 11 NCAA violations. One pertained to hosting a camp for high school graduates and transfers from other programs that had entered the portal.
But the university (deliberately or not) also welcomed seven players on active NCAA rosters that had not entered the portal, a violation of rule 13.1.1.3, which prohibits tampering with a player who is not in the portal.
And in February, Iowa announced that it planned to self-report a tampering violation concerning its recruitment of offensive lineman Kadyn Proctor, who had transferred to the Hawkeyes from Alabama. Tyler Barnes, Iowa’s director of recruiting, had reached out via text message to Proctor in September 2023. Alabama began the season with losses to Texas and an ugly road win at South Florida that month.
Proctor has since left Iowa to transfer back to Alabama.