Has NIL already gone off the rails in college football?

The way it’s operating at some schools cannot be how this works.

Michigan football is still working to get its footing in the new college football landscape, as name, image, and likeness has changed the nature of recruiting in the sport.

There seems to be a quintessential difference between how different programs are handling the new reality. The way that schools like Michigan are handing it is that players, once they’ve established their merit, will then profit. Others, however, appear to be using it more as a bargaining chip while recruiting.

Make no mistake, every school has to address it now during the recruiting phase, but with the reports that Miami Hurricanes quarterback commit Jaden Rashada having received a $9.5 million agreement, NIL has perhaps gone off the deep end.

Rashada is a well-known recruit, a four-star recruit, ranked in five-star range at No. 29 according to 247Sports, indicating that he has true star potential. But, if that figure is accurate, especially half a year before he can even sign a national letter of intent — especially given that he doesn’t have the name-power as Texas commit Arch Manning — it’s not only a possible indication of the still-illegal pay-for-play, but that college football players could be making NFL-type money, based solely off of potential.

Granted, while it may just be obfuscation to avoid pay-for-play calamity, there are reports that that number is highly exaggerated.

An On3.com report that Rashada agreed to a NIL deal with Miami megabooster John Ruiz for $9.5 million is “grossly inaccurate,” Ruiz told the Miami Herald, referring to the dollar figure and the existence of any executed contract with a player considered one of the top half dozen quarterbacks in the 2023 recruiting cycle.

Exaggerated or not, that we’re reaching the point where it’s even a possibility, for a high school player who hasn’t even seen a second of intercollegiate play, it indicates that college football as we have come to know and love it is over.

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Let me be clear: I am a big proponent on NIL. I think it’s an excellent policy to let players to be able to monetize their worth and it’s been short-sighted — to some degree — that those who partake in college football haven’t been able to do things that the rest of the country have been able to. Simple things like monetizing a YouTube channel, which irrationally was illegal in recent history. And that’s absurd.

But this is a different deal here. This isn’t a known player, or even a household name, per se, outside of recruiting circles (I think Manning, due to name power, resonates outside of the realm of recruitniks) cashing in on endorsements. More and more, we’re hearing figures attached to players without any brand tie-in, which screams ‘come here and we’ll pay you X-amount of money.’ I’m not alleging that to be the case for Miami, necessarily, but you have to question what exactly is going on here and in similar cases.

Michigan, meanwhile, is playing the long game, and I think this is more in line with the spirit of the rule.

Jim Harbaugh spoke to Jed Hughes about it last week, and noted that it’s still about a team, meritocracy, and the college experience above all, with NIL being an added perk — not the selling point itself.

“We’re still going to maintain that this is going to be a transformational experience, not a transactional experience, and what that literally means exactly is we’re not going to pay signing bonuses for players to come onto the team,” Harbaugh said. “We’re not going to pay recruits to sign here. When they get here and they do well, they’re gonna profit pretty good here from jersey sales and other examples.”

To some degree, that may be undercutting the program, at least in terms of what other schools are doing. And if the college football world truly wants ‘X signs with school for blank-compensation,’ that’s certainly a direction it could go. But, as Harbaugh astutely points out, that, in and of itself, undercuts the team element, which is one of the most important factors in the sport.

“Maybe I am wrong, maybe that’s not how to do it, but boy, imagine yourself on a team, and there’s a lot of good players on the team that have worked really hard, some of those seniors that we were talking about earlier — how important that senior leadership is and guys who stuck around and paid the price and are producing,” Harbaugh said. “The policy on your team is to go buy recruits — I don’t think that would sit well if you were in that locker room, you know, Jed? If you were a player on that team and were one of those older players. From that standpoint and from others, that’s our decision.”

Naturally, the other question when it comes to compensating a player who hasn’t even played a down yet are the expectations. Expectations that they will play close to immediately, and that they will perform up to those expectations. That’s asking a lot of the coaches, the team as a whole, and could be a disservice to the player, himself.

I don’t have any good answers here, save for taking the Michigan approach — perhaps with more zeal. There has to be some sort of middle ground where NIL doesn’t suspiciously look like pay-for-play, while those who are achieving things on the field are able to be rewarded for their efforts.

But, for now, we’re starting to learn how deep the iceberg actually might be.

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