RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Let’s just say for 116 years, you devised a system that used and exploited young adults you allowed to play sports for you, using “free” education as collateral for what you received from them in return.
Then guilt (pressured guilt, but still guilt to a degree) set in, say, 111 years later. And you, a group with a long history of unfair labor and under-compensated practices in sports, began to do (almost) everything you could to right your past wrongs. Let’s call it athletic reparations.
And that guilt-free system worked in your favor until now. When the chaos finally met and matched the corruption. And the term “amateur status” just turned gray in area.
A player entered the NFL Draft after four years of playing in the NCAA. During that time, the NCAA instituted a fifth-year option called the 5-in-5 rule, which allowed players who entered college in 2022 to have a fifth year of playing eligibility. The player participated in workouts and camps to make an NFL roster but failed, so he decided (or was told) to exercise that fifth year. He kept his name in the transfer portal and returned to a school of agreed choice between him and head coach. It was OK because it was legal for the player and broke no known NCAA laws. It was above genius.
The “why,” especially with the ability of NCAA players today to make all that money via NIL, is fully understood. It’s the “how” that seems to have caught even the most profound football and media experts off guard.
“How” can this happen? How “did” this happen? And how was it “allowed” to happen?
Who in the “Lane Kiffin” found a loophole in the bylaws of the transition from “amateur” to “professional” athlete, then “training camp back to college” so open that of the two initial players (first Dae’Quan Wright, then Zxavian Harris) who challenged the 5-in-5 rule, both reentered the NCAA and chose to play for the same school, same coach: Kiffin?
(Note: The infamous and brilliant Drew Rosenhaus just happens to be Wright’s agent.)
That caused emergency late-night meetings by university athletic directors, presidents and chancellors and the releasing of emergency joint-policy statements. Or as the public discussion was framed: “Big 10, SEC [and other conferences] band together to ban NFL players from returning to play in the NCAA.”
For players who may not have technically or legally been “NFL” players.
According to C. Lamont Smith, a longtime NFL agent whose clients included Barry Sanders, Jerome Bettis and Eddie George, not only is the emphasis on the NCAA to clean up this situation, but there needs to be language put in place by the NCAA to define when a player crosses the equator from one phase to the next. From legally non-professional to officially professional.
“If [the NCAA] really wanted to cover their butts, they’d broaden the language to ‘anyone who pursued or participated in professional football activities,’ and that would cover it all,” Smith said via phone conversation for this column. “I think what you have is a conflict in what the NFL defines as an NFL player and what the NCAA and some of these conferences are describing as an NFL player.”
Ambiguity at its finest because the NFL collective-bargaining agreement seems to have no clear-cut definition of what exactly a “player” or “NFL player” even is. But that still is not a problem the NFL has to figure out. That all falls on the NCAA as it is the one fighting against non-defined NFL players (a k a: professional football players) with eligibility left from being able to return to familiar workplaces on college campuses for one more year.
It’s complicated, confusing and (slightly) corrupt. But also not illegal. The goal here is to win games in the NCAA, not, as Mike Greenberg said, “to achieve some state of morality that the sport has absolutely never aspired to.”
But the internal fight the NCAA is moving toward having with itself has the power to be the final undoing of the system it has been trying to correct for the last five years only to find out that the damage might have been too systemic to repair. The semi-psychokinesis mind games the NCAA played on its prey for all those years has come back to roost, scream, holler, demand and sue.
Fear of the antitrust lawsuits sitting in wait, waiting by any prosecutor for their phone to ring to prove in court that the NCAA has been unfair to either a singular or multiple want-to-come-back student-athletes will be the NCAA nightmare that keeps on giving.
In the climate of now that has become college and pro football, if it is more financially beneficial to play in college for a year than it is to keep attempting to be in the NFL — chase that paper until you can legally no longer further your college career and you legally are deemed by the court of law and the laws of the NCAA either a “professional” or an “NFL” (or NBA or WNBA because they were also included in the official argument) player.
The choice is theirs. Or yours. Until the courts (state, appellate or possibly Supreme), the Senate (or Congress if all decide to get involved) and (not “or”) the NCAA say you no longer have a choice.
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