Why won’t Do you do what Oklahoma quarterback Dillon Gabriel does?
Why won’t Do you do what Florida running back Trevor Etienne does?
Why won’t Do you do what Ohio State quarterback Kyle McCord and Duke quarterback Riley Leonard do?
Why won’t Are you doing what these and other top stars in college football are doing?
Enter the transfer portal and earn a million dollars for themselves.
Or two million dollars.
Or however, there are several million dollars, some desperate large corporations with higher incomes are willing to pay them.
“Make no mistake: A good quarterback in the portal costs $1 million to $1.5 million to $2 million right now,” Nebraska coach Matt Rhule recently revealed to reporters. “There are some teams that have $6-7 million players playing for them.”
Gabriel originally transferred from UCF and ended up at Oklahoma, where he undoubtedly received a lucrative nothing deal. Now he is moving back to Oregon where he will likely receive a more lucrative deal. Essentially, he does what every smart businessman or corporate CEO would do: He makes the best possible deal and maximizes profits — just as most of us tell our kids to do if they were a talented college player… or a linebacker… or a wide receiver. Wide receivers…or offensive linemen.
why not?
If not, you are not financially responsible.
Let’s use Gabriel as an example because we know him so well.
He is undoubtedly a great college quarterback as he showed at both UCF and Oklahoma, but he is a bit undersized and there are no guarantees that his skills will translate to the NFL. If he plays his cards right in the transfer portal — and it appears he has — he could have $3 million, $4 million, $5 million or more in his bank account when he leaves college.
If these high-priced players can manage their money properly, they can set themselves up for life before they even leave university. In fact, isn’t that the point of college, to secure your financial future?
Naturally, there is the requisite amount of anger among some of my old college football buddies who lament the lack of loyalty among today’s college players. It’s easy for them to say. How many of them would turn down a million-dollar raise to move from one company to another in whatever business they work in?
Could Gabriel have stayed in Oklahoma and gotten paid? Maybe, but perhaps not to the extent he achieved when he became a free agent and signed with Oregon State, where billionaire Nike founder Phil Knight is a huge financial backer. Throughout my career in journalism, the biggest pay raise I’ve ever received didn’t come from my current employer; They came when I moved from one newspaper to another.
We don’t know what financial arrangements college players make with their team through the team’s NIL group, but we do know that many of these groups (even those on the major Power 5 brands) are having trouble raising the amount of money necessary to keep their current stars and pay their stars new ones.
Many schools have already discovered that the current model of raising funds to pay players through the collective NIL pool is unsustainable. It is not reasonable to ask fans and fans to pay millions of dollars every year in perpetuity in order to pay for an entire college football team – especially when there is no tangible return on investment.
The groundbreaking proposal put forward by NCAA President Charlie Baker earlier this week seems more plausible. Baker wrote a letter to member institutions proposing a new Division I subdivision in which NIL compensation would be provided internally and schools would be required to pay athletes directly and without limits.
Anyone with any common sense knows that a multi-billion dollar business like college football should pay for its own labor, not beg fans and fans to pay for it.
Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark called Baker’s proposal “directionally correct” earlier this week at the Sports Business Journal’s Intercollegiate Athletic Forum.
In other words, college football administrators — with a massive push from the federal and state governments, the court system and the athletes themselves — came to the realization that they would have to start sharing the wealth with the players.
Players, their parents and their NIL agents are not waiting for the overworked NCAA and its plodding bureaucracy to create this new subdivision. Instead, they’re actually treating college football for what it is — a giant business in which everyone is trying to make as much money as possible.
If Gabriel can make more in Oregon than he can in Oklahoma, I say more power to him. The same goes for Florida’s Etienne, who just entered the portal and is reportedly receiving interest from Georgia and LSU.
If entire universities can leave one conference for another in their mad dash for more TV money, why can’t star athletes leave one school for another in their mad dash for nothing money?
For a long time, we believed that the main mission of college football was to provide educational opportunities for athletes.
We now know that the pursuit of a college degree has been usurped by the pursuit of corporate profits.
This is the evolution of college football from an extracurricular activity to a billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate.
As the great economist Milton Friedman once said: “A business is a business.”
Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Follow me on
The transfer portal has revolutionized the landscape of college sports, giving athletes the opportunity to capitalize on their success and transfer to another program. For college stars, it offers the chance to find a better fit, a higher level of competition, or simply to cash in on their talents. With the transfer portal, athletes have the freedom to explore their options and take control of their own athletic careers, ultimately allowing them to maximize their potential and reap the rewards of their hard work and dedication. This shift in the traditional college sports model has brought about a new era of opportunity for talented athletes to truly cash in on their skills and abilities.