College football remains in the early stages of players getting money for their names, images, and likenesses. Pro football, in turn, remains in the early stages of evaluating players who are cashing in on NIL.
During Wednesday’s pre-draft press conference, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll addressed the changing realities of college football, given NIL and the transfer portal.
“It’s like free agency going on in college football,” Carroll told reporters. “These kids have choices and they’re figuring it out, and here’s a whole young kind of evolution occurring here, and they’re early in it but they’re exposed differently, so we’re seeing guys a little bit differently. We have to continue to adapt as the times change, and that’s what we’ve been doing.”
Carroll was asked to explain how it’s changing their evaluation of incoming players.
“They’re getting paid,” Carroll said. “I think they can’t help but be affected by that. It’s a different world. They don’t have to stay at their schools anymore. They can go wherever they want. I think it changes the guys. It changes their mentality. I don’t know what the results of it’s going to be because it’s only a couple years old right now, but it’s evolving now, and we’re going to see, I think, some changes. Coaches in college are constantly recruiting not just people from the outside but their own guys because their own guys can leave. It just shifts somewhat of the dynamics of it.
“Again, we don’t know the effects of it, but we know that it’s changing things. For a guy to come in here and make a million dollars a year, some guys have been making a million dollars a year already, so it’s a little different than it’s been in that regard. I don’t know what the result of it’s been, but it’s having an effect.”
One way it will change things comes from the ability of those players who have banked a lot of money potentially telling the team that might be drafting them to not bother, that they’ll sit out for the year and re-enter the draft if picked by teams they don’t want to join.
Rarely do players push back against the involuntary nature of the draft, a process that has given them little power in past years. With $10 million or $20 million or maybe even more in the bank, players can turn the table on the “an honor and a privilege” brainwashing that has them willing to go wherever the draft takes them, no matter where it may be or who they may be playing with or who they may be playing for.
