RJ Young
FOX Sports National College Football Analyst
Eight head coaches sat in a roundtable setting at Big 12 Media Days on Wednesday, nodding in agreement that college athletics’ NIL system is not just flawed, it’s impossibly screwed up. It’s not sustainable. It wreaks of sycophants, selfishness and greed.
Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy speaks during a coaches roundtable during Day 2 of Big 12 Media Days. (Photo by Austin McAfee/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
The money isn’t the problem. The money is a symptom. Led by the voice of Colorado head coach Deion Sanders, the youngest among the eight in coaching years, the group agreed: a fix is needed, and it’s quite simple.
This is a group of coaches that are anti-Gordon Gekko. Greed isn’t so good. It’s a group of coaches that are all millionaires … several times over … but change the stage at AT&T Stadium into a boardroom in a high rise on Wall Street, and you can feel like Jeremy Irons’ John Tuld as he asks question after question to his staff in “Margin Call” and each of their answers are essentially the same. No matter who he asks and how he asks it, the market is doomed. Business as usual no longer applies and will not apply ever again.
College football coaches now use national letters of intent like cudgels, even though those letters of intent must be renewed and scholarships are one-year contracts. Players are no longer forced to sit out a year if they choose to transfer within the highest subdivision in football. And, of course, players are now paid a lot more than they used to be, up to seven figures in many cases.
On Wednesday afternoon, the college football world watched as half the coaches in a Power 4 league pleaded for change … and fast. Coaches know they can’t keep total control of the sport, but they do believe they still have some level of control.
Big 12 coaches want a salary cap. They want enforceable termination and buyout clauses. They even want a collective bargaining agreement, knowing players would need a union for such a thing to exist. They want a system that is not littered with back-dealing, tampering and payment to players they don’t feel have earned it. They want to be able to compete with programs that simply have no bottom to their bank accounts. And they want it now.
“I wish there was a cap,” Sanders said on Wednesday. “I wish that the top-of-the-line player makes ‘this’ and if you’re not that type of guy, you know you’re not going to make that. That’s what the NFL does.
“The problem is, you got a guy that’s not that darn good, but he could go to another school and give him half a million dollars, and you can’t compete with that.”
Head coach Deion Sanders of the Colorado Buffaloes speaks with the media during the Big 12 Media Days. (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)
Houston coach Willie Fritz has coached college football since 1978, beginning at Pittsburg State in Pittsburg, Kansas. In other words, he’s seen it all. From the split between Division I-A and Division I-AA to the inception of a 12-team tournament to crown a national champion, he believes the integrity of the sport is under attack.
Fritz went 4-8 in Year 1 in a city he called “the epicenter of football in the world.” This happened because he couldn’t afford to pay enough to incoming players, as well as monitor the players he is committed to paying, all while stopping others — namely boosters, NIL collectives and agents — from aggressively poaching players even after deals are done. And that could be mitigated.
TCU coach Sonny Dykes got started coaching college football at Navarro, a school more known for its cheerleading program than its football team, and he was one of the first coaches hired by Mike Leach at Texas Tech in 2000. At the time, the Red Raiders made it work with a plucky attitude and the most eccentric offensive system anybody had ever seen in major college football. This past offseason, Dykes watched Texas Tech spend more than $10 million on portal additions to its football roster, $1 million on a softball player, and open a state-of-the-art football facility. He also recognizes tampering as a problem the men on that stage could fix.
TCU head coach Sonny Dykes and Kansas head coach Lance Leipold meet after TCU defeated Kansas at Arrowhead Stadium. (Photo by Kyle Rivas/Getty Images)
“There are obviously conversations that have taken place and guys have known each other for a long time,” Dykes said. “But I do think that’s a thing we should be able to communicate with each other. You should be able to call anybody up here and say, ‘This happened’ or ‘I’m not comfortable with this. What can we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?’”
It’s difficult to make that call when you’re not just trying to keep your own job, but the jobs of everyone you hired to work for you. When money becomes a symptom you can no longer ignore, integrity and character get tested, but putting food on the table is a test many of us don’t get to fail. So the status quo will remain until the market fails.
Mike Gundy has been the head coach at Oklahoma State for 20 years. He has seen the creation of and the realignment of the Big 12 Conference. He has always been great at evaluating under-recruited, under-valued players, from Wes Lunt to Ollie Gordon, but he draws the line at who gets paid what.
“We really need to get some guardrails to eliminate the things that are going on from a tampering standpoint,” Gundy said, “and players that are coming out of high school getting way too much money before they ever make a play on game day.”
Here is a good time to remind you: Michigan QB Bryce Underwood is set to make a reported $12 million, and he has yet to play a single snap in college football.
[Related: Top 25 college athletes with highest NIL valuations]
Kansas coach Lance Leipold climbed up to Lawrence, Kansas, using the rough side of the mountain with a career that began in 1987 at Division III Wisconsin-Whitewater. That means he has seen most of it, from the change of the Bowl Alliance to the Bowl Championship Series to conference realignment. He has turned one of the sport’s doormats into a program you don’t want to play late in the season – just ask Iowa State, BYU and Colorado – three ranked teams that all fell to the Jayhawks in consecutive weeks in 2024.
Leipold is also one of the coaches who is a proponent of change, speaking on players who are already hunting for a better deal than the one they just signed.
“We’ve got people out there that are trying to fight around the system, getting the players, getting the agents, third parties, high school coaches, whatever it is, to put feelers out, and then next thing you know, they’re talking dollar figures with a young man,” Leipold said at Big 12 Media Days. “That’s not the way to do business. I think we as coaches and leaders have to set the example of doing this with integrity once we get everything settled.”
TCU head coach Sonny Dykes and Houston head coach Willie Fritz meet on the field before the game at Amon G. Carter Stadium. (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)
The problem is, it isn’t theirs to settle. West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez hopes that’s not going to be the case going forward.
“My hope is that the coaches, athletic directors and commissioners are at the forefront of making decisions for what’s best for college sports and college football,” he said.
Rodriguez, who has been the head coach at multiple schools — from Michigan and Arizona to Jacksonville State — wants voices like his own to lead the way rather than the federal government. The issue with that is, so far, not even the commissioners want to touch this quagmire 156 years in the making.
Sanders left it blunt when asked what he’d like to see done, while seven other coaches in the league nodded in agreement.
“All you have to do is look at the playoffs and see what those teams spent, and you understand darn well why they ended up in the playoffs,” Sanders said. “It’s kind of hard to compete with somebody who is giving $25, $30 million to a freshman class. It’s crazy.
“We’re not complaining because all of these coaches can coach their butts off and, given the right opportunity with the right players, a play here and there, you’ll be there [the CFP], but what’s going on right now doesn’t make any sense.”
Colorado coach Deion Sanders talks during a coaches roundtable at Big 12 Media Days. (Photo by Austin McAfee/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Just last year, Ohio State reportedly spent more than $20 million on its 2024 roster, and the Buckeyes won the national title.
There will be more jawing — lots more jawing. There will be more grandstanding, handwringing and lip service from a bunch of individuals who claim to know how to get their million-dollar hands dirty. But it will come back to not just winning, but who owns the ground we’re all playing on. It always does.
The sport has never been fair. The rich have always gotten richer, and fans have always wanted to see Ohio State and Notre Dame play for a national title more than Boise State and Southern Methodist. And most coaches will stomach that. What they won’t stomach is losing even more control over an institution for which they were once the most powerful figure in every room. Now, with all these new faces on the land — agents, collectives, attorneys — they want what John Dutton took in Yellowstone, Montana. Remind everyone, once and for all, who really runs the valley. And it’s not you.
RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast “The Number One College Football Show.” Follow him at @RJ_Young.
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