The recent NIL meltdown between the Tennessee Volunteers football program and their former quarterback in Nico Iamaleava has been the hottest topic of discussion over the past several days.
It has renewed a bevy of heated debates surrounding how NIL is changing the college football landscape, and what the NCAA and universities need to do moving forward in order to make sure the future of college athletics as a whole are secure.
The most recent media figure to voice their concern over what may be coming down the line has been prominent NFL Network analyst Rich Eisen.
Eisen, who also hosts his own award winning sports talkshow, was asked to comment on the situation during Monday’s broadcast of The Rich Eisen Show. He started off by stating his support for athletes being able to earn as much as they can, especially when coaches leave for better opportunities all the time.
“I do not bergudge anybody making more money for themselves,” Eisen stated. “Coaches have buyouts, and they depart. They tell kids ‘come to my school,’ they tell parents ‘if you send your son, I got them.’ Then all of the sudden you look up and that coach has now moved on. So, why can’t players do it?”
While Eisen is in favor of athletes being able to make the best moves for themselves and their families, he also voiced his displeasure with the current NIL structure. He states that without some form of guiding rules in place, college football is heading down a disastrous path.
“I just don’t like it because there doesn’t appear to be any rules,” Eisen continued. “I don’t know, it just seems to me that there are no rules, and there are no protections for the players, or for the schools. At some point we just need someone to get everyone to come together, and come up with the rules before it all blows up.”
It’s clear that Eisen, like many others, believes that without some common framework in place college football will be irreversibly altered, and his view of what this potential future would look like is a very bleak one to say the least.
“At some point, some schools that are making a ton of money are gonna say ‘we’re done’ to the rest of the schools that won’t come to the table and make up some rules,” Eisen said. “It’s all just going to break apart, and all those schools that weren’t willing to come to the table are going to get relegated to somewhere else.”
It’s very apparent that there is something fundamentally wrong with the system as it currently stands, and Eisen isn’t the only one saying so. The hope is that the powers that be are able to come to some sort of compromise before a point of no return is crossed, and that they are able to do so fast.
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