Ima Leavin'

I love college football. Or should I say, “I used to love college football.” There was a time not so many years ago that my wife and I would get up on Saturday morning, read our Bibles and then at 0900, we would turn on College Gameday on ESPN and watch college football until we went to bed that night. We would watch it sometimes all day long. I know that I am not alone. I have a friend who is a big “gamer” and loves to play video games. He once asked me about it because he thought it was stupid. My response was that I get to watch college football maybe 20 days out of the year and yet he played his video games for hours almost every day of year. Now who is the stupid one?

Enter 2025 and the ridiculously ungoverned an unregulated transfer portal. The biggest name to hit the news this year is obviously Nico Iamaleava of Tennessee. Ever since he showed up at Tennessee, I found it easier to just say Ima Leavin’ rather than try to spend time pronouncing his name correctly. Who knew that name I gave him would become reality.

Before I really get started, let me make my position clear on NIL (Name – Image – Likeness). I am totally in favor of NIL. A car dealership puts your mug on a billboard as a way of selling cars, you deserve to get paid. If the university sells a jersey in the student center with your name on the back, you should get a cut of that. A clothing line? You get a cut. Name on a pair of tennis shoes? You get a cut. A cereal box? You get a cut. An action figure? You get a cut. I have zero problems with NIL. If somebody is making money off of you, why should you not get a percentage of that? And no, I am not here to haggle percentages. But the athlete should get something.

The problem? Nick Saban, after he walked out the college coaching door said it best. He said what we have today in so many instances is “pay for play.” It too often has nothing to do with NIL but simply paying kids out of high school, large sums of money to play sports at their college or university. And no, I am not in favor of that. One reason is that these are no longer amateur athletes but professional athletes playing sports and wearing a uniform of the college that is paying them. Just last football season, one team played close to $20 million to get their team on the field.

At the moment, there is the perfect storm of crap brewing in the college athletic world. We have NIL, pay for play and the transfer portal all swirling around and each is mostly either unregulated or at best “under” regulated. In other words, the inmates are running the asylum. I do not like the idea of a bunch of teenagers and young adults dictating to the NCAA how they are going to operate. Even big time College Gameday announcer Kirk Herbstreit has mentioned on several occasions that rules need to be put into place.

With the transfer portal, at the end of every season, dozens of players jump into the portal looking for more money. Can I blame them? On one level, not really. There are so few rules so the wild-wild west rules. With the rules as they are now, why not make as much as you can? For many, the days of honor and commitment to a single team mean nothing compared to the all-mighty dollar. Can you imagine being a coach, and yes this has happened, and one day you find out that almost your entire team has hit the portal and now, instead of building upon the last season, you are concerned with just trying to find enough quality players to field a team. Or imagine being a coach like Nick Saban and having some knuckleheaded kids come into your office and threaten to enter the portal if the university doesn’t pay him enough money or cannot guarantee him a certain amount of playing time every game. And some wonder why the greatest college football coach in history said, “See ya later, alligator.” I cannot blame him. You are going to walk into his office and demand something like that? Nope, ain’t gonna happen.

The portal is busted, fix it!! Put some restrictions on it. Cap it to maybe two transfers per collegiate career. Something. If you signed an NIL contract for example, sorry rosebud, you are stuck or you have to sit out a full year. And like Nico Ima Leavin and his younger brother are about to find out, it appears that the University of Arkansas where Nico’s brother just left and the University of Tennessee might be suing the Ima Leavin brothers for breach of contract. If this is true, then whatever NIL money they might have been given by their new college of UCLA, might be going to the two universities they left. I for one hope so. I saw a meme the other day and is fitting for the Ima Leaving brothers. It basically said they are entering a new hood; adulthood. And it is perhaps the most unpleasant hood they have ever lived in.

As for just outright paying these kids to play – no. I cannot agree with that. “We need to get paid,” they say. Uhhhhh, you are getting a college education for free. Free room and board, etc. You are getting paid. Going to college should be more than zipping around the campus in your Lamborghini or Mercedes. Shouldn’t there be some college in college sports? Don’t get me wrong. There are hundreds of dedicated student athletes out there who are able to juggle the pressure of their sport and stiff academics. My hats off to them. At the same time, there are a lot of athletes who do not care about school. One athlete’s father famously bragged that his son never once set foot inside a classroom while he was in college. Now that is something to be proud of.

Do I have a definitive answer to the Portal-NIL-Pay of Play problems. Nope. But guess what, it is not my job. The NCAA has some work to do. But don’t expect much. Remember, it took an executive order forcing them to not allow men to compete against women in college sports. In other words, men cannot compete in women’s sports programs but women can compete in men’s programs. It seems that few if any of them are interested in fixing a problem that is clearly spinning out of control. As the saying goes, once the worms get out of the can, they are nearly impossible to gather up and put back into the can. Right now, they are squirming everywhere.

As for the 2025 season, I most definitely will not be watching as much as I have in the past. Much like last season. But if things do not get reigned in, within a few years, only the colleges with the most money will be able to field competitive teams. Oh well. I would rather watch great WWII documentaries and movies than watch millionaire teenagers and 20 somethings play football. What’s the point?

THE VIEWS OF SUBMITTED EDITORIALS MAY NOT BE THE EXPRESS VIEWS OF THE ALABAMA GAZETTE.