It seems nothing gets the teeth of college football’s old guard gnashing like a good season by Indiana.
You’re probably old enough to remember 2020, when the CFP Committee gave the Hoosiers no respect, while the Big Ten broke their own rules to keep IU out of the Big Ten Championship game.
Fast forward to 2024, and Indiana has folks steaming once again. The 10-0 Hoosiers are No. 5 in the CFP, clearly lower than any power-brand Big Ten team would be ranked with an unblemished record. Look no further than the two one-loss Big Ten teams above them in the current CFP rankings for proof.
But even with that, many across the college football landscape can’t handle Indiana’s success.
SEC Network’s Paul Finebaum has become the poster boy for anti-Indiana rhetoric of late. He’s called the Hoosiers “irritating” and “overvalued” just in the last few days. Finebaum serves as a good reminder for why the media has largely been stripped of their ability to vote for national champions. Instead, the CFP has continued to expand, with a selection committee comprised mostly of former players, coaches and college administrators.
On Tuesday, former college football coach and current U.S. Senator from Alabama Tommy Tuberville added his name to the list of football has beens frustrated with what Indiana has become.
Tuberville co-sponsored a failed effort to get federal name, image and likeness (NIL) legislation through Congress a year ago. His concepts weren’t compelling enough to even reach the floor for votes.
But the 70-year-old Tuberville continues to be involved with finding a federal solution for college NIL.
Michael Casagrande of the Alabama Media Group reported on Tuberville’s most recent comments this week about the state of federal NIL legislation when he visited the Monday Morning Quarterback Club in Birmingham.
And wouldn’t you know it, suddenly Indiana has become the real problem here.
“It takes a different mentality coaching because you just don’t build a team. You pretty much buy a team now,” Tuberville said. “And that was a little bit forbidden when I was in coaching, but now it’s legal. Look at Indiana. They went out and bought them a football team, and look where they’re at.”
Can we just start with the premise?
Is Tuberville really trying to suggest that IU football’s NIL coffers are significant in the context of Power Four college football?
Yes, Indiana has seen substantial growth in the NIL space in recent years, but you won’t find a living soul who believes Indiana has the funds to compete with Alabama, Ohio State, Texas or any of the rest of Finebaum’s favorites.
That team Indiana “went out and bought”? They were a bunch 0-star rated Group of Five players. Everyone questioned their ability to compete at the Power Four level. Before the season there was no one saying Cignetti’s offseason roster construction was the new model for college football. No One. (Yes, we still remember the 17th place Big Ten predictions by the Finebaumian class.)
So Tuberville’s comments about Indiana are absurd, and his latest idea to “fix” NIL isn’t much better. Now he wants a federal law that penalizes college athletes for breaking their NIL contracts.
Never mind that Tuberville twice left college head coaching positions to take other jobs.
And never mind that such penalties can already be negotiated in NIL contracts without federal intervention — if that’s what the parties want. There’s no doubt Tuberville’s own coaching contracts had buyout provisions that had the same effect.
Tuberville’s “solution” is an afront to the very movement that got us here. NIL and the transfer portal arose over the last decade because college athletes demanded greater autonomy and commercial rights.
And now Tuberville wants to penalize the players with a federal law that restricts their movement? It’s hard to not see the parallels in that outmoded thinking with old heads like Finebaum intent on protecting college football’s traditional power brands.
The real problem that needs to be addressed has been obvious from the start of NIL in college sports in 2021, but no one seems to want to confront it. If you want to fix NIL at the college level, you have to figure out what is different than pro sports, where NIL has never been considered problematic.
See, the real problem continues to be involvement by boosters, collectives, and even the schools, creating so-called “NIL deals” that in reality are nothing more than variants of pay-for-play schemes where the schools with the richest boosters win. Real NIL deals are arms-length transactions negotiated by players, their agents, and third-parties, all with legitimate commercial interests.
There is already a profession called transfer pricing that specializes in assessing the arms-length nature and fair market value of commercial contracts and transactions. Tuberville should call them. They could easily add the evaluation of NIL contracts to their toolbelt. And if they find deals that aren’t legitimate, penalize the multi-millionaire/billionaire party paying the athlete. The sham deals will disappear real fast.
But why address the real problem, when you can just blame Indiana?
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