College Football Tampering

A long and insightful article on ESPN from a couple days ago. https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/48123438/college-football-transfer-portal-tampering-how-works-crosses-line.

We all know college football recruiting, contracts, and NIL are unregulated chaos right now, but the article really shines a light on the slimy realities of this 'business'. Is this really what college football fans want to cheer for on Saturdays? I know we would all answer that a little differently. Props to Dabo Swinney if he really is trying to hold the line. I feel like transfers sitting out a year would help curb a lot of this activity.

Here are some excerpts:

Coaches have griped for years about the out-of-control nature of tampering across college football. But this was a rarity: A head coach [Swinney] going public with precisely how his program was wronged. And not just any coach, but one with two national title rings.

He laid out the story of Luke Ferrelli, a transfer linebacker from Cal who had just enrolled at his school, moved into an apartment and went through classes and workouts for a week. And then, suddenly, he bailed for more money at Ole Miss.

"Right is right even if nobody does it," Swinney said. "And wrong is wrong even if everybody does it."

But now that players have agents, impermissible contact has dramatically escalated. "The tampering got much more brash and blatant," one agent said.

"I don't even see why schools get mad about it," one agent said. "If you don't want your kid to be tampered with, sign them to an agreement that's fair and the kid won't be looking to go elsewhere."

"You almost have to tamper at times with these schools, because they don't want to pay their own players," the same agent argued. "They just don't."

According to agents, the easy way to facilitate December tampering was via three-way phone calls. The agent would call the GM or coach, then add the player to the call. That way, it's the agent showing up in phone logs and not the player. Some even held these pre-portal agent meetings over FaceTime and Zoom.

"They'd done three-way calls with their coaches for four different clients as early as November," the agent said. "He's up there waxing poetic about how bad tampering is, and I've been helping you tamper for a month."

Swinney and other coaches have likened the renegotiation process to extortion in some cases and know they're contending with agents who could be bluffing about offers from other schools. But that's how it works when there's no data or transparency about how much college football players are earning.

"Once the kid gets on campus, that s--- has got to stop," an SEC GM said. "To me, that was the cardinal sin in that situation." "He's literally in class," an agent added. "There's no way to defend it."

One ACC GM felt the Ferrelli move was nowhere near as troubling as Miami swiping star quarterback Darian Mensah from Duke at the portal deadline. The Hurricanes' last-minute push to flip Mensah away from the ACC champs resulted in Duke suing the quarterback and settling for an undisclosed sum to release him from his two-year contract.

"It's like they robbed a bank in broad daylight, walked out with no mask and no alarms went off," the ACC GM said with a chuckle.

One month after Swinney's news conference, NCAA vice president of enforcement Jon Duncan sent a memo to member schools warning that his group has been charged with pursuing "significant penalties" for tampering violations -- including any contact between agents and coaches about players who are not in the portal. He vowed work is underway to modernize and streamline the investigative process for more expedited resolutions.

"Simply put, communicating with an agent for a student-athlete who is not in the transfer portal is a tampering violation," Duncan wrote.

GMs surveyed by ESPN said they haven't turned in other programs for tampering in recent years because they view it as a waste of time. It's not easy to obtain evidence and prove it like Swinney did. More importantly, staffers don't want the NCAA imaging their phones and finding proof of their own tampering efforts.

"Nobody's clean -- except maybe Dabo," the Group of 5 GM said.

After years of perceived investigative inaction, GMs and agents say they'll believe a reckoning is coming when they see it.

"I hate to say it," one agent argued, "but the rules are a suggestion at this point."

"Let's say they do penalize Ole Miss or one of these teams," an SEC GM added. "At the end of the day, it's still going to end up in a courtroom."

Tampering has become so easy to do that trying to stop it might be futile. Perhaps it's wiser to confront some of the contributing factors such as fixing the calendar, regulating agents or dealing with the schools who are spending far beyond the revenue sharing cap.

"It's like trying to stop a runaway train, man," an ACC GM said.