Hypocrisy and duplicity drip from many college coaches, college administrators, and elected political officials.
They want to impose what can reasonably be construed as punitive transfer restrictions on student-athletes while affording themselves unfettered freedom to abandon their previous jobs with impunity for more lucrative opportunities.
In 2021, the National Collegiate Athletic Association adopted the “one-time transfer” legislation, which fundamentally allowed Division I student-athletes the right to transfer once to another school without having to sit out a full year of competition, as most were required to do prior to the new policy (with exceptions for those with a waiver for special circumstances).
Then in 2024, the legislation was amended again after legal challenges, granting student-athletes unlimited transfers through the NCAA transfer portal — a digital database — without having to sit out a year of competitive play. Coaches have never been subject to the same or similar regulations. Contracts are nominally binding as multi-million dollar buy-out clauses, paid by the institution they are jetting off to, give coaches comfortable pathways to walk away from the athletes they wooed to help them build resumes that command deals exceeding $100 million for some.
Consider Will Wade, the current head basketball coach, and Lane Kiffin, the current head football coach, for Louisiana State University. A little over one week ago, LSU announced it had rehired Wade, whom it fired in 2022, ending his five-year tenure due to major recruiting violations. Wade then coachd McNeese State from 2023 to 2025, then North Carolina State this season before bolting to LSU, leaving dozens of players behind, many of them teenagers, in his wake.
Kiffin basically told Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) to kick rocks as his team was about to begin a run in the College Football Playoff (they lost in the semifinals). In late November, he signed a seven-year, $91 million contract with LSU to become their head coach. It is the 50-year-old Kiffin’s sixth head coaching job — including a stint with the then Oakland Raiders (2007-08) — and fifth college head coaching position since 2007.
Tommy Tuberville, a senior United States senator from Alabama, has introduced the Student-Athlete Act, a bill that would circumscribe student-athletes to having five consecutive years to play in five consecutive seasons, essentially the NCAA reverting back to the 2021 one-time transfer rule. One claim Tubberville and those that support the Student-Athlete Act have made is that it is for the betterment of the athletes education and future. It is a flawed if not farcical assertion on its face.
Tubberville, a Republican, who is now running for governor of Alabama, erected his political career on the foundation of being one of the most prominent and popular figures in the state as the head football coach of Auburn University from 1999-2008.
He, along with his buddies President Donald Trump, Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson, who ironically is from Louisiana where LSU sits at the top of college sports excess and impertinence, and other politicians are attempting to remake name, image, and likeness (NIL), now that student-athletes have agency in the capitalistic economic free-market they otherwise champion. One such vehicle is the SCORE Act, a Republican-driven framework that would federalize NIL, which today is governed state by state.
They are intent on ensuring that college sports, a multi-billion dollar business, never achieves a semblance of egalitarianism and continues to suppress the power of the men and women directky generating numerous sports departments massive revenue.
This is so stupid. The transfer rule and NIL have ruined a 130 year institution. It was amateur for a reason. A few sports writers are the only people talking this stupidly about the issue. What percent make substantial money? 2%? Of them how many have a dime left after 5 years. I guess we’re about to learn that one, but we all already know.
Comparing coaches to players is retarded. It’s partly how we ended up here. The writing is on the wall and this has been the disaster that so many warned for years it would be. It’s actually worse.
Great job idiots. 130 years…because being given a free college education and treated like a king wasn’t enough.
And yeah I’ll take Tubberville’s opinion over yours. You didn’t explain how he was so wrong because you can’t. He coached for 30 years so I’m gonna go with that perspective versus what you’re bringing to the table which is clearly nothing. Not even clear you watch sports.