MORGANTOWN — Neal Brown believes college football’s on-field product is as popular and as entertaining as it has ever been.
Off the field? Well, it’s been eventful … and not always in a good way.
What concerns those within college football is that the off-the-field issues will ultimately affect that on-field product.
The latest example was found in Las Vegas, where former UNLV quarterback Matthew Sluka became the school’s former quarterback after he claimed a promise of $100,000 in name, image and likeness money was broken. The money never came, so Sluka walked away, taking a redshirt for the season.
Here are the issues: both Sluka’s father and agent claimed an assistant coach made a verbal promise of the money. Nothing was guaranteed in writing, and the NIL collective that works with UNLV claimed that it never heard of that $100,000 promise, so it wasn’t about to pay it.
From afar, it seems like the main issue is the left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing. That apparent absence of communication led to Sluka leaving the UNLV program. That’s not good.
Brown said this week that, while he can’t speak on UNLV’s situation, he’s confident how NIL is dealt with at WVU.
“I think our processes are good, and how we make decisions, and how we communicate is good,” Brown said. “We don’t have a lot of voices that are involved in the process.”
NIL payments are a new and necessary step in compensating college athletes. It is their physical talents that glue millions of fans each fall weekend to their television sets. Those talents allow college conferences to ink multi-billion-dollar rights deals, so it’s only fair that those athletes get a more equitable cut of the pie.
The problem is that college athletics are evolving at a rate too fast for the NCAA to regulate, which leads to a Wild, Wild West where confusion and controversy can fester.
That, Brown said, needs fixed as soon as possible.
“This is an imperfect system,” he said. “It’s imperfect and for right now, it doesn’t affect the product. Will it eventually? Maybe. I don’t know. We’ve got to get it figured out.
“I don’t think we have a great system in place right now, but you never hear me sit up here and complain about it just because nobody wants to hear the head coach complain about it,” he continued. I mean seriously, they pay me a lot of money and they pay you to figure it out. But it’s not a great system, but it is what it is.”
Brown has said in the past that, if you tell him the rules, he’ll play by them. But what in NIL are the real rules? And how long will those rules last until a new variable comes along to shift the landscape yet again?
Brown said that next variable could be coming soon with the upcoming House vs. NCAA settlement, which will fundamentally change how athletes are paid, how rosters are constructed and more. That settlement is currently on hold, as Judge Claudia Wilken wants revisions regarding third-party NIL restrictions.
The parties involved can’t wait too long, Brown said.
“We’ve got this House settlement that’s out there that maybe it’s going to get settled, maybe it’s not,” Brown said. “Man, the clock’s ticking on that because it’s supposed to go into effect (in 2025) and that seems far off. But signing day’s coming up in the first week of December and those guys want to know what it looks like.”
The solution goes back to what Brown has said — tell coaches the rules, and they’ll play by them. But the rules need to be uniform and need to be clear.
College football is a great, entertaining game. The last thing the sport needs is hamstrung because the leaders at the top can’t get their acts straight.
— Story by Derek Redd
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