Between The Eers: The Rules of the Portal + NIL
Between The Eers: The Rules of the Portal + NIL
Transcript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 What is going on everybody?
00:11 Skylar Callen here, on Between the Ears.
00:13 And yeah, so much for the getting away
00:16 from the Transfer Portal stuff.
00:17 I thought we were kind of past that for a little bit
00:21 until some real moving and shaking started happening.
00:23 But I've got a lot of people in my DMs on Twitter,
00:28 asking me a bunch of questions about
00:31 kind of the process of portal recruiting.
00:35 What's allowed, what's not allowed,
00:36 how does the money get sent out to different players,
00:40 who can be in contact, all that different stuff.
00:44 And so I figured this would be the best time to do it,
00:47 'cause it's the dresser right here.
00:48 So I mentioned this a couple of days ago,
00:53 I don't know if it was on this particular show or not,
00:55 but coaches cannot have any interaction with players
01:00 when it comes to money, zero.
01:06 Nobody at the school is allowed to have any affiliation
01:12 with the money as of today.
01:14 Now, Charlie Baker, the president of the NCAA
01:19 is trying to make all these complete changes
01:23 and stuff with not only the transfer portal itself,
01:27 and that guys can transfer and be immediately eligible,
01:32 even with their second or third or fourth transfer,
01:35 but there's also this pitch to allow schools
01:39 to just pay the players.
01:41 And in some respects, it makes a lot of sense because
01:45 the collectives that deal with this
01:51 may not exactly know, I mean, they have a hunch,
01:54 they probably get told certain things,
01:56 but it's hard to know what they need,
02:01 and it's hard for the coaches to kind of
02:03 get that message relayed to the people
02:09 that are handling the money.
02:11 And it just would take out that third,
02:16 not that the collectives would go away,
02:18 but it would eliminate a lot of confusion, I think,
02:23 not only for the fans, but for the coaches,
02:26 the administrators, the people that run the collective,
02:29 the recruits.
02:30 So I do think in some ways it makes a lot of sense.
02:36 The big problem is you're gonna have
02:40 so many schools operating, and you already do,
02:44 with deeper pockets than others.
02:48 And this is a similar issue that's going on
02:51 in Major League Baseball, the Shohei Otani thing, right?
02:54 Dude just signed a $700 million deal with the Dodgers,
02:58 and he's deferring so much of that money because he can.
03:03 There's no rules against it.
03:05 There's also no salary cap in baseball.
03:08 There's also no salary floor in baseball.
03:12 So the big issue there is there's only a handful of teams
03:17 that can seriously contend for a player like Shohei Otani.
03:22 And much like in college sports, there's no salary cap.
03:26 So when there's no salary cap,
03:30 and there's quarterbacks out here in the portal
03:34 demanding one to $2 million,
03:36 there's only a few schools out there
03:39 that can legitimately enter themselves
03:42 in the mix for said player.
03:45 West Virginia is not one of them.
03:46 I'm gonna tell you that right now.
03:48 And that's exactly why they're going after
03:51 some of these Group of Five transfers,
03:53 these FCS guys, these kids coming from Canada
03:56 and every which direction.
03:58 That is why they're going after those guys
04:03 instead of the big name stars
04:06 that you're seeing these other schools go after.
04:09 And I explained that in great detail on a show last week.
04:13 But back to the point of this show,
04:16 the handling of the money, who can do it, who can't.
04:22 Again, coaches cannot have any conversations about money.
04:25 Even if they have a little bit of a conversation,
04:28 that's against the rules.
04:31 It's a violation.
04:32 It's a big, big no-no.
04:35 And I guess depending on what school you are,
04:39 the NCAA can give you a very major,
04:44 I don't wanna say fine, but a major penalty,
04:49 or you'll just get a slap on the wrist,
04:52 or you'll get ignored.
04:54 This is also a time of year where rules are broken.
04:59 There's gonna be schools that tamper.
05:03 Happens every single year.
05:06 To players at West Virginia,
05:08 and to players around the country.
05:10 There's so much of this going on.
05:13 And to be honest with you,
05:15 I don't really know how you police it.
05:17 There's gotta be a way somehow to police it.
05:22 But that's not for me to figure out.
05:26 The collectives, again,
05:33 they are the only ones that can have
05:35 conversations about money.
05:38 So someone asked me yesterday,
05:41 why didn't Jaheim White,
05:43 or why is Jaheim White committing to Country Roads Trust?
05:46 Why is he committing to them?
05:49 And why is he even making this type of announcement?
05:52 Two things.
05:54 One, it's to relieve the stress
05:58 of him potentially entering the portal.
06:01 And he can still do that.
06:02 These are not binding contracts.
06:04 So even though he has committed
06:06 to a partnership with the trust,
06:09 it doesn't 100% guarantee that he won't hop in the portal.
06:13 He can still do that.
06:14 And there's essentially no rule or law that he's breaking.
06:19 Just like the trust, if they say,
06:22 "All right, Jaheim, we'll get you this NIL package
06:27 "where you're gonna get X amount of dollars.
06:30 "That way you stay here at West Virginia."
06:32 If they don't live up to that,
06:34 there's no law or rule that they're going against.
06:39 It's very much a verbal agreement.
06:42 And you're banking on each other
06:45 to be honest, to be transparent.
06:48 And that's tough.
06:51 There's a lot of these kids going around
06:55 thinking they're gonna get hundreds of thousands of dollars,
06:57 maybe even millions of dollars,
06:59 and they get told that, they commit to that school,
07:02 they go to that school, they enroll,
07:04 they start playing, the money never shows up,
07:06 or at least the money that they thought
07:08 they were getting never shows up.
07:10 And then guess what?
07:11 They're stuck.
07:12 They're stuck.
07:13 They can't go anywhere.
07:16 After you transfer that second time,
07:19 or after you transfer the first time,
07:22 if you wanna leave that second school,
07:24 you've gotta sit out of here,
07:26 as the rules currently state.
07:28 Now they're having a meeting on all this stuff today,
07:30 but that's a big, big problem.
07:34 But Jaheim, not only is doing that to relieve the stress
07:40 of maybe some fans, but it's also
07:42 because he didn't necessarily get that NIL package
07:45 coming out of high school.
07:46 He was overlooked, he was under-recruited,
07:49 and West Virginia probably didn't feel the need
07:52 to go and offer a lot of money to Jaheim
07:55 coming out of high school, or the collective.
07:58 A big part of it too is,
08:04 it's also maybe saying, hey, look, I'm staying here.
08:10 Schools that are maybe gonna try and contact me,
08:15 even though I'm not in the portal, I'm not going anywhere.
08:20 That's his verbal, his public announcement, his PSA.
08:25 But it's still gonna happen.
08:27 I'm sure there's gonna be coaches, not only to him,
08:31 but maybe other players on the roster that get contacted
08:33 that are not in the portal.
08:35 That is illegal, that cannot happen.
08:37 That is 100% against the NCAA rules.
08:43 And again, depending on who you are, you'll get in trouble.
08:46 But for guys like Jaheim, and most kids probably
08:51 coming out of high school, they're not gonna get money.
08:53 And I think you're gonna see that trend be the case.
08:55 We saw a couple of years ago, these high school quarterbacks
08:58 getting these big NIL deals, and it'll still happen,
09:02 like the Arch Mannings of the world and whatnot.
09:04 But I really don't think you're going to see
09:08 much money be spent on these high school kids,
09:11 because quite frankly, they're unproven commodities.
09:15 You have no idea what you're getting.
09:16 It might be a top kid, a quarterback,
09:20 it might be one of the top five receivers in the country,
09:23 but how often have we seen those players turn out to be duds,
09:28 and they end up transferring down to a group of five
09:31 or FCS or whatever the case may be.
09:35 I really think you're going to see the majority of the money
09:40 be spent on proven guys that have played elsewhere.
09:46 Example, I don't know their money situation,
09:49 like Dylan Gabriel, Oklahoma, those guys,
09:54 and the way they spend their money.
09:56 I think that's where you're going to see the money go,
09:58 and the high school kids are just going to have to rely
10:00 on proving themselves once they get to college.
10:03 So that's pretty much the gist of it.
10:10 Again, collectives, they can talk about money to the kids.
10:16 They can talk about money to a certain extent.
10:22 They can't say necessarily,
10:24 "We're going to pay you X amount of dollars
10:27 to stay at this school."
10:30 That's not necessarily what it is.
10:32 It's a third-party situation.
10:35 Yes, there is a partnership, a loosely tied affiliation
10:40 between the collective and the school,
10:44 but they can't just go to said player and say,
10:48 "We're going to pay you to stay here."
10:50 It's more of an opportunity for NIL situations
10:54 where the collective works with local businesses,
10:58 and they may appear on a GoMart commercial or Parmar
11:04 or whatever brewery is around, stuff like that.
11:10 Those opportunities are there.
11:13 Now, from the coaching side of it, West Virginia, again,
11:18 they can't go to Country Roads Trust and say,
11:23 "Hey, this kid in the portal, we're going after him.
11:28 We need fill-in-the-blank amount of dollars."
11:33 They can't do that.
11:35 They can't say, "We're going to need this much for this guy,
11:41 this much for this position."
11:44 That's not how it works.
11:46 There's a budget that they work with,
11:49 and again, they have to be very careful
11:54 with how they work in conjunction with the trust,
11:59 but it's more about the opportunities
12:03 that are lying within the trust.
12:07 WVU can have some conversations and say,
12:12 "This is what type of money that we're going to potentially need
12:19 to attract prospective student athletes to WVU,"
12:24 but it can't have anything to do with positions,
12:28 certain players, anything like that.
12:31 They can go there and say,
12:33 "Look, this is what it's going to take for us to be competitive.
12:36 This is what it's going to take for us to compete
12:43 against other schools in the Big 12 nationally,"
12:48 but when it gets down to the specifics, they can't do that.
12:52 I think at some point that's going to change,
12:55 and again, I think you'll have more of a direct relationship
12:58 between the two.
13:00 How much money do we have in the trust?
13:02 How much can we spend?
13:04 Who are we looking at so we can prepare NIL packages
13:08 and so on and so forth?
13:10 So that stuff I think is going to come.
13:13 Right now, it can't, but the other part of it,
13:19 and again, I kind of addressed a couple of times here,
13:22 but I do want to make sure we make very clear.
13:27 Players cannot talk to other schools,
13:33 and other schools cannot talk to players
13:36 if they are not in the transfer portal,
13:40 even if they have intentions of going to the portal.
13:42 Even if they put on Twitter,
13:45 "I intend to enter the transfer portal,"
13:48 and they haven't officially entered,
13:51 there's like a 48-hour window where the school
13:54 has that allotted time to officially submit
13:58 all the paperwork, get them in the system,
14:01 and then they're in the portal.
14:04 From the time the kid may have posted on social media
14:07 to the time he officially enters,
14:10 if there's any contact in that time,
14:13 that's still a no-no.
14:15 Can't happen.
14:17 So it's a hard thing to police, which is, again,
14:22 I think why they're trying to go away from it,
14:25 but there's a lot of problems that go on
14:31 with trying to police it.
14:36 There's a lot of different ways you can go about it,
14:38 but I just don't think there's a perfect solution,
14:41 but we'll see how this all plays out,
14:45 and, yeah, welcome to portal season, folks.
14:48 It's going to be crazy. There's going to be tampering.
14:50 There's going to be kids leaving left and right
14:52 that you don't think are going to leave.
14:54 There's going to be kids that West Virginia brings in.
14:58 It's madness right now.
15:00 You got to recruit your own -- re-recruit your own roster.
15:03 You got to recruit kids in the portal.
15:05 You got to recruit the JUCO ranks,
15:07 recruit all these other options
15:10 that are existing in the portal
15:11 from every which level of college.
15:14 It's crazy, so buckle up.
15:17 Next couple of weeks is going to be crazy,
15:19 and we'll be here to cover it all.
15:21 Here on "Mountaineers Now,"
15:22 be sure to hit that subscribe button on YouTube
15:24 at "Mountaineers Now," and you can also follow us
15:26 on X at the same handle.
15:28 I'm Skylar Callen.
15:30 You've been listening to "Between the Ears,"
15:31 and we'll be back here tomorrow with another episode.
15:34 [music]