Right now, college athletics is in a state of purgatory. It's a professional enterprise where, seemingly by the day, a coach or AD comes out and admits that players are employees, yet this system offers no protections for employee or employer. Make players employees and it may be harder to get rid of the ones you don't want, but it's also easier to keep the ones you don't want to lose.
Another way the lack of structure around this system hurts all involved is in the lack of transfer fees. In an in-house interview, Northern Illinois AD Sean Frazier called for a system where Power 4 programs pay the Group of 6 any time they import one of their players.
"It's time to pay," he said. "I've introduced this a couple times nationally -- kind of a transfer fee. Professional soccer already has this. You want to leave? That's okay. How about throwing some money back at the school that developed that individual, so he or she can do that again, so we can make the ecosystem fair. You want to come in, talk to our person, poach our player -- make sure you do it legally -- why don't you throw something back into the kidney to help us to continue to develop so we can have an ecosystem that's fair."
Frazier has never been afraid to call it like he sees it. Way back in 2016, Frazier introduced the idea for a Group of 5 playoff. Since then, the 4-team bracket existed for seven more years and only one mid-major (Cincinnati) got in, and they're now part of the Big 12. The Group of 5 has become the Group of 6, as the SEC and Big Ten look to further separate themselves from the rest of college football. The 12-team Playoff reserves one spot for the highest-rated G6 champion, but the CFP immediately changed formats after Boise State was granted a No. 3 seed in the initial bracket. The Big Ten is currently doing everything in its power to put a moat between itself and the SEC and the remainder of college football.
Frazier doesn't like it, but he doesn't fight it, either.
"It's important to be reasonable about where we are in the pecking order. We are a developmental program. That might mean that the person comes in, gets developed, and leaves. Let's not belabor that they took us off the roster. I don't want to cry over spilled milk, because at the end of the day, that's where we are. We need to embrace that part of it, and then use it to our advantage," Frazier said.
"You come here, you're going to have a shot at the NFL, you're going to be developed here, we're going to be sound on all three phases of the game, and if somebody else has a larger bounty out there? That's fine too. At least you gave us that time."
Group of 6 programs have largely stopped trying to fight against the portal, instead using the number of players they lose to the Power 4 as a recruiting pitch as a selling point to the next crop of players. But getting poached year after year is a drain of resources for them and hurts the Power 4 programs up the food chain. Though it may hurt in the short term, in the long run it helps the Big Ten and SEC to equip the programs that have proven they can identify and develop under-the-radar prospects into Power 4 players.
A transfer fee could also serve as a deterrent from programs being overly greedy in the portal. A player leaving the MAC or the Sun Belt to start in the Big Ten or SEC generally can't pass that up, similar to a junior with an early-round draft grade. But a transfer fee may force the bigger-resourced programs to pause and think whether it's really worth it to spend $100,000 or so, plus his salary on top of that, for a backup.
Transfer fees might serve as an effective -- dare I say it? -- guardrail.