As antitrust litigation forces the college sports system away from a corrupt system that denied fair compensation to players for decades, plenty of coaches keep complaining about the new NIL reality.
And they keep missing the point.
The latest get-off-my-lawn message comes from outgoing Coastal Carolina baseball coach Gary Gilmore, who is retiring at age 66. In his final press conference on Sunday, he vented about the current system that, between NIL and unlimited transfers, gives the players more power — and money — than they’ve ever had.
Gilmore’s argument partially comes from the perspective that he wants to protect the kids against making money that would be squandered. Which is baloney. He wants the players to get less money, which will make it easier for schools that can’t get the most money together to compete.
“A rule system would be one where they’d get a little bit of money, but then they’d put money in trust or this and that so you don’t have the horror stories that you see in the NFL and different places, you know, Major League Baseball, kids get big signing bonuses and boom, you know, five, ten years later they’re broke, they don’t have a dime, they don’t have an education, they don’t have anything,” Gilmore said. “There has to be a better way.”
A better way for who? Under the old system, it was great for the schools but not great for the players, who didn’t get fair return for their time and talents. Now, thanks to the overdue reckoning, it’s great for players and not great for those who deserve that reality.
We’ve said it for years now. The college system has gotten the chaos it deserves. And as folks like Gilmore and Nick Saban (who if he was 10 years younger would have simply gone to a school with the cash behind it to buy the best players) whine about the way things are, they fail to realize that any effort to put the toothpaste back in the tube will create more antitrust liability.
The only real solution is to unionize the players under a multi-employer bargaining unit and negotiate rules that limit transfers and salaries and that otherwise tries to create competitive balance. (The NFL has; MLB has not.) Even then, it won’t be easy to keep boosters and other would-be bigshots from finding ways to pay players on the way in. The difference would be that, once a player signs a multi-year contract to play for a given school, it won’t matter.
For now, the grievances of guys like Gary Gilmore don’t matter. The court system has spoken, over and over and over again. The coaches can either accept that reality and adjust to it, or they can keep acting like little children who when faced with a reality they don’t like will stomp their feet and ball their fists and hold their breath until they turn orange.
