Cotton candy and consternation: NIL noise takes center stage at SEC spring meetings
Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz sought out a sweet treat somewhere inside Disney’s Magic Kingdom.
He settled on a bag of cotton candy and two “suckers” for his youngest daughters, Ella and Parker Lynn. But the numbers didn’t add up.
Drinkwitz was one bag of cotton candy short.
Perhaps he struck a deal with Ella to give her more total cotton candy than her sister. Maybe Parker Lynn had an agreement in place with Lindsey, Drinkwitz’s wife, to collect her own bag of the fluffy, sugary confection.
That, though, is how the “Happiest Place on Earth” turns into a battleground for a 2- and 4-year-old.
“My wife was like, ‘You’re an idiot,’ ” Drinkwitz quipped on Tuesday at the Southeastern Conference spring meetings. “...You don’t bring back one bag of cotton candy. You bring back two bags of cotton candy.”
It doesn’t take squinting too hard to draw parallels between the tongue-in-cheek scenario Drinkwitz presented about cotton candy and the recent Nick Saban-Jimbo fisher gripe regarding the effect of name, image and likeness on college football.
That brush between Saban and Fisher, naturally, took hold of the opening morning of SEC spring meetings on Tuesday as the discussion centered on how coaches within the league felt about the complex, inconsistent and increasingly hostile world of NIL.
“It’s changing the narrative for the player, because I make a conscious effort to ask kids when they come in to meet, ‘What’s the most important thing to you?’ ” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said. “That certainly has transitioned in the recent years from, kids would say, ‘Playing time.’ Kids would say, ‘Ability to win a championship.’ Kids would say, ‘Proximity to home, relationship with my coach.’ Now, a lot of times, that revolves around, ‘What can I make in NIL?’ ”
Need a minute to catch up? Let’s do that briefly.
Saban drew headlines when he called out Fisher — his former assistant at LSU — for “buying” his 2022 recruiting class that ranked No. 1 nationally in the 247Sports Composite team rankings via NIL inducements.
Fisher added gasoline to an already combustible situation when he called an impromptu press conference the following day to address Saban’s comments that included further personal attacks.
The league office responded by publicly reprimanding both coaches and issuing a statement from SEC commissioner Greg Sankey.
“I’ve said everything I’m going to say about this,” Saban said on Tuesday when asked about trading barbs with Fisher. “But I guess the point, and I should have never mentioned any individual institutions — I’ve said that before — but some kind of uniform name, image and likeness standard that supports some kind of equitable national competition, I think is really, really important in college athletics and college football. We’ve always had that.”
Jabbing over the last few weeks aside, that NIL has and remains a key talking point early in the SEC’s annual meetings on the Florida Panhandle shouldn’t come as a complete surprise.
The NCAA has largely decided to avoid legislating anything in regard to student-athlete compensation. That comes, at least in part, due to a fear of creating unwanted antitrust lawsuits and other possible legal matters should it try to limit what players are able to earn.
That’s led to little, if any, consistency across the league and sport in terms of how schools are going about managing NIL deals inside and outside the walls of their respective departments.
Thirty-nine states — South Carolina included — passed, currently or previously proposed, or plan to propose NIL legislation that would create some form of guardrails in relation to NIL as of February, per AthleticDirectorU. That, too, has come with a mixed bag.
South Carolina, for example, is expected to suspend the NIL law it passed in April 2021 that places limits on schools coordinating deals for their athletes in-house. That would, in theory, allow South Carolina, Clemson and others to operate more freely within the NIL space.
“Currently, with our state law being what it is right now — until that changes on July 1 — we as an athletic department cannot facilitate deals,” USC senior deputy athletic director Chance Miller explained during a Q&A session at Gamecock Club event on May 12. “We cannot take donations and turn around and pass that to our student-athletes.”
Where much of the ire around the country and SEC has arisen lies with collectives — third-party organizations overwhelmingly run by boosters that help facilitate NIL deals with prospective recruits or current players.
Collectives have quickly led to a growing concern over purchasing recruits for their services and rumors like those Saban alluded to in Birmingham and that a Tennessee quarterback recruit committed to the Volunteers for an $8 million NIL deal.
“If you had any foresight at all, you would see that coming, that when NIL went into effect (pay-for-play) was going to be an end result of it,” South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer said on Tuesday. “I don’t know if everybody felt that way. But certainly those people that I talked to, myself included, kind of saw it going in that direction when it was instituted.”
Saban was rather icy in his responses about his contentious repartee with Fisher, who hasn’t spoken publicly since arriving in Destin on Tuesday. Other coaches around the league also remain frustrated with the lack of consistency in how NIL has been handled within the sport.
The reality, though, is the league — or NCAA, for that matter — is unlikely to do anything to hamstring schools or step on a hornet’s nest of legal issues.
Perhaps the SEC simply needs a conference-wide trip to Disney World to cool temperatures — just make sure Sankey and his staff provide enough cotton candy for everyone.
This story was originally published May 31, 2022 at 4:27 PM.
