Someone is going to have to explain how Kentucky’s supposed $22 million basketball roster fits within the bounds of the $20.5 million revenue share cap for all sports.
The regulations that are supposed to be governing this business simply are not working.
On one hand, fans only care to a point. Just look at the boffo ratings for the College Football Playoff and the national title game. This is still a compelling product and maybe even better than it was before. Indiana just won the national title for goodness sakes.
On the other hand, if it’s true that the Ole Miss head coach was continuing to recruit a transfer who enrolled at Clemson and that an agent tried to shake down Swinney for $1 million to ward off the threat, nobody could credibly argue that’s how a professional sports league should operate.
Oh, and these NIL agents? Many of them are laughably unprofessional and out of their depth, which is what you get when there are no real standards or certification processes. No matter what you think of Swinney — and many of us have had our critiques the last few years — this is not a “failure to adapt” issue. It’s a refusal to enable corruption issue.
Fixing all this is not solely up to Swinney. He is a cog in a very large and out-of-control machine. But if a future Hall of Famer with two national titles doesn’t have the courage to stand up and call out peers for their role in the full-scale system breakdown, who will?
In a career and lifetime of defying the odds, Swinney will now try to do it one more time. If NCAA rules and potential punishments don’t get other coaches to act right, wouldn’t it be something if pure, old-fashioned shame did the trick?
Credit