An NIL problem that’s still around?

We've got Chip Patterson, CBSSports.com, Cover3 Podcast, moderator, and he's wearing a sport jacket. Hey, there we go.

So do you have a heart out? Do you have to go on TV? Oh, you're on TV now.

Yeah, I was going to say thanks to the magic of television and the flexibility of Jenny Dell, Jacqueline DiAugustino, and producer extraordinaire Jack Capartato. I am on CBS Sports HQ right now, and I will be again at the top of the two o'clock hour. So hang out here, watch and listen with us, and take it back to CBS Sports HQ on your CBS Sports app or CBSSportsHQ.com. We'll be doing two 15-minute deep dive breakdowns, players to watch, storylines to watch, coaching edge, all those things for each of our two national semifinal games. Oh, okay.

Well, you and I will talk a little basketball here. So let me ask you this. We're going to hit what's going on in DC with NIL in a second, and I'm not even sure it's worth talking about what they're saying because the more I hear politicians talk about this issue, there's like two. They don't know what they're talking about. They don't.

They're like two people. They're really just cheering for their schools, which is fine. So I heard Jack Swarbrick on another college football podcast. I'm not endorsing it unless I'm talking to Dan Wetzel or Pat Fordy. So I heard Jack Swarbrick with them, and there is this NIL fear, or there is this desire to ask Congress to do what they should be able to do, which is figure out what if there are problems.

I don't even think they can identify problems. When you hear, whether it's Swarbrick or Father Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame wrote the op-ed piece in the New York Times or Jim Phillips. What goes through your head when they're asking Congress to help them? The one thing that stands out to me is that in the proposals of the legislation, there have been also the inclusion of that this federal legislation would be the law of the land. In other words, it would take precedent over all the state laws that currently exist, which are wide ranging. I mean, in the state of California, you can be in high school and have an NIL deal. If you're a five-star quarterback, you can be in your senior year of high school and have a car dealership come out and want to have an NIL deal for you, and you can make that money. It is not the case in states elsewhere, but I just wanted to point out that there is a great disparity, and that's one of the reasons why a lot of these conference commissioners or athletic directors are concerned, because they are concerned about an unbalanced playing field. I don't think...

I'm sorry, I laugh at that. I don't think that the idea that the federal government is going to pass a law, which is going to be law of the land over college sports and compensation is realistic, because when we start to talk to the people who really, really matter and have the best view of where this thing might be headed, you're going to have a whole new college sports world, I don't know, five years from now, 10 years from now. The path which we are headed involves the scenarios which would make even those laws be obsolete. So it is a waste of the federal government's time to try and construct legislation that would become the law of the land regarding NIL, because we are in such a bigger picture shape-shifting moment in college athletics that it might all be for naught by the end of the next decade.

Chip Patterson is with us as he is every Wednesday. Here's the thing that I get to with this, is we have... I understand why the NCAA does not want NIL deals to become recruiting inducements. I understand that, understand that, because it used to be illegal to offer an athlete money to come to your school.

Correct. Well, not illegal. It would be illegal to then defraud them. No, no, illegal in the eyes of the NCAA. It would be a violation of their rules. Not a legal matter, it's an NCAA rule violations matter. So just in that context, so if I screw that up again, we understand we're not talking about breaking the law.

So it's against their rules. I understand that that used to be the case, even though it went on in hundreds of places for thousands of athletes over the last five decades plus. And some of it was caught, very little of it was caught.

And a lot of it just kind of happened undetected because, I don't know, people are smarter or people like Jerry Tarkanian fought it for years, all of that. I get all of that. I understand where the NCAA is coming from. But the question that I would have for all of these people is now that we have brought all of that above board and we have said that NIL, boosters can offer athletes money, but there has to be a service attached to it, whatever.

That's fine. What's the real problem, though? If boosters are, even if we're attaching like bogus services to it, and you wear my t-shirt, wear my company's t-shirt, here's $100,000 for the year, but wear my company's t-shirt.

If that's the service, that's fine. Where's the problem with that? That's what I don't understand.

Nobody has really explained what the problem of that is. I think that my problems with it are, A, it might not be enough, but allowing NIL does not still bring the value. This is where I compare it to coaching contracts. What is the difference between an NFL player and an NFL coach in terms of compensation? What is the difference between college football coaching at the highest level and even the priciest NIL deals?

You're still out of whack. You are still paying far more money to the coaches than you are to the players versus how responsible the players are for the success on the field than the coaches. My first problem is it might not be enough money, what you're doing right now with NIL. Number two, I do think that you are opening up involvement in the compensation process. If you are college sports, not as the NCAA, but college sports as an amoeba, which of course it is, you are passing off compensation to individuals and groups of individuals, which might not be trustworthy, which might not be worthy of trust or reliable enough. Meaning the boosters, right? Not the players.

Okay, good. You're saying like, okay, we are going to allow the boosters and the collectives to handle this compensation so that we don't have to pay them. And so that's why I have maintained that a future model that makes sense to me is if conferences pull together licensing deals out of these billion dollar media rights deals and you become an employee of a conference.

You're not an employee of a university. You are able to be compensated based on literally what you are providing, which is the value that's coming in from TV rights deals and you're the one on TV and that, you know, maybe the SEC won't do it. Maybe the ACC won't do it, but maybe it's the United States Conference of College Football. Then we let the 30, 40, 50, or however many teams want to play that game, go play that game. But I think that right now, NIL to me, like it's, it's not hurting any, it's not hurting the larger picture of college athletics, but it is helping us find out a lot about which of these programs, which of these coaches and who within the college sports space has really been, been able to succeed or has been skating by without having to deal with the realities of this.

Yeah, I actually, I think that, that it's just so new that we, sometimes we search for a solution to something that isn't really a problem because we think we've been told it's going to be a problem because coaches are by and large alarmists. So Jim Boeheim accuses Miami of buying their team. They played by the rules that Syracuse has been playing by for years, right?

Now these, everything is above board. John Ruiz can take the Cavender Twins to dinner. They don't play from the men's team.

They played for the women's team. He could take them to dinner. And it just, the whole thing is it's, it's way, Miami in the final four is great for the NIL. It's, it's great for a lot of reasons. I want to get to Jim Larrenake in a second. I want to ask you one thing about what Jack Swarbrick is also talking about.

And I am on absolutely on board with this. He talked about the, the number of conference games we all play and the fact that the ACC in basketball plays 20. And I know they're going to nine in football and big 10 plays nine. But specifically to basketball, if the committee tells us over and over and over again, that you're, the conference games you play don't matter because that's what they tell us. That doesn't make a difference what your conference record is.

It's who you played, when you played them, where you played them, all of that. Why do we, why do we pigeonhole ourselves into playing 20 conference games at the expense of what could be really good non-conference match-ups for teams that can prove themselves outside of the league? Because this year the ACC killed itself by playing 20 conference games. It killed itself because the bottom of the league was pulling everything else down.

Right. And, and every one of the teams that was trying to get into the tournament played too many games against those five teams is what I'm getting at. If you've only got one really bad team in the league, which generally the league has always had one bad team, we had five historically bad teams. Syracuse at number one 20 or one 30, whatever they were, um, which played in the eight, nine game. Syracuse was generally where the worst team was in most ACC seasons. And we had five teams worse than them, but that's, but my, my point has always been, why are we playing so many? We're not getting to a true round Robin. Why are we, why are we bothering with 20 play better non-conference schedules?

Be creative with your schedule rather than do this. It's an interesting, uh, fight that he and new head coach, Michael Shrewsbury can, uh, can go and take up. I, I think that if your league is good, then your bloated league schedule provides more opportunities for sub 500 teams in your league to go and make the NCAA tournament. And like there is a numbers difference in a 15 team league and a 10 team league and around Robin versus not around Robin, but West Virginia had a seven and 11 record in big 12 play and was not even close to the bubble.

Yeah. And was not even close to the bubble. I mean, they were in the eight, nine games, right? So, you know, like it wasn't like they were safe, but nobody had West Virginia on your last four in that was a seven, a team with a seven and 11 conference record, a team that was 19 and 15 overall did not have 20 wins and was comfortably in the field because every single game that they played was going to be a quality game.

It was not going to hurt. Even if they lost the big 10, got a boatload of teams into the NCAA tournament, even though everything that we've seen from the big 10 and the NCAA tournament continues to reinforce the idea that it's overrated because enough of those teams are not awful, awful, awful. Then there's no bad losses. And the problem with the ACC this year, um, first there's two aspects is that I do want to hit note. The problem from a metric standpoint is there were bad losses and there were more bad losses on that schedule than there have been in recent years. And number two, from a perception standpoint, you were looking at a situation, um, five, six years ago where the ACC had about a handful of like, most of them active hall of famers, head coaches who had been inducted into the hall of fame, along with other head coaches who seem to be on their way to hall of fame contention or being inducted into the hall of fame. And you cannot go from that point where you are just nearly half your league is either in the hall of fame or on that trajectory and then have coaching changes at nearly every one of those and not expect there to be a drop-off. We are in the midst of the coaching changes at North Carolina, at Duke, at Louisville. We've got it coming at Syracuse. Like that is how a perception changes in college basketball. Cause college basketball has always been the coaches and the ACC has undeniably downgraded.

There's no question. But it's just, you lost half, you lost almost half a dozen hall of famers. So it's going to take some time for John Shire.

It's going to take some time for Hubert Davis. It's going to take some time for Louisville, for Syracuse, for all these other programs to like navigate their way back to a point where they can be, you know, powers again. But I just like, is the ACC that bad?

Like, yeah. I mean, it's at least not what it was. I think that the argument that the ACC was, because Miami's in the final four, that the ACC was better than everybody thought.

I think that argument is intellectually dishonest. We know, we watched this year. I'm not saying the ACC, the ACC was not worse than the Mountain West Conference.

That's the biggest problem that I have with that whole conversation. I understand what the metrics say, as you said, and we've, gosh, I talked about it for a month. It's the bottom five teams dragging everybody down. So the fact that Clemson should have been, Clemson's metrics should have been an NCAA tournament team.

Right. But also losing to those teams, like Clemson losing to Louisville, Miami losing to Florida State. But my point about those particular losses is that anytime you play a conference game, you can lose even on your own floor, but certainly on theirs. I don't care how bad the conference team is.

I don't care how good the conference team is. When you play a league game, it is a loseable proposition for you. But you can absorb those losses if the majority of your games are considered good wins. And that's the problem of the ACC this year, because the middle of the league's numbers, the metrics and how we, how we determine what's a quad one or a quad two. I mean, I was looking and listing each game in the last three weeks of the season as was it a quad one opportunity, two, three or four.

And there were more threes and fours than there were ones and twos. And it wasn't close. Like there were teams that had like six games left and four of them were quad three or quad four opportunities. And that was the problem with the league because the metrics dragged everything so far down that it just, you couldn't survive the one bad loss. So we looked at that and we said, oh, and they lost to Louisville.

Yeah, that's terrible loss. But half of the wins, which actually weren't that bad, were looked at as bad as, as irrelevant because they were quad three. And that's, that was what the metrics told us about the league. So I don't think the league was better.

I just don't think it was nearly as bad as they said, but we're so hell bent on staring at the metrics because the numbers are dizzying that we get lost in the numbers and nobody wanted to use their brains. I don't think North Carolina was a tournament team, by the way. They proved they weren't a tournament team. They didn't beat anybody good. The state win was their best win.

That was it. That was their best win. They didn't beat anybody good. But I think Clemson kind of proved that they belong. They didn't beat a bunch of good wins. You didn't see that NCAA bylaw that if you lose to 2023, Louisville, you're not allowed to play in the NCAA tournament.

Apparently not. It was determined very early in the season and Louisville beats any one of these teams. And look, I know that Virginia got, got by Furman in the first round, but we should have known when they, when they were a squeaker against Louisville, we should have known it was like, Oh, I'm with this team.

We should, we should see what's going on right here. But I mean, like Florida State was at the, in, in 2020, Florida State was maybe headed towards being a one seed, you know? Oh, there were no, I think they were going to be a one seed.

Absolutely. 2018, they were in the elite eight and they just absolutely fell apart this year. And so you, you throw Florida State in with what you had at Louisville, with what you had at Syracuse, um, with Georgia Tech, Boston College, all of that. But like we're used to Georgia Tech and Boston College at the bottom. To me, it was just like Louisville, Notre Dame, cause Mike brave was on a roll there where he was getting to the Fighting Irish to the tournament every year, Florida State. Again, it was really disappointing to see some of these programs end up at the very bottom of the conference.

And I think that again, there's like the number side of it, but then the perception is, and the perception was when we were up at the very top of it, when it comes to these coaches and these results, and now the coaches are gone and the results of dip too. All right. Final thing.

I'll give you 60 seconds. Tell me the best thing about Miami being in the final four. Jim Larronega has 11 NCAA tournament wins as Miami's head coach. The rest of the school's history has four. Four without Jim Larronega and Jim Larronega has 11 of them. He's reached the sweet 16 four times.

He's recently date twice. He's now in the final four for the first time in program history. He's won ACC regular season titles on opposite ends of his tenure, showing that a 73 year old can adapt. Like we talk about adapting to the NIL, like he figured out how to win at a high level back in 2012. And he has continued to be able to reinvent himself and adapt throughout the process of his tenure, which is the greatest stretch of Miami basketball in school history. I think it's great that we, I'm with you.

I am team Jim Larronega. I think it's amazing that we have two teams in the final four that in my lifetime did not exist. Because they Miami did not have a program for, I don't know, 20 years, right? And you didn't even have FAU at all until 88.

Exactly. We have two of the final four teams that did not exist in my lifetime. I am amazed at this, this tournament. I'm amazed always by you, chip Patterson. I appreciate everything. And I will talk to you later next week.

We will, it'll be a conversation unlike any other. Yes. Yes. Sounds good. Hopefully chip will be wearing a green jacket. Oh, next week. Okay.