Dan Mullen: NCAA Didn't Listen To Coaches Ahead Of NIL And Portal, So Now It's Dealing With Fallout

You could see it coming from a mile away. The introduction of NIL and the ever-changing transfer portal were about to bring college athletics into a new era. 

For the folks sitting off to the side waiting to pounce on the upcoming opportunities, the future turned out bright for their chances to change how coaches recruit, but for some, the warning signs were there, but the NCAA failed to listen. 

How we got to the place we are in when it comes to college athletics will one day be written by countless authors trying to put their own spin on what has turned out to be chaos. While some collegiate programs are flourishing in this new era, there are teams suffering the consequences, mainly outside the Power-4 conferences. 

But there has been one looming question for the NCAA in the years since NIL was introduced, and boosters found a different way to recruit the best players in the country. Long gone were the days of dropping off bags in the hotel parking lot, or the high school fieldhouse. We have entered into an era where NIL, for the most part, is just another term for pay-for-play, according to the NCAA. 

And by the way, this is not some overt crisis for the players. They deserve to be paid for their likeness, especially if you are one of the male or female athletes driving ticket sales and merchandise revenue. But as all of this is transpiring, the NCAA entered into a situation where guidelines were lacking, even if the coaches responsible for recruiting these athletes told the organization it was coming. 

I know you remember Jimbo Fisher's 2022 recruiting class that was filled with stories of a total cost upwards of $20 million, with the former head coach laying into Nick Saban for insinuating that the rumors were true. That whole ordeal feels like it transpired ten years ago, which is incredible to think about, since both Fisher and Saban are no longer coaching. 

Listen: Former Florida Head Coach Dan Mullen Sits Down With Trey Wallace On The Latest Podcast To Discuss NCAA, NIL And Much More

COLLEGE STATION, TX - SEPTEMBER 10: Texas A&M Aggies head coach Jimbo Fisher (Photo by Ken Murray/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

In the pre-NIL era, there were warning signs that what we now call the transfer portal would turn into another form of NFL free agency. And how a lot of folks in the business describe NIL for most athletes is just another way to get the player enrolled at a certain school. The coaches who were preparing for this all, they saw it coming. 

For former Florida head coach Dan Mullen, he tried to warn the NCAA about what was just a few years away from transpiring. Speaking with OutKick on the Trey Wallace Podcast, Mullen put the pieces together to know that these two entities, NIL and the transfer portal, were about to change the college landscape for good. 

But the NCAA would not listen to the coaches telling them what was to come, or at the very least did not think it would get this chaotic. 

"I think if you go back to the coaches, everyone knew this was coming," Dan Mullen noted. "I was on the college football oversight committee around then, 2017-2018. NIL was coming up, the transfer portal was coming up and when you’re talking to all the people at the NCAA, you sit in the meetings, and from the coach’s perspective, the transfer portal and how you want to do it moving forward is basically going to lead to free agency.

"And they (NCAA) were like ‘No, it’s basically just taking paperwork away, instead of us having to approve everything’. I said that’s the intent, which is the right intent, but it’s gonna lead to free agency. NIL is solely going to be about recruiting, and they’re like ‘it’s not going to have anything to do with recruiting’. I think the coaches saw this coming down the road. A lot of time administrators didn’t because they weren’t dealing with this on a daily basis to know what was going on."

Mullen Says Florida Decided To Wait On Everyone Else, Even Though Law Was Passed

When it came to the University of Florida implementing their own NIL strategy, they were already ahead of everyone else, at least that's what Dan Mullen figured. When the State of Florida passed its own NIL legislation that would help the football program get a head start on the competition when it came to recruiting, Mullen thought this would be a massive benefit to his program. 

Unfortunately for him, and the football team, the school decided that they would wait on other states to catch up before starting to head down the road of using NIL to their benefit. This move by the school would end up frustrating Mullen, who knew he lost out on an opportunity to potentially jump other schools. 

"When I was at the University of Florida, we were the first one to pass a law. So I remember meeting and saying, ‘Hey, we have a year's jump to potentially get this good, we should be able to sign players one through 25. Because we can pay them and nobody else can. This is going to be fantastic. But we need to get lawyers and everything in place, do it. And then it came, ’Oh, we're gonna wait and do it when everybody else does'. 

"So well, that's not real smart. But that was out of my hands, it was administrative. And so, all the sudden you start falling behind a little bit."

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NCAA Decided Not To Listen To Coaches Because They Thought It Was A Tactic

The NCAA has a long history of not wanting to be parented, or having coaches making much more than them try to dictate the future, even when some of the best opinions you can receive are from the ones dealing with this on a daily basis. Obviously, we've seen coaches' contracts skyrocket over the past ten years, reaching the $11-$12 million per-year range, so the NCAA in their mind was trying to now look out for the well-being of the student-athletes, not the millionaire coaches. 

In a way, we have turned the current system into a way that puts the athlete first, which is fine for most situations. But as Dan Mullen pointed out, when the organization decided to cater their rules towards the athletes, Mullen mentioned it was like having his kids decide what the family would eat for dinner every day, or if they would do their homework. 

This scenario wouldn't work in the long run, and since the NCAA decided that the coaches influence wasn't needed in all areas of the game, we came to a point of reckoning. The disconnect between the coaches and NCAA was as clear as a sunny day on the coast of Florida. 

Mullen made it a point to say that when the NCAA started to realize that coaches had both the power and large contracts behind them, they had to start siding with the student-athlete, without grasping the full ramifications of what was to come in this new era in college sports. 

 "You combine those two. To say that Tom Osborne didn't have power in Lincoln, Nebraska, you know, or Barry Switzer didn't have power or Bear Bryant didn't control the state of Alabama, it's silly.  But then you throw the money into it. I think a lot of what comes is the NCAA and administration and all the different people look, they said that coaches have all this power. So if the coach does something, it's to benefit him. And, you know, what we need to do is take care of the student athletes. 

"So if the coach does something, it's to benefit him," Mullen would characterize the NCAA's thinking. "Anything the coach said a lot of times was taken as the coaches are evil."

Coaches Were Trying To Present Reality, NCAA Wasn't Taking It Serious

Before we arrived at the current fork in the road, the NCAA had a choice to listen to its coaches about what was about to transpire. Maybe they truly didn't believe it was going to get this bad, which you can tell by the NCAA's loose guidelines when NIL was first introduced. Maybe the leaders in Indianapolis were liking the idea of being the ‘good guys’ for the first time in a while. 

No matter what the circumstances surrounding the NCAA's decision to not take the word of coaches that had been in the business long enough to know how this would potentially play-out, we're seeing the ramifications now. Collectives can now negotiate with prospects before they sign with a certain school, driving NIL prices up in the process, and the transfer portal is just another form of poaching from other schools that develop their own talent. 

"The coaches started to make statements like ‘Hey, this is what's going to happen, here's the bad part of everything that's going down,' to which the NCAA had a response that surprised those in the industry. 

Mullen noted that the organization did not really take to heart the input of the coaches, or even the ones trying to voice their concern about what was coming down the road. 

"And so I think what happened is a lot of what was going to happen on a daily basis. It got swept under the carpet by the administrators and lawyers at the NCAA, looking at the practical use of NIL, and what it was actually designed for, and the practical use of transfer portal and what it's designed for. And they didn't want to hear the reality of what was actually going to happen. And I think that's where the disconnect was, and that's how it started to get a little bit out of control."

While the NCAA found out the hard way about the ramifications of them not listening in the first place, some coaches that voiced their opinion on the matter can now just throw up their hands as to say ‘We told Ya So’. 

"Now that all of those prophecies have kinda of come true. Now everyone's like, oh boy, well, how did this happen?"