DESTIN, Fla. — Just about all the oxygen in the room that is this year’s Southeastern Conference Spring Meeting has been consumed by talk and speculation about football scheduling.
Eight games. Nine games. The shell game of who will play whom and when.
“It’s the most overrated conversation there ever was,” said Georgia coach Kirby Smart, who after winning back-to-back College Football Playoff titles probably feels compelled to worry less about who his team plays than many other coaches do.
On the other hand, ask Smart, or just about any SEC football coach, about player tampering, and you’ll get a different, more candid and urgent response.
“This,” former UL and now Florida coach Billy Napier said, “is a cutthroat business.”
You’ve got trouble, folks.
Right here in River City.
With a capital “T” and that rhymes with “P” and that stands for “Tampering!”
If anything is an existential threat to college coaches’ programs and livelihoods it’s the wide, wide world of the transfer portal, which the NCAA threw open in 2021 by allowing student-athletes to change schools once without having to sit out a year as in the past.
In some cases, it can be a huge benefit. There’s no way the LSU women’s basketball team, which returned only one starter in point guard Alexis Morris from the 2021-22 squad, wins the program’s first NCAA championship without being able to dip deep into the portal. Players like Angel Reese, LaDazhia Williams and Kateri Poole helped transform Kim Mulkey’s Tigers from rebuilding mode to national contender mode in a flash.
In some cases, the transfer portal can strip programs bare and leave coaches frantically searching for enough players to fill their needs. And the way players are sometimes lost to the portal what bothers South Carolina football coach Shane Beamer.
“We lost four guys who were key contributors after the season. That’s,” Beamer said, pausing a beat for intentional effect, “strange.
“Again, rumors are one thing and proof is another. I’ve had other SEC coaches call me and ask if I’ve heard something. I call them. But it’s not SEC coaches who are directly involved. It’s a lot of third parties.”
Third parties as in trainers or high school coaches, you name it. That, college coaches say, is often where the conversations with the potential new schools start, doing a proverbial end run around the rules before the player in question even enters the transfer portal.
“It’s hard to police that,” Smart said. “So, it’s disturbing, it’s upsetting, but I really don’t know (what to do).
“People want to blame the coaches for tampering. But a lot of the time it is the player who is negotiating or is looking for greener pastures and when they do that, sometimes they create the tampering. It goes both ways.”
Sometimes a school, or its supporters, can head off any shenanigans. That was certainly the case in late 2021, when Baton Rouge attorney and LSU booster Gordon McKernan heard rumors that schools were trying to pilfer wide receiver Kayshon Boutte, then the injured but still star returning player for the Tigers heading into the first season of the Brian Kelly era.
McKernan met with Boutte and his family soon after and arranged an NIL deal in return for marketing and advertising rights. Instead of Boutte’s name being part of yet another transfer portal headline, he posted an “i’m locked in” message on social media.
That Boutte never recaptured the star status in 2022 that he achieved in 2021 before he suffered a serious ankle injury midway through that season is almost secondary. That LSU was able to use the NIL tool/weapon to keep its biggest name in the fold was an early win for Kelly and his new program.
But the Boutte saga is an example of a win in a single battle, not the entire war. SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey was asked Wednesday afternoon if reducing the transfer portal from its current 60 days (split over two windows in the winter and spring) would reduce tampering, but he said he didn’t think it would make a significant difference.
“One can make the observation that tampering is happening outside the window,” Sankey said. “I think what’s been discussed is how do we clean up the tampering issue while recognizing that it doesn’t always come from coaches.”
So, meanwhile, a cutthroat business rolls on with few if any clear solutions.
“There’s no doubt tampering is real,” Napier said. “… And I think that until there’s something done about it, I think that you’ll continue to see it.”
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