JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
With the college football season winding down and the college football playoffs starting tonight, coaches across the top level of the sport are all in agreement on one thing - college football is a mess. NPR's Becky Sullivan has been listening to what they've had to say.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: You'd think James Franklin, the coach at Penn State, would be in a good mood this week. He just steered his Nittany Lions to a top-five finish, a berth in the first-ever 12-team college football playoff and a chance to win Penn State's first title in decades. But instead, he's sounding glum.
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JAMES FRANKLIN: I'm concerned for college football right now in general, to be honest with you. And I think a lot of people are.
SULLIVAN: Here's why. His backup quarterback, Beau Pribula, a Pennsylvania native, just announced Sunday with, quote, "a heavy heart," that he's leaving the team to enter college football's transfer portal to switch to another school next season. The transfer portal is open now but closes before the second round of the playoffs. Franklin said that left Pribula with a tough choice - skip the playoffs or hang around but risk his chance to find a new team where he could play a bigger role next season.
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FRANKLIN: Beau grew up wanting to come to Penn State, his whole life. This is his dream school. Why have we created a system where this guy couldn't finish this season with his team?
SULLIVAN: The situation at Penn State is emblematic of what's happening across college football right now. Over the past few years, lawsuits against the NCAA have opened the door for players to license their name, image and likeness rights for money and to transfer freely from school to school. Now many athletes are getting paid five, six or even seven figures each year in NIL deals and departing schools when they're offered a better deal elsewhere. In effect, every player in college football becomes a free agent every December, said Kenny Dillingham of Arizona State.
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KENNY DILLINGHAM: You know, they're going to have to face questions of, do I want to be a Sun Devil more than I want another $300,000?
SULLIVAN: The Arizona State Sun Devils are maybe the most surprising contender in the playoffs. They won the Big 12 Conference this year and, with it, a ticket straight to the second round. That success has drawn a lot of attention to the team, including from bigger programs looking to poach Arizona State's players. Now they have 11 athletes skipping the playoffs to transfer away. Keeping a team together increasingly requires raising millions each year from donors, and to reach this level of success again next season might require even more, Dillingham says.
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DILLINGHAM: And it's funny how, when you keep winning, it gets more expensive to win. It's amazing how that happens. And the more we win, the more people are going to offer our players, and the more we have to understand the investment that's needed to keep our roster here.
SULLIVAN: There are even more changes ahead for college football. If a federal judge approves a pending legal settlement between college athletes and the NCAA, then schools will be able to pay millions of dollars directly to players for the first time ever. That's likely to start as soon as next season, so many schools are already modeling their football programs after NFL teams, by hiring general managers to build the roster and handle player transactions.
The University of North Carolina went even further last week when it hired Bill Belichick, who won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots, to be the head coach of the Tar Heels. Running this kind of team doesn't appeal to everyone. After 3 1/2 decades of coaching college football, Dave Clawson decided this month to call it quits.
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DAVE CLAWSON: I tried to embrace it. I tried to fight through it. I tried to get a new mindset with it. I could do it. I just don't want to do it.
SULLIVAN: Clawson had spent the last 11 seasons as the head coach at Wake Forest. Players getting paid now is a good thing, he said, but with the constant roster churn, including players who've left Wake Forest just one semester shy of a degree, he couldn't take it anymore. Overall, college football is more lucrative than ever. The top-tier conferences haul in billions of dollars from TV deals.
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CLAWSON: And so a lot of people will say the industry isn't broken because of the financial success. But that isn't the reason I got into this.
SULLIVAN: The new expanded playoffs start tonight and will last a month, and ESPN paid almost $8 billion for the TV rights. Becky Sullivan, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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