Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Alumni or people with vested interests in the school. Yes, would pool money, not through the school, completely different than the school. And they had funny sounding named organizations and LLCs and websites that looked a lot like the school's colors, but weren't actually affiliated. And they would do these weird deals where they would tell the AD, the athletic director, or the coach of a team, hey, we've raised X money. Go tell that high school recruit that if that recruit plays for you, then we will do a private side deal with them to pay them money while they come and play for your team. You have this strange structure happening at the very same time that they created the transfer portal, which for a very long time, the college game had this role where if you're going to change schools, you have to sit out for a year. It was a big penalty. You actually had people who are sort of like loyal to their schools, who would play for their schools for three or four years before going to the NFL, who would sort of build a reputation with that alumni fan base. And with the transfer portal, every year, people just decide willy-nilly to enter it. I'm going to go where I'm going to either make the most money or have the best shot at NFL draft prospects by getting more playing time.The interesting thing is next year is when the schools actually will start being able to pay the players directly. And there's like a salary cap of sorts. The reality is right now, I think it's all still too messy and in flux to definitively say what the impact of all this will be on the NFL. But to me, it's just sort of like the final formal nail in the coffin that football in America is the NFL these days in a way that when the NFL was starting, football in America was the collegiate experience.…

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