If I was king for a day

The bottom line is, there will be few players getting paid. If EA pays each player for their name, it won’t be a ton of money. Star players in bigger markets may get some endorsement deals, but they’re going to be small. A tiny fraction of star players will get big deals from apparel companies, etc. It’s going to create a class system in college athletics, and it’s going to get really bad.

The situation now is, the semester after they enter the portal, the school may revoke the scholarship.

I feel like the Portal is doing it’s job and self-correcting on it’s own. Look at the number of kids who are still on there because they were not able to find other schools to take them on. That should eventually lead kids to make better decisions on whether to enter (as much as a 19-22 year old can be expected to make the best decisions for his future) but the novelty hasn’t quite worn off yet.

There was a very real need for a mechanism such as the Portal to stop coaches from restricting transfers. It had become a joke because coaches would only let kids out of scholarships if they would agree to a list of places they could not transfer to. I felt like that was hypocrisy since those same coaches would accept another job at the drop of a hat and it didn’t matter to them if it was in the same conference, with a future opponent, etc. Something had to be done for the kids but the Law of Unintended Consequences prevails as it always has.

The market has shown that players who sit on the bench at school X are not the hot commodities they believe they are. The Portal is great for the the Joe Burrow / Justin Fields types, even someone like Dalton Kincaid who was able to move up a level because it allows any school to initiate contact once your name is entered. At the same time, someone like Jaylon Dixon is pretty lucky that Utah was willing to take him back after he sat in the Portal for 6-8 months.

as a general rule, i’m okay with your compromise. I think you need to add a couple of exceptions:

1) If the school is put on probation and the student transferring is not involved in the allegations (Mississippi as an example)

2) Any student who is the target of harassment should also be allowed to move on without penalty. I hesitate to put that one in because not all reports of harassment are created equal, but there has to be an out. Harassment may not be the current en vogue term but I’m trying to come up with something that could apply to all student-athletes, not just those of color. Abuse seems too strong but at the same time, should an unsubstantiated report of someone in a crowd using the N word be grounds for transferring to one of the top 3 schools in the country that just happens to have an immediate need for that student (looking at you Justin Fields)?

Because the player is a STUDENT athlete and and for the coach it is a job.
The first part of that may be long gone.