By R.L. Bynum
RALEIGH — Five college football coaches sat side-by-side at the Bill Dooley Pigskin Kickoff on Thursday and covered nearly every corner of a sport in transition: the transfer portal, revenue sharing, the debate over whether Congress should get involved in college athletics and tampering.
On the latter, second-year UNC coach Bill Belichick, the highest-paid state employee in North Carolina, said that stopping tampering was above his pay grade.
Belichick appeared at the Hilton Raleigh North Hills with N.C. State coach Dave Doeren, Duke coach Manny Diaz, N.C. Central coach Trei Oliver and East Carolina offensive coordinator John David Baker, fielded questions from master of ceremonies David Glenn.
The second-year UNC coach described watching a signed player flip to an SEC school the next day, with no real recourse.
“You can take them to court, you can fight it, and all that, but in the end, by the time you win the case, the guy’s eligibility is up anyway,” Belichick said. “So, there’s really not much recourse to that.”
Belichick argued that meaningful enforcement would have to come from the conferences, and he wasn’t optimistic that would happen anytime soon, particularly after quarterback Darian Mensah went from Duke to Miami near the end of the transfer-portal window.
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“The conferences don’t necessarily support that. They’re not going to turn against a team in their conference,” he said. He added that the ACC specifically should find a way to prevent late losses like Mensah, before conceding the fix was out of his hands.
“I think our conference should find a way to keep that from happening,” Belichick said. “That’s above my pay grade.”
Doeren said the absence of consequences has effectively gutted the rules already on the books.
“Right now there’s a bunch of rules around tampering, and so far there’s been no accountability around the ones that are breaking those rules,” he said. “It doesn’t help to have guardrails nobody pays attention to.”
Diaz was blunter about the practical hurdle.
“You need proof, right? And it’s hard to get in a lot of ways, through the back channels,” he said. “But ultimately it’s hard to govern those that don’t want to be governed.”
The coaches were asked about the Protect College Sports Act, which is currently being debated in Congress. The legislation would grant the NCAA an antitrust exemption, cap agent fees and limit players to one penalty-free transfer before requiring them to sit out a year under the old transfer rules.
“I think it’s a pretty complicated problem. I don’t know if there’s a real simple answer,” he said while suggesting that Nick Saban, Sen. John Cornyn, Sen. Ted Cruz and President Donald Trump are trying to do the right thing.
Belichick pointed to the difficulty of governing dozens of sports with wildly different needs under one umbrella, particularly in a conference as geographically sprawling as the ACC.
“I think the state laws are a little complicated, too, so to have federal legislation is probably a good idea,” Belichick said.
Doeren said that the lack of a shared spending structure undermines the sport’s competitive balance more than the portal.
“The level playing field of the salary cap slash third-party money, I would love to just see — whether it’s different in Power Four, G6 — for the 69 Power Four teams to have the same amount of money,” he said. “Let’s see who can recruit, develop, coach, retain, but it’s so not that way right now.”
He argued the current financial gap between programs has undercut the NCAA’s founding purpose.
“The NCAA is supposed to be about creating a level playing field with the rules, and there is nothing level about the amount of money schools have to go get their rosters or retain their rosters right now,” Doeren said. “If there’s a way that they can actually have, like the NFL, a salary cap that everyone has to adhere to, I would love to see that change in college football.”
Diaz, who had to scramble to find a quarterback after Mensah left for Miami, argued that schools developing a player should be able to reinvest whatever compensation they receive when that player leaves.
“If we believe in contract law, the money that one school pays the other school for their player, that school gets to reinvest that dollar figure into their roster,” Diaz said. “So that not only is there a buyout, but that buyout then can be used to replace the player that left.”
After 29 seasons in the NFL and six Super Bowl titles, Belichick is struck by the difference in the rules between college and the pros and suggested that they shouldn’t be that different.
“The one thing I’ve always advocated is for college football and pro football to have the same set of rules,” he said. “I think that would make it a lot easier and a lot better for the fans, the players, the coaches, the officials and everybody that watches the game.”
He pointed to the whiplash of watching mismatched rulebooks across a single weekend.
“You watch multiple games on Saturday and see one set of rules has interference penalties, overtime rules, time outs; there are multiple differences, and you don’t see that in other sports,” he said. “And then you turn on the game on Sunday, and you have a different set of rules, clock stopping after a first down, or not stopping after a first down, things like that.”
He singled out the targeting rule as one example of a standard players learn for years in college only to see it change once they reach the league.
“I think if the NCAA and the NFL can get together and consolidate the rules to the best of whatever they can agree on, [that would be good]” he said. “Players have learned that targeting rule through their entire college career, and then they go to the NFL, then the rules are a little bit different for targeting.”
The transfer portal, as expected, was a hot topic, and the coaches were candid about how it has upended the recruiting process some of them built careers around.
Belichick said that the transfer pool skews older and more physically developed than high school recruits, which simplifies part of the equation.
“Those kids are more generally speaking mature, have played college football, and just have a little bigger, stronger background than the high school kids,” he said. “So, in that respect, it’s a little bit easier to evaluate them.”
He also raised a wrinkle that has become common in the portal era: agents increasingly steering the decision-making.
“Some of these kids will make a decision within 24 to 48 hours; they’re in the portal based on where their agent directs them, and it’s really not even the kid’s decision,” Belichick said. “It is his decision, but he’s transferred where [the agent] thinks that that’s good for [him]. Sometimes, those are the ones he picks.”
He added it’s hard for players to transfer to Carolina unless they are a graduate student or coming off their freshman season.
“The kids in between just have too many credits to make up. It just doesn’t fit,” Belichick said.
Doeren said familiarity built during the high school evaluation process still helps when a player later enters the portal.
“There’s a lot of these guys that end up in the portal from other schools we recruited in high school, and so it’s part of it,” he said. “You’re tracking guys that you don’t get that you loved in high school, and you knew them, so that if they go in, there’s already a built relationship.”
While Doeren and Diaz each pointed to their likely starters in the Pack’s C.J. Bailey and the Devils’ Walker Eget, Belichick talked about four candidates to win the quarterback job at UNC: redshirt freshman Au’Tori Newkirk, freshman Travis Burgess, Wisconsin transfer Billy Edwards Jr. and Texas A&M transfer Miles O’Neill.
“It was a very competitive spring, and we look forward to that competition continuing in training camp, and whoever has the best production will be that player,” Belichick said.
