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Matt Norlander has a piece up in his Candid Coaches series over at CBS Sports about NIL and cheating.
Specifically he asks coaches if NIL will increase or decrease cheating. The general response he gets is yes and he gets some really good answers. This one might be our favorite:
“Are you serious!? Cheating has been around since I was born and it’s only gotten worse, even with coaches doing jail time. I can’t tell you enough how glad I am to be out of the SEC.”
It’s been around longer than that, coach. Apparently he hasn’t seen the 1953 John Wayne movie called Trouble Along The Way. And it was going on before then, too.
If there is a way to cheat under NIL we’re pretty sure someone in the Situational Ethics Conference has already figured it out.
In a perfect world though, if we’re going to do NIL, one of the advantages should be that it’s all out in the open. At this point, what difference does anything make? There’s not much of a point in trying to control it. Cat’s out of the bag, genie’s out of the bottle, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube and any other cliche you’d like to toss in is fine.
The NCAA’s power to control this is broken. The sooner everyone accepts it the better.