Scooter Hobbs column: Lines blurred between college, pros
Published 9:16 am Friday, January 17, 2025
Best I can tell, the football long weekend begins Saturday and Sunday with NFL divisional rounds of its postseason and ends Monday night with the College Football Playoff championship game — Notre Dame and Ohio State, I guess it is.
I think I got that right. But who knows? Maybe Monday is the Detroit Lions and Buffalo Bills?
Better double-check it. Who knows?
The NFL keeps moving more and more toward college offenses (i.e., the read option chicanery) and the college boys keep copying more and more of the pros’ business and labor model (i.e., blatant cash grab — money talks).
It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between the two.
With that in mind, this morning’s question of the day comes at you straight out of leftfield.
What I’m wondering is this: How long is it before college coaches start spending August scouring the NFL waiver wire for their last-minute season shopping?
It’s true that the nation’s football talent flow traditionally moves in the opposite direction, but this is an exciting and idiotic new era for college football.
So why not?
Most big-time college programs already have what amounts to an NFL-style general manager sorting out the rosters.
So don’t scoff out loud just yet.
College football has been threatening to jump the shark for a few years now and maybe this would do it, make everyone take pause.
Probably not — there seems to no end to this madness.
Anyway, we were talking about the NFL waiver wire deal as the next option for all your college recruiting needs — players “this” close to the NFL surely could help State U’s varsity.
Those coaches who massage and finagle it to restock their needs will be heralded in the media and be in big demand at coaching clinics for “understanding” and “navigating” and “taking advantage of” the “exciting new realities of the college game.”
Go ahead, doubt it … at your own risk.
The former hurdles in place are now little more than speed bumps.
Silly you, you surely are not wondering how players who’ve already received NFL paychecks can return to the fun and games of college experience.
New flash — there are no amateurs anymore. The player-friendly United States Supreme Court said so — while warning the NCAA that there could be even more dire consequences if they ever tried to roll things back to the good old days.
Eligibility? Yeah, there’s that.
But these days, with the myriad of loopholes, there seems to be no way to run out of eligibility.
We’re seeing the wonder of seventh-year seniors these days, some at their fourth or fifth different college.
Nobody even bats an eye about it anymore.
All you need, seemingly, is a good sob story, maybe with a note from your parents or legal guardian (or, better yet, an agent), and it’s almost impossible to run out eligibility.
Already we are seeing the dilemma of players quite adept at college ball whose talents don’t really — through no fault of their own, the courts will likely decree — translate into the NFL’s preferred skill set. The poor chaps were making a profitable good living at the college level and, they will say,
These guys may have been misled by a dastardly agent who oversold the NFL’s interest, and they now could demand that they not be denied their right as U.S. taxpayers to collect a college paycheck.
Maybe not NFL money, but not exactly menial labor and wages either.
Just sue the NCAA and you’ll probably get a sympathetic judge who might let you play well into your dotage.
That’s basically what quarterback Diego Pavia of Vanderbilt (his third school) did this year to get to come back next year. He became a cult figure at Vandy for all but single-handedly beating Alabama and Auburn this season. But he’s one of those tough-nut kids the NFL shies away from. So, making good coin at Vandy, he argued that a long-ago year in junior college shouldn’t count against him and, of course, a federal court agreed.
Former Auburn coach and current U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville said, “This judge has basically said now there’s no eligibility requirements. The next thing coming is you can forget about the four-year eligibility, it’s gonna be nonstop as long as you want to play … you can play til nobody else wants you.”
So, just spit-balling here, but could that also clear the way for the NFL to start sending it’s waiver-wire cuts back to school.
You’ll know when you hear a college preview opening week with: “We lost to five players to the NFL draft, but we got four from the NFL portal to come back. So we came out pretty slick there.”
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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. You can email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com