As If You Needed Another Reason To Love Mike Leach

Sports Illustrated — Fifteen months into the era of name, image and likeness (NIL), Mike Leach has come to a realization like so many within the industry: College sports have been professionalized. And it is time, he says, for college athletes to become professionals. It’s time for a player draft. It’s time for salary caps, for trades and for player cuts.

Caught in a purgatory between amateurism and professionalism since NIL was legalized in July 2021, college sports should take the full leap into the latter, the Mississippi State football coach says.

“This should not be a masquerade party of professionals. Are you a professional or are you not?” says Leach during an interview in his office earlier this week. “Instead of sitting here and having 17-year-olds lecture everybody that they are professionals, well, let them be professionals. It’s one [amateur] or the other [professional]. Right now, we’ve got this whole mysterious stratosphere of people wiggling all over back and forth.”

“With professionals comes responsibility,” he says. “Yeah, you will potentially make more money. But you are drafted and can be traded. That’s what professionals do. This college football group [of administrators], they are all shocked by that. Why are you shocked by it? Name one league of professionals who don’t do it that way.”

Ok, this makes a lot of sense. These NIL athletes are making money based off of their name, image and likeness thanks to the school they are at. Just like Tom Brady and the Bucs, Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers, or Marcus Smart and the Celtics. The professional teams had the opportunity to select (draft) the players, sign them to a contract that gives them to trade, renew or terminate said contract. There is no transfer portal, there's free agency but that's worked into the contract.

Sure the colleges have scholarship dollars etc but there is nothing that binds the student/athlete to the school they are playing at by any means. Mike Leach is basically proposing to put college players on a contract. You will play here for X years, at the end of those two years we will have the option to renew, terminate or allow free agency (transfer portal).

Working out the logistics of the draft would be a nightmare for the NCAA considering how well they did bringing in the portal and NIL but if they would allow Scott Boras and some of his agent friends get some ideas together, it could very well work. Non drafted players would be free agents and able to play for an opportunity to get a contract.

Again, it makes too much sense which is why it will never fly.