Bob Stoops on College Football Landscape: The NCAA ‘Really Failed’
The rules have changed drastically since Bob Stoops retired as the head coach of Oklahoma on June 7, 2017. There is virtually zero regulation of name, image, and likeness deals and it has given teams like USC the ability to use their abundance of cash to recruit players to their schools, and it’s technically legal.
It has been widely reported that the Trojans have offered Pitt wide receiver a seven-figure NIL deal to enter the transfer portal and come to the west coast. Well, guess who entered the portal on Tuesday evening?
247Sports’ Chris Hummer reported on Tuesday that Ochuan Mathis’ decision to choose Nebraska over Texas was heavily influenced by a six-figure NIL package that Husker boosters used to land the talented TCU transfer.
Naturally, during Stoops’s regular appearance on the Rush, a drive-time radio show in Oklahoma, hosts asked the former Sooners’ coach about his thoughts on the direction that college athletics are headed and he didn’t hold back anything.
“The bottom line — you know, be careful what you wish for,” Stoops said. “My opinion, we need a new leadership group. The NCAA and the way it’s been has really failed overall. I don’t know who goes by any rules anymore, and how they enforce it just seems so ambiguous.”
Stoops went on the talk about the inconsistencies that the NCAA has shown in laying down penalties on programs that have broken the rules, using Oklahoma State’s basketball program as an example.
“Look at Oklahoma State with their basketball program and what happened to them,” Stoops continued. “How wrong; brutal. Just so wrong, and so late, [and] insignificant to the people who actually did it. And then other teams, you know, nothing happens to them. I’m not pointing fingers at anyone. It happens in football too. So I don’t know; I’ve been very disillusioned for a long, long time on the NCAA, just through my football years and [seeing] how they enforce things or don’t.”
“Maybe we need to have a new league of Power 5 teams that have their own league, with their own whatever it be — commissioner, or governing board,” he said. “You may have to put a salary cap on everybody and every team; who knows? I don’t know. Again, I’m not living it like these other people are. But from afar, it looks like right now nobody has control of anything. I don’t know if that’s ever good. Even the NFL has some rules, restrictions, guidelines, salary caps. Right? All of that. And I don’t know right now if college football has any of that.”
