Bill O'Brien demands college football 'contain the poaching' in transfer portal era

Second-year Boston College coach Bill O’Brien has grown frustrated with the amount of tampering going on in college football, often before the transfer portal windows are even open or before players have entered. It’s a real problem, he said at ACC Media Days.

The issue is that the boundaries for college football are not being adhered to. There is too much rogue activity that isn’t being punished.

“They keep comparing it to the NFL,” O’Brien said on ACC Football Kickoff. “It’s not the NFL. The NFL has a CBA, there’s a union, there’s an enforcement body over it. There’s structure to the NFL. There’s 32 teams. This is the wild, wild west.”

That’s not to say Bill O’Brien hasn’t made it work. He’s going into his second year and prospects are high for Boston College. The team has lost some key talent — see quarterback Thomas Castellanos leaving for Florida State — but much of it has been retained, too.

“Our niche in this thing is, ‘Yeah, we have some money, we can compensate these guys. They have to earn it. The older guys make more than the younger guys,'” O’Brien said. “We have a great degree. We have a great university that gives back to the community, an incredible city, the city of Boston. So we have a lot of things to sell.

“And I think when our guys come to BC, and I don’t want to speak for all of them, but the majority of guys don’t want to leave. They love the staff, they love what the school can do for them, they love the community atmosphere. It’s a smaller school, about 9,000 undergrads.”

Bill O’Brien is trying to keep that roster retention as a reality in an ever-shifting world. And until there are hard and fast rules around policing bad behavior, that’s likely to continue to be a moving target.

“The issue is, you get me on a little bit of a soapbox here, but what we have to try to contain is the poaching,” O’Brien said. “When the portal’s not open and there are teams… and look, I’m not trying to throw stones or anything like that, but can we have some type of control over like, ‘Hey, the portal opens, yeah, these guys have the ability to go in there no problem. But let’s leave them alone when the portal’s not open.'”

For now, Bill O’Brien is just adjusting as best he can. That’s all you can do, really.

“I think you wash it all away, I really do. I think everybody, again, like I think it’s happening,” he said. “It’s just the way it is. Because, again, there’s not a lot of — in the NFL, as you guys know, there’s a legal tampering period before free agency, where guys can kind of check it out and figure out where they would be interested in once they are free agents. Maybe down the road, there’s something like that for college football. I don’t know that.

“I’m really focused on Boston College. But I do think over the course of time, over the next four, five years, it can hopefully be regulated a little bit better.”