Cliff Godwin exposes tampering across college baseball: 'We have proof'

The transfer portal has only been open for a few days in college baseball but already the accusations are flying. On Thursday, East Carolina coach Cliff Godwin accused coaches at Power Four schools of tampering with his players.

East Carolina finished its season over the weekend, coming up a little short in the Conway Regional final against Coastal Carolina. And now Godwin is having to battle illegal contact.

“Our system is so BROKEN!” Godwin wrote on Twitter. “We have coaches at P4 schools texting our players directly who are not in portal! And we have proof!”

Cliff Godwin didn’t provide proof immediately, though his original tweet was still very fresh at the time of this writing. So it’ll be interesting to see if he opts to lay everything bare on social media at some point.

Even if he doesn’t, Godwin has been vocal in the past about the potential pitfalls of NIL and the transfer portal. In conjunction, the two can be especially disruptive for a coach at the non-power-conference level.

“I don’t like the portal and NIL together because it’s become a corrupt business,” Godwin said in January 2024. “So people are cheating. And I’m not perfect. I’m not saying that. But that’s not why that was created.”

As of Wednesday morning, there were more than 2,700 Division I baseball players in the transfer portal, according to On3’s Pete Nakos. So the problems aren’t going away any time soon.

Cliff Godwin outlines issues with NIL

The East Carolina coach has been blunt about how he feels about NIL, too. In short, he thinks its a system ripe for abuse. He even called it ‘pay for play.’

“They kept saying it’s not pay for play,” he said. “Well guess what it is? Pay for play.”

Even though NIL has impacted the way rosters are built at times, that hasn’t changed anything for Godwin’s approach at ECU. But balancing that can be challenging, and when NIL comes into the picture, Godwin admitted that jealousy can play a role, too. That only becomes more challenging when considering college baseball teams only have so many scholarships (currently) to distribute across a much larger roster.

“I’m all for rewarding our guys who have been in our program and have done the things the right way, from Trey Yesavage to Justin Wilcoxen to Joey Berini,” Cliff Godwin added. “I think it’s also worth mentioning that Joey Berini has never received a cent of baseball scholarship money since he’s been at East Carolina because we only have 11.7 (scholarships). [Wilcoxen] has only received scholarship this year in his fifth year. Guys that have grinded, that have developed with our coaching staff, that means something to me, because that’s what this place was built on. Now I still want them to be able to make some money if that is available. And so those guys were able to get some money, but it also creates jealousy.

“I asked Trey Yesavage this summer, ‘Does NIL create jealously?’ ‘100 percent Coach.’ So that’s another thing we have to navigate. But I’m all for helping the returners. I can’t foresee Coach Godwin offering any recruit any amount of money because that is going to take away from the culture that we have in the locker room. A lot of coaches talk about it. And I’m not sitting up here saying that we have the best culture in the country, but it means something to me to have culture. And you can’t sustain success the way we do if you don’t have great culture within that locker room.”

On3’s Jonathan Wagner also contributed to this report.