David Pollack explains how his idea of freshman salary cap would work

There are plenty of ideas floating around college football about how to implement several potential new features in the sport post-House settlement. Among them? Managing NIL and roster payout allocations, especially when it comes to freshman salary limits.

Is there a way the sport can standardize things to a certain degree to make things more competitive and more fair? Former ESPN analyst David Pollack has one idea.

He’d like to see a freshman pay scale implemented, such that freshmen aren’t able to make significantly more than some of their more veteran peers. Implementing such a system would not be easy.

But the former Georgia star provided some guidelines for how it could work on the See Ball Get Ball podcast. He explained.

“Here’s how you do the freshman cap,” Pollack said. “Every team gets X for their freshman cap. Two million dollars. Three million dollars. Whatever that number is. Now you do it like a draft. First pick, second pick, third pick, fourth pick, fifth pick, sixth pick. That way you can prioritize.”

There’s a lot to digest there. If teams can only pay a certain amount to freshmen based on their priority within the class, suddenly recruiting opens up quite a bit for teams that might not normally be in the mix for star players.

“There’s some skill in there. There’s some skill to that,” Pollack said of his freshman salary cap idea. “Instead of just you being able to sign everybody at the same number, OK, if somebody prioritizes someone else more and I want to make you the first pick, then I’m going to pay you X. So there’s still an evaluation that’s really cool. I think it lends itself to spreading the players out as opposed to them all going to one school. Because you can still file in a bunch of guys to a certain school and build a bunch of depth.”

Pollack had one observation in the current NIL landscape, without a freshman salary cap. He was blunt about it.

“The depth is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he said. Why is that?

Well, a few teams have stacked depth and prevented others from building as much. But the transfer portal has also wrecked the traditional method of building depth, even for the juggernauts.

“I never used to go to Georgia’s roster and depend on freshmen. Never,” Pollack said. “You didn’t do that. You never saw an Alabama‘s run that you depended on freshmen. You had guys come in after two years of redshirting, developing, in a program. Now they’re going to get paid somewhere else. So it’s totally different.

“But I think that rookie salary cap would do a good job of, again, we limit some of this craziness of coming in and getting stuff that you haven’t necessarily earned yet but still slotting it where you have to have a good staff and recruit well and prioritize well.”