Mack Brown wants college football to add a salary cap

Former North Carolina and Texas coach Mack Brown is all for a salary cap in college football. Heck, he said the sport needs it and needs to adopt the NFL model.

Without one, schools and collectives are free to spend what they want in order to acquire players from the transfer portal. Since it’s a freewheeling transfer world, player movement happens often, even a couple of times within a calendar year.

But if you limit the amount of funds that can be spent on players, then schools will be more thoughtful about the process, according to Brown. Plus, it might reduce the player movement, which could ultimately be a good thing.

“I think we should have a salary cap period,” Brown said on David Pollack’s See Ball Get Ball. “And we should definitely have a rookie salary cap. Coaches are calling around anyway and saying, ‘What’s the going rate for a quarterback, a great quarterback,’ so we’re kind of doing that anyway. But if the NFL can do it, then why can’t college do it? And it would be better for the players, it’d be better for the families. 

“Then you can go back and think about if North Carolina and Georgia can offer you the same amount of money, then you can go back and have some money, but also make a decision of which university is best for you. And then Nicholas can start thinking about what’s best for him. We always said it’s a 40 year decision. It’s not four. Well, the last few years, it’s been a one year decision. It’s been a six month decision.”

Brown mentioned the transfer portal, as it relates to NIL and how much money schools can spend. He provided the example of players participating in bowl practice but have the ability to transfer less than a month later. 

“And we can’t have it David, where we have a situation where, if you come in for bowl practice and you’re starting school in January, you could go to bowl practice with us and transfer somewhere else if you got mad at bowl practice before you went to school in January,” Brown said. “So, I mean, that’s how ridiculous it is right now. We need to get to the NFL model for the first time, I think their model is so much better than the collegiate model that we’ve got to get back to where, and we’ve got to do it with some urgency, but we’ve got to get back to where there’s a salary cap and coaches are making decisions on development of players.”