Matt Leinart on future of NCAA: It's definitely moving to a Pro Model

On3 imageby:Sam Gillenwater07/04/22

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College sports look a lot different from when Matt Leinart was playing quarterback for USC. His Trojan team that won the national championship in 2004 famously had its title vacated for an NCAA violation regarding benefits received by Reggie Bush. Now, those same practices are essentially par for the course in the new NIL era.

In an appearance on ‘The Herd’, Leinart talked about the style the NCAA is taking on. He says they’re headed closer and closer towards a professional style league. From there, it may be up to the programs themselves whether they can evolve or not.

“It feels like a pro model. You have the SEC which has brought in Oklahoma and Texas. Now you have the Big Ten which is bringing in USC and UCLA. The whole landscape is shifting. I think the NIL is another thing (and) the transfer portal. There’s so many different issues right now. It’s all going to settle down at some point. It is the new norm,” said Leinart. “I think we have to get used to that, for better or for worse. You either have to be a part of the future, you sink or you swim. Some teams are going to sink and some teams are going to jump off and try and survive.”

All the different policies in the NCAA have made it undeniably unrecognizable from even just a year or two ago. Players stand to make millions off of their name, image and likeness. They have the freedom to move schools as well through the transfer portal.

Leinart played six seasons altogether in the NFL for Arizona, Houston and Oakland. With that experience, he sees more comparisons for college football in the NFL than what it once was before.

“It’s gonna become the NFL. You have these two conferences, the transfer portal is free agency. Will there be a player’s union at some point? There’s no governance right now,” Leinart said. “All of those things are down the line. It’s gonna happen in the next three to five years.”

We’re now one year into NIL and programs across the country are still navigating this new space. The speed at which it happened allowed players to make more earlier on, but it came at the cost of a lack of official guidelines at times. Leinart believes it will smooth out in time but, until then, it’s a free for all in college sports.

“It just went from zero to 180 in like a day. The policies are changing every single day. The rules are changing every single day. There’s a lot of confusion on the NIL front. You can’t pay for play, you can’t buy players, but there’s a lot of people trying to figure out loopholes and trying to figure out ways to get players. It’s all going to kind of iron itself out and it’ll make everybody happy. Right now, it is legitimately the wild, wild west.”