Steve Spurrier reveals his concern level for the state of college football

Steve Spurrier is never shy about voicing his thoughts on college football. And he’s not a huge fan of a more recent development in the last few years. Well, a few of them.

There have been plenty of changes to the sport in that timeframe. The implementation of new transfer portal windows, reform of the transfer process in general, the introduction of NIL legislation and more.

Spurrier recently joined Another Dooley Noted Podcast and opened up on the state of the sport. He was blunt.

“Yeah, I wish all this had not happened, but it is what it is now,” Steve Spurrier said. “I don’t know how they change it, because they don’t know how to do it either. There have got to be smarter people than me that can look at it and say, ‘Why don’t we put some like… you’ve got to stay two years somewhere.’ Or just anything. And every school gets $20 or $22 million and that’s it, you can’t spend more than that. And you’ve got to have accounts of it.”

In other words, let’s rein in the free transfer era a bit. And let’s level the playing field when it comes to NIL spending. The alternative is the kind of chaos we’ve seen unfold in the sport.

For Steve Spurrier, there are some obvious things that should be cleaned up. For one, it’s impossible for most people to get a handle on what’s going on in the NIL world.

“I heard Ricky Neuheisel talking on his radio show the other day, he said, ‘College football is the only sport in the world, or the only business in the world you don’t have to tell anybody how much money you make,'” Spurrier said. “It’s supposed to be public knowledge.”

Steve Spurrier provided two high-profile examples. Both came from the SEC.

“Nobody knows what (DJ) Lagway got,” Spurrier said. “They asked me, ‘What did Lagway get?’ I said, ‘I think three, four or five million. Arch Manning supposedly got six million a year. So I can’t put an exact number on it because they don’t tell you.”

For those in charge in the sport, the lack of transparency is a feature, not a bug, Spurrier said. Coaches have an easier time managing things if it’s not readily apparent that one player is getting paid far more than another.

“Obviously they tell the players don’t tell anybody how much you got now, because we can’t give everybody that much,” Steve Spurrier said. “So yeah, it’s just what it is. But like people say, the attendance is good as ever, the TV ratings are as good as ever. So people are watching and there’s great interest in it, I will say that. But just have some rules somehow. You would think they would want to do that, but they haven’t done it yet.”