After ACC title game, another challenge awaits UNC, Clemson: Managing transfer portal

Mack Brown and his coaching staff at North Carolina spent the week preparing for Clemson, and trying to position the Tar Heels for their first ACC football championship in more than four decades. Up next is a challenge that’s perhaps even more daunting these days in college athletics: managing the transfer portal and keeping coveted players from entering it.

The Tar Heels, along with every other school in the ACC and around the country, will try to address their needs by recruiting transfers, who have become much more prevalent since the NCAA began allowing transferring athletes to compete immediately. Now, though, in the second year of college sports’ NIL era, the transfer portal has come to resemble unregulated free agency.

It’s not so much the player movement that bothers Brown, but the motivation behind that movement. A critic of the no-rules-and-anything-goes nature of NIL deals, and their influence in recruiting and transferring, Brown again spoke out against the state of things on Friday, before the Tar Heels and Tigers played for the conference championship.

“One of the real issues we’ve got in college football, I feel, is people that are tampering with guys on your team and paying them money to leave,” Brown said. “And it’s an issue that needs to get stopped.”

When the NCAA in the summer of 2021 begrudgingly relented and allowed college athletes the right to monetize their name, image and likeness, the spirit and the intent of the legislation was clear enough. Athletes could sign endorsement deals. They could sell their own merchandise. They could, in a sense, become entrepreneurs.

And, indeed, countless athletes have taken advantage and signed the kind of NIL deals the NCAA expected and envisioned. To the chagrin of Brown and many others, though, another side of NIL quickly emerged, and that was the side on which he focused his ire here on Friday. While it is not unexpected that NIL has become a cover for pay-for-play, it has proven impossible to stop.

Already, even before FBS players were allowed to enter the transfer portal on Monday, Brown said he has been made aware of at least one UNC player who he said has received more than a dozen offers to transfer. The player, whom Brown didn’t name, indicated other schools had been offering him money to enter the portal and play for them instead of returning to Chapel Hill.

“I sat down to lunch with one of our starters the other day and I said, ‘Are you getting calls?’ ” Brown said, reciting the conversation. “He said, ‘Oh, Coach, I’ve got 15 places I could go.’ And he said, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

“And I said, ‘Are they offering you money?’ He said, ‘Yes. One hundred percent.’ ”

One particular question, that would’ve been unthinkable in pre-NIL times, is whether UNC has any reason to fear losing Drake Maye, the freshman quarterback and the ACC Player of the Year. Maye comes from a long line of Tar Heels, and his family’s ties to UNC are well-documented.

His father, Mark, played quarterback there in the 1980s. One of his brothers, Luke, made one of the most memorable shots in UNC basketball history in 2017, and sent the Tar Heels to the Final Four before their sixth NCAA championship. Another of Drake’s brothers, Beau, is his roommate and a walk-on on the UNC basketball team.

On the surface there’s no reason to think Drake Maye would ever entertain the thought of transferring. And yet, on the other hand, he’d likely be worth millions to a school that believes it’s a great quarterback away from competing for a national championship next season. There could be a few such schools, at least, with deep-money NIL collectives in the SEC or the Big Ten.

Would they come after Maye? Would he listen?

“I don’t think Drake will go anywhere,” Brown said, referencing his deep Carolina ties, but as improbable as it might seem for Maye to leave, it’s representative of the kind of concern that’s grown more common throughout college athletics. Smaller schools, in some cases, have become feeder programs for ones with more money, in wealthier conferences.

Brown, meanwhile, said UNC has felt the effect of NIL as pay-for-play in high school recruiting, too.

“Right now you look at our recruiting, it’s not as high as it has been in the past — it’s because every player that we’ve got that’s coming is coming because he wants to come to the University of North Carolina,” Brown said. “He wants to come for academics. And he’s coming for the right reasons.

“And sadly enough, we’ve probably lost five great players that aren’t going to come, that would’ve normally come if NIL hadn’t been an issue.”

Brown said there were already 2,000 college players in the transfer portal, which has been open to FCS and lower-division players, and that he anticipates the number growing to 6,000 by next week. The most high-profile of those players would likely command large paydays, some of which would undoubtedly come from NIL collectives that have emerged over the past year.

UNC has one of those, too — as does N.C. State, and most every school competing in FBS. NIL collectives vary wildly, though, in the resources and financial backing behind them. Then there’s the question of how NIL deals come together, and the fruitless endeavor of trying to keep them from becoming pay-for play.

“Now you’ve got agents, you’ve got third parties, you’ve got high school coaches” contacting players and arranging deals, Brown said. “So I’ve just told our players, if somebody’s calling you and trying to get you to go, let me know.”