Signings of the times: Banished
letters of intent, shrunk transfer window equals more college chaos
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[October 17, 2024]
By EDDIE PELLS
The time-honored tradition of high school athletes proudly sitting
behind a table and signing a national letter of intent is a thing of
the past. In its place starting in a matter of weeks, athletes will
ink their name to something different — a financial aid package that
will likely be tied to a revenue-sharing contract.
Coaches reacted with a mix of shock and confusion to the latest end
of business as usual in college sports. The NCAA announced the death
of the letter of intent last week on the same day it introduced a
newly condensed schedule for signing players out of the transfer
portal.
“There’s been so much going on, so many moving pieces in the middle
of our season, that quite honestly, myself and a bunch of our
colleagues, we have no idea what the heck is going on,” Kentucky
football coach Mark Stoops said after hearing about the latest
changes.
All the changes are, in some way, related to the antitrust
settlement a federal judge conditionally approved last week that
will result in universities paying their athletes directly through a
revenue-sharing program. And that stems from a series of legal and
legislative rulings that have allowed college athletes to make money
on the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL) since July 2021.
With no national law to pull things together, and with the NCAA's
rulemaking authority gutted by the courts, a group called the
Conference Commissioners Association, which has looked over letters
of intent for decades, made the recommendation to do away with them
for good.
What was the national letter of intent and why did it matter?
National letters of intent date to 1964 and used to be a rite of
passage, a sign that a player had “made it.” They were a player's
signed word that he or she would play for at least one year at a
certain university.
When players started being able to earn money in 2021, and when they
became able to transfer without as many restrictions as in the past,
the letters became less important than the financial arrangements
that accompanied them, including terms of the NIL deals the players
were signing through third parties that supported their soon-to-be
school.
Now that the schools are headed toward paying players directly,
instead of signing the letter, the players will sign a financial aid
agreement that will likely be paired with a contract dictating the
terms of their revenue-sharing agreement.
Michael LeRoy, a labor law professor at Illinois familiar with
college athletics, said the changes will have an impact. He
predicted that bidding for transfers will be less active -- and
lucrative – when revenue sharing becomes a primary focus for schools
and NIL deals will become more “limited to an athlete’s intrinsic
brand or marketing value.”
The change also comes as college athletes, notably in California and
New Hampshire, seek to be recognized as school employees with the
right to collectively bargain for pay and benefits – a proposal
schools are fighting in court.
“It’s amazing to see that the faster and farther the NCAA runs away
from employment, and even ‘pay-to-play,’ the more their workarounds
create a direct financial relationship with their athletes that
looks like employment,” LeRoy said.
The new rules prohibit other schools from recruiting a player once
the player has signed that aid agreement. Players used to be able to
sign aid letters with more than one school, then make sure the NIL
money (or other factors) were lined up for their first choice.
Since details of the lawsuit settlement won't be finalized until
spring, it means revenue sharing won't officially be allowed when
the early signing period for football opens on Dec. 4. NIL deals are
still allowed, though players won't be able to back away from the
school they sign with, whether next month (for most sports), on Dec.
4 (early football) or on national signing day for football, which is
Feb. 5.
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Lakeside High School's Rashad Roundtree signs a letter of
intent on national signing day, Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2015, at Lakeside
High School in Evans, Ga. (Jon-Michael Sullivan/The Augusta
Chronicle via AP)
“We're getting blown up by recruits and we don’t
have any answers for them,” Missouri football coach Eli Drinkwitz
said. “We don’t have answers for the settlement, we don’t have
answers for (NIL), we don’t have answers for National Letter of
Intent. We don’t have a lot of answers right now on the portal.”
What's new with the transfer portal and why does that matter?
Since it started becoming exponentially easier for players to
transfer, the numbers game has grown more difficult for coaches.
They have to figure out how many players are returning, how many are
leaving, how many are coming from other schools and how many are
coming from high school. Many have responded by adding general
managers and beefing up their personnel departments.
While the transfer portal has been viewed as something of a
necessary evil of the open market, without rules to strictly
regulate it, it has turned into something of a free-for-all. Coaches
say roster tampering is not uncommon.
Trimming the amount of time the portal is open by 15 days is not
certain to bring more order to roster building.
“I don’t know that I totally buy into the exact dates," said Kansas
coach Bill Self, acknowledging concerns that the basketball period
that begins after the second round of March Madness will shrink the
time for players on Sweet 16 teams to decide.
Some football coaches were hoping to eliminate the spring window
completely, but there will still be 10 days in April where players
can enter the portal.
“My hope is that some of this stuff will start to come to fruition
sooner than later, so you have an idea of how to move forward,” TCU
football coach Sonny Dykes said. “Because it’s like anything. If you
don’t, the people that are going to suffer are going to be the
players.”
How will roster limits impact all of this?
Ultimately, all these changes impact how a coach builds a roster.
Under terms of the lawsuit settlement, they will now work with
roster limits (105 players for football, 15 for basketball) instead
of scholarships (85 for football, 13 for men's basketball).
Each school will have to decide what it can afford. Last week, for
instance, Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel sent a letter to
fans saying if the school offered scholarships for all the spots
available under the new limits, it would add $29 million to the $21
million in revenue-sharing funds Michigan plans to distribute to its
athletes.
Even wealthy schools like Michigan do not have millions of dollars
readily available to pay athletes. Manuel hinted at fans needing an
“openness to developing new revenue streams”, in what sounded like a
suggestion that fans might be coughing up more money in the future.
Tennessee is already planning that step with a “talent fee” for 2025
football season ticket renewals.
Dykes said the new roster limits will change everything from how he
runs practice to the kind of developmental player he'd be willing to
take a chance on.
“It’s complicated, I understand, and there’s a lot of possibilities
and opportunities,” Dykes said. "But you want the players ultimately
to be taken care of. You just hope that those decision-makers keep
that in mind.”
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AP sports writers Dave Skretta, Stephen Hawkins, Larry Lage, John
Zenor and Pete Iacobelli contributed to this report.
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