Something I’ve found striking about the NIL era is how much more access those of us on the outside of the program have to the athletes. It has kind of snuck up on me, but it’s substantially easier to hear football players’ voices now than it used to be.
The decade of the 2010s was one in which access shrank over time. The proliferation of Saban assistants becoming head coaches, plus unrelated coaches trying to mimic his success as closely as possible, meant that football teams became more and more closed off to the outside.
In much earlier eras, access was often closed off because of handshake agreements between media members and coaches. They were a lot chummier back then, so unflattering stories often never made it to print.
That dynamic slowly shifted, but coaches were still fairly relaxed about things. Freshmen were commonly prohibited from speaking to the media, but there weren’t a lot of barriers thrown up for the sake of secrecy. There’s a reason why, for instance, Gator fans in the ’90s knew how much of a goofball James Bates is. Steve Spurrier kept things relatively open and let Batesy be Batesy.
Pete Carroll’s USC was the last major program to really fit that mold. Coach Win Forever would let media, celebrities, and I think even fans into a lot of practices, confident that his superior players would carry the squad to victory most of the time. Getting hints from practice reports certainly didn’t make Reggie Bush any easier to tackle.
Urban Meyer wasn’t super open with his program, but Florida’s first real taste of the new paradigm came from Will Muschamp. A classic early-era attempted Saban clone, Muschamp tried to restrict program communication to only that which he would approve of. Players spoke to the media less, assistants parroted the official line the few times they got to speak, and an era that was already plagued by boring football also lacked human interest stories to make up for it.
Things got more extreme under Jim McElwain. Another former Saban guy, he too tried to keep things close to the vest. However he also tried to use paranoia of the outside as a means of team building. By his third season, players were fighting with fans on social media frequently, and many reports described a bunker mentality in the locker room. Fans being frustrated by a years of offensive stagnation became enemies, and it took years for that idea to get flushed from the system. Remember Feleipe Franks shushing the crowd in 2018?
Things got a little better under Dan Mullen, but it was mainly a factor of it being impossible for things to get worse. And once Mullen got an excuse from the pandemic to start taking away access, he never lifted a finger to bring it back. Yes, they really did need to curtail outsiders wandering around the program in 2020. But in 2021 after vaccines became available and the team and staff mostly all got them, Mullen kept doing nothing to allow any peeks behind closed doors.
Billy Napier is a former Saban assistant from a more recent era than Muschamp and McElwain. I don’t think that makes much of a difference, though. Napier was still there when Jalen Hurts went nearly all of 2016 leading the Tide to the national championship game while not speaking to the media because freshmen still aren’t allowed to in Tuscaloosa. Hurts finally spoke some because the SEC Championship Game locker room is open after the game, and no one in crimson could stop the media from approaching him.
Napier has been more generous with providing access to assistants than most former Saban guys. I think that’s partially a personality difference with him — he’s by far the least uptight guy on the tree that I know of — and partially because a brand new coach and staff need to introduce themselves to fans. It’s easier to get people to come out and root for coaches they think they know a little than for strangers.
The advent of NIL has truly changed the game in terms of access to players.
The coaches can discourage their players from speaking too much, and I’m sure if someone says the wrong thing, then consequences can occur. But as long as someone is doing it for an NIL deal of some sort, there’s no way for the coaches to stop them.
It really hit home when I saw people widely commenting on and promoting Anthony Richardson’s appearance on the 84 Reasons podcast. It’s an interview show hosted by former Gator tight end Ben Troupe (who wore No. 84) and produced by the Gator Collective. The show has existed since late March, and nine football players have made appearances so far.
Now, everyone who’s been on it is at least going into his third year in college. So far, no freshman rule (if one exists) is being broken here.
However, I can’t imagine Jeff Driskel, Will Grier, or Franks getting the green light to do a 40-minute recorded interview under any circumstances. Not even for a show like this, hosted by a former player who’s promoting an organization dedicated to supporting the football program. It just wouldn’t be done, period.
But, that’s the new era we’re in. Rashad Torrence has been on 84 Reasons, and he announced last week that he’s starting a YouTube channel. There’s no chance in hell that Matt Elam could’ve done that under Meyer or Muschamp, but nothing is stopping Torrence. Napier could try to restrict social media activities as coaches have done in the past to take aim at the YouTube channel, but that’s an even faster route to tanking morale than it was years ago when Kirk Ferentz was banning Iowa player from Twitter (said ban ended in 2020).
I knew players were doing live webcasts of kinds for the collective, but those seemed like small potatoes since they haven’t gotten much traction and I don’t think are all that well structured.
But really, though, there has never been a better time to want to get to know college football players better. The old barriers are down, and they’re not going back up.