Same-old, same-old

 I wouldn't know Florida football coach Billy Napier if he cut in front of me at the grocery store. So this is not where you come to find out if he can actually coach 'em up down there in Gainesville.

I do know one thing, though: The man can arm-wrestle the obvious right down to the ground.

This after Coach Billy acknowledged that high-stakes college football is "a cutthroat business", which is a bit like saying water is wet. In this instance, though, Napier was specifically referring to the transfer portal, and how it's being illegally used to tamper with other programs' players. According to Napier, it's a damn epidemic.

 "There's no doubt tampering is real," Napier told Alex Scarborough of ESPN. "... And I think that until there's something done about it, I think you'll continue to see it."

Of course you will. The transfer portal, after all, is hardly the midwife for this sort of thing.

It's just another way for coaches to do what desperate coaches (i.e.: all of 'em) have been doing since Knute Rockne and Fielding Yost first bad-mouthed each other. Tampering is as old as the single wing, and you'll teach a fish to do algebra before it's curtailed by the NCAA. 

Long before anyone dreamed up the transfer portal, see, coaches have been poaching each other’s players. No one calls it that, however, because the players in question aren't yet players, but recruits. And it's perfectly legal to continue pursuing them long after they've plighted their troth to dear old Big Ticket U.

That’s because a recruit’s commitment isn't actually a commitment until he signs that National Letter of Intent. And so coaches from Big Ticket's rivals can keep right on wooing him.

Officially, after all, it's not tampering. It's just business -- as Billy Napier says, a cutthroat business.

In spite of that, there actually used to be a time when there were gentleman's agreements between coaches that, once a kid committed, you left him alone and moved on to the next stud on your list. Hard to believe, but it happened.

Of course, there was also a time when Atari was state-of-the-art gaming. Time marches on, and all that.

In which case I suppose it left me behind.

That's because I hear coaches complain about how the transfer portal and the NIL facilitate tampering with another program's players, and I don't see a hell of a lot of difference between that and tampering with another program's recruits. I understand that it is different, but to me it's all the same ethical shadiness at work.

I mean, if you're not going to honor a kid's commitment during the recruiting process, why would anyone expect you to stop there?

My question for today.