NIL and the Transfer Portal Have Become Both an Advantage and Disadvantage

Being a college football head coach has never been an easy job. But if you want to be a head coach in 2026, there is a whole lot more on your plate than just coaching football.

NIL funds and the transfer portal have added another layer to the job. I don’t necessarily like everything about either one, but honestly, that doesn’t matter. They are part of college football now, and coaches have to figure out how to use them.

If you’re taking over a struggling program, you better have a plan to turn it around quickly. You aren’t necessarily going to get four, five, or six years anymore to build it the old-fashioned way.

Look at what Curt Cignetti has done in Indiana. He was able to bring some players with him from James Madison, use the transfer portal and NIL, and help turn around a program that had struggled for a long time. But let’s not make it sound easy. It wasn’t.

You still have to get those players to come in and buy into what you’re doing. You have to get the players who were already there to buy into a new system. You have to get everybody to mesh together and become a team. You can have all the NIL money in the world, but if you don’t have a strong culture and relationships with your players, you’re not going to have a strong foundation.

And that’s something that hasn’t changed about coaching.

You have to build relationships with your players. You have to make them feel valued. You also have to establish your expectations from day one.

That’s especially important today because players have more options than they ever have before. If a player isn’t happy, the transfer portal gives him the ability to go somewhere else. And I think that has made some coaches have to think differently about how they manage their teams.

I’m not saying coaches can’t hold players accountable. They absolutely have to. But I do think the portal and NIL funding have added another layer of thought and planning that coaches must prepare for.

You can almost hear another school saying, “Come play for us. We’ll give you this much money, and our rules aren’t as strict.” I’m not saying that’s happening everywhere. I’m saying it’s possible, and coaches have to know that’s part of the landscape now. That’s why the relationship between a coach and his players may be more important today than it has ever been.

I’ve always believed you have to make your players feel valued. You can coach them hard and offer them tough love at the same time. Those two things aren’t opposites.

In fact, I always told my coaches that if you had to come down hard on a kid at practice—and that’s going to happen—you better find that kid before he leaves that day. Make sure he knows you still care about him. That’s the kind of relationship a coach needs with his players. And I think college coaches need that more than ever today.

I’m also an old-school coach, so I’ll admit something: school loyalty doesn’t mean what it used to. I think it still exists, but not nearly to the same degree it did five years ago, much less when I started coaching.

And it’s not just college football. You can see some of the same thing happening at the high-school level with open enrollment. Kids have more opportunities to move around than they used to.

NIL is another resource for a coach. There’s no question about that. But it has also created another level of competition. There was a time when you could sell a recruit on your school’s tradition, academics, facilities, history, and what your program could do for him. Those things still matter, but let’s be honest. Money is now a huge part of the conversation.

As a longtime football coach and fan, that saddens me a little bit. I’m not against college athletes getting paid. I’ve always believed college athletes should receive some kind of stipend. But what we have now is something different, and I think there has to be some kind of control.

The same goes for the transfer portal. I’m all for a player having the opportunity to transfer. But I think one transfer is enough. Coaches having to worry about losing players every single year makes an already difficult job even harder.

But I’m not sure you can put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point. And that’s the problem for today’s college head coach. There are more things to manage, more things to think about, and more pressure to win quickly.

Schools have started bringing in general managers to help take some of those responsibilities off the head coach, and I think that’s a good thing. But the head coach still has to manage the football team, the relationships, the culture, and the expectations.

At the end of the day, the job of any head coach—at any level or in any sport—is still the same: put the best product possible on the field the best way you can. That starts with establishing your standard from day one.

NIL and the transfer portal aren’t going away. So today’s college coaches have to figure out how to use those tools without losing the basic things that have always made good programs successful. You can bring in talent. You can bring in money. You can bring in players from all over the country. But you still have to get them to buy in. You still have to build a team. 

And you still have to coach.