GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Steve Spurrier tried to tell everyone but few listened.
Bill Carr wished he’d seen the warning signs.
Two men who put Florida football on the map during the mid-1960s — Spurrier as a Heisman-winning quarterback and Carr an All-America center — see the game of their lives at a crossroads.
The July 1, 2021, implementation of name, image and likeness legislation has produced unintended consequences and upended college football — whether for better or worse is a matter of perspective.
This much is clear: a lack of NCAA oversight and a patchwork of state laws has turned NIL into a money grab potentially undermining the team concept and a recruiting inducement with a third-party entity striking deals.
“You see what has happened in the last year since the whole thing has been opened, it’s absolute chaos,” Carr told the Orlando Sentinel. “If somebody tells me they understand the NIL and think it’s something other than just rampant hustle, I have to laugh at them.”
Spurrier recognizes Carr’s frustration as one shared by many players of their generation.
“Most of the older guys think it’s terrible,” said Spurrier, 77. “It’s a new way of life. We’re just gonna have to live with it.”
Spurrier — as a player and coach — and Carr — as a college sports administrator and consultant — followed different paths to reach their conclusions on player compensation.
In fact, Spurrier received a preview of NIL long ago during his college playing days.
“I was good friends with a banker,” Spurrier told the Sentinel. “He loaned me the money, which I guess was legal. I think it was. I bought a Chevrolet, and then I paid it back after I signed my pro contract.”
Either way, the statute of limitations has passed and players getting a piece of the pie has evolved from a talking point to a focal point.
Coaches’ pay warps system
During his 26 seasons on the college sideline, Spurrier struggled to reconcile the pay gap between coaches and the workforce.
The first college coach to earn $2 million annually — 25 years ago in 1997 ― Spurrier retired from the game in 2015 having witnessed salaries escalate — to $4 million in his case — as players received a pittance.
As head coach at South Carolina a decade earlier Spurrier offered a solution during the 2011 SEC Spring Meetings. There in Destin, he pitched a plan for coaches to personally pay 70 players $300 per game — or $273,000 for a 13-game schedule.
“Help their parents maybe get a hotel room,” he recalled. “Or go out to dinner with their girlfriend or parents after the game.”
Spurrier and six the league’s 12 coaches, including Nick Saban, Will Muschamp and Dan Mullen, signed the proposal.
“The commissioners said, ‘That’ll never fly. Steve, you might as well quit bringing it up,’” Spurrier said. “I said, ‘Yeah, it’s going happen. It’s just a matter of time.’”
In the fall of 2015, all student-athletes began to receive a cost-of-attendance stipend, ranging from around $3,000 to $6,000 depending on a school’s location and whether a person was from in or out of state.
But the NCAA did not loosen the purse strings enough.
When the Supreme Court overwhelmingly ruled against it last year during the NCAA vs. Alston case, athletes were allowed to monetize their name, image and likeness. The landmark case also gave schools the option to provide benefits up to $6,000 annually “tethered” to education — or $5,980 per student per year in the SEC’s case.
“I was hoping when the money just kept getting bigger instead of giving it all to the head coach and the assistant coaches, they would spread it out to the players,” Spurrier said. “Of course, they never did do that. So the lawsuits came and name, image and likeness was approved by the Supreme Court.
“That’s where we are right now.”
Carr, 76 and whose son Scott is AD at FIU, barely identifies with the current enterprise of college athletics even though he remains closely involved.
Carr’s circuitous path after his playing days included two years in the military and a three-year coaching stint at Florida (1972-74) before he became assistant to Gators AD Ray Graves, whom he replaced in 1979. Since leaving the University of Houston as AD in 1997, Carr has served as consultant on more than 200 projects on more than 100 colleges campuses.
Born in Gainesville and son of a Baptist minister, Carr long has viewed college sports as a “crucible experience” which builds character and leadership through competition and teamwork.
“The intercollegiate athletic experience is not an enterprise that it is intended to be a financial endeavor,” he said. “That’s not the point of it. It’s antithetical and I disagree with it entirely.”
Leaders lack vision
Carr also recognizes reality. In hindsight, he blames himself for lacking leadership when he had the chance nearly 40 years ago.
During the summer of 1984, the Supreme Court ruled individual universities could make their own television deals after Georgia and Oklahoma sued the NCAA for media rights. The decision generated a sizable cashflow for top conferences that trickled down to everyone but the athletes.
“We simply did not meet the challenge,” Carr said. “We did not have the leadership step up and control the industry and force people to be willing to say, ‘There should be a better control over this enormous revenue stream that is now bursting on the scene.’
“There should be a new way of controlling these dollars ... what more can we do for our student athletes?”
A start, Carr said, would have been providing lifetime health insurance, akin to what military-service people receive.
“The NCAA should have studied that,” he said.
Carr remains less keen on schools providing cash directly to players. Yet his stance has become difficult to justify.
Universities’ willingness to cycle through coaches despite massive buyouts offends Carr.
UF paid around $35 million in buyouts to Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain, Dan Mullen and their staffs after each was fired. The poster boy is Charlie Weis, who earned nearly $65 million after Notre Dame and Kansas fired him.
“We could have and should have done some of things to be more fair and share the wealth with young people,” Carr said. “Instead, we gave it away in the form of dead money to the demented scheme that made Charlie Weis the most inappropriate multimillionaire in the world.”
These days, more than a dozen coaches make at least $7 million annually, including Florida’s Billy Napier ($7.1 million) whose Gators are set to open an $85 million football facility.
The money keeps growing, too. In 2020, the SEC inked a 10-year, $3 billion deal with ESPN that begins in 2024.
Prior to NIL’s arrival and the Alston ruling, UF athletes received just under $4,000 per semester in cost of attendance to supplement their room, board and tuition.
“When the money started getting bigger and bigger and bigger from television, the cost of attendance should have risen instead of coaches’ salaries,” Spurrier said. “Coaches’ salaries are going up; the performers — the players — should receive more also. Very simple.”
Few things are cut and dried with NIL.
Paying players, though, always has operated in the shadows with obfuscation the modus operandi.
Carr was the Gators’ AD in August 1984 when the NCAA placed Charley Pell’s football program on two years’ probation for admitting to 107 infractions, many involving recruiting inducements from boosters.
The violations by Pell and his staff would not have qualified under NIL because the few rules in place prohibit coaches from facilitating payments to players. Third-party involvement is out in the open, however, operating as so-called collectives created by boosters who pool money to pay college athletes.
In theory, NIL intended to solely benefit athletes currently in college and competing. In practice, highly coveted high school recruits and college transfers land some of the most lucrative deals, often at the richest schools.
“It hasn’t surprised me too much. It just makes it unfair,” Spurrier said. “I’m not saying it’s illegal to do it. We don’t have the rules on it. Most of the schools are trying to approach that after you get here and you do well, you’re free to do whatever you want financially.
“Some of the schools obviously are using it during recruiting.”
Napier has stated he wants athletes to benefit once in his program, not prior to joining it. Spurrier wonders whether the thinking of the Gators’ first-year coach will change.
“Eventually, if they’re going to do it, I guess we should do it also,” he said.
Looking back, Carr cannot help but think about if NIL had been in place when the NCAA punished the Gators’ football program. Pell took full responsibility and eventually was fired.
Carr moved on two years later and joined the private sector before resurfacing in 1993 at Houston.
“What happened with Charley Pell while I was there was illegal,” Carr said. “Now it’s legal. That’s what NIL stands for — now it’s legal.”
