If NO and the transfer portal continue to change the structure of college football, a newer trend of players opting out of the season after four games and redshirting — with the intent of transferring — has begun to emerge. The latest example is UNLV quarterback Matt Slukaapparently due to the failure to make the promised NIL payment.

And the whole ordeal was the topic of the day on the SEC coaches teleconference on Wednesday. And neither LSU’s Brian Kelly or Georgia Kirby Slim I think a lot can be done, without sharing revenues, to put an end to this new phenomenon.

“The NIL, because it becomes a third-party piece, you lose control,” Kelly said. “And that’s why the revenue-sharing piece is so important and by passing that legislation now, it puts that back in the hands of the universities. And now those contracts can be written very differently. When you’re dealing with a third party and collectives and NILs, the universities are at arm’s length. And so it’s much harder to have the language that’s necessary to see that a quarterback might not leave midseason or, you know, a player might not opt ​​into a particular bowl game. Revenue sharing changes the dynamic.”

Smart, who spoke immediately after Kelly, agreed.

“I can tell you I don’t think it’s the last time and the way we’re going into this abyss of the unknown, and I’m talking about financial responsibility, financial commitments, financial promises, sometimes people make promises and I know I’ve run into it in our recruiting that they can’t keep and there’s no — sometimes there’s no rebuttal for the athlete,” Smart said. “Sometimes there’s no rebuttal for the athletic department or the collective or whoever’s involved. And it’s sad that there’s not just a better way to police it better. Because it’s unfortunate and when — I’m not suggesting that UNLV made promises that they can’t keep. I’m not saying that. I don’t know that situation. I want to be clear about that.”

He went on to note that revenue sharing itself does not solve the problem, but it gives schools the power to include contractual provisions that protect them.

“What I’m saying is it’s happening more and more and it’s going to happen more and more as we move to this revenue sharing where I don’t think we’re ever going to get to where we want to get to unless there’s a contract and there’s a contract where Person A has to stay for a certain amount of time or they have to pay back this contract,” Smart said. “There’s probably going to be more and more of this stuff happening, especially as the year goes on, November, December. Athletic departments are going to have a hard time meeting their commitments and I think we’re going to see some really tough times in college football when this is all said and done.”

Kelly also believes that revenue sharing and the contractual controls that schools could then put in place would be the biggest step forward in solving much of this problem.

Kelly also stressed that players and their families should get advice from real, certified agents.

“The first thing is you should never give up your name, your image and your likeness exclusively,” Kelly said. “You have to stick to that. And I think that’s the first thing. I think the second thing is that when we’re talking to the young men, we want to make sure that when we’re talking about agents, that they’re certified. And I know that’s tough in most cases, but a certified agent versus someone who’s doing it as a part-time job — those should be red flags for families and they should be very, very careful about signing anything if they’re not a certified agent. Or if they want your name, image and likeness and those are, in my opinion, the things that we try to teach when we have the young men on our campus.”