Maryland Terrapins Head Coach Mike Locksley Blasts NIL Era Of College Football

In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a few college head coaches leave to take coordinator jobs in the NFL. Their reasoning? They want to get back to coaching football. The modern college football coach has to deal with recruiting and fundraising first; otherwise, the program will fail. Actually, coaching the team becomes secondary. Lockley talked about this in an interview with SiriusXM radio.

“I’m never one to complain about the amount of work, but I can tell you for the first time in 33 years of coaching, I went home and said, ‘Am I really gonna have enough energy to do this for the long haul?’” Locksley said. “My hope is that we can put a guardrail around the NIL and the transfer portal stuff and create more accountability in terms of knowing.

“The hard part is you just can’t build a roster and know exactly who, what, when. So, for me, I think it’s going to be really important. There’s a lot of different things you have to do, but you have to prioritize when it’s time to coach football, we’ve got to coach football. I’ve been able to do that and I’ve got a staff of coaches that help me do that.”

Ridiculous Demands

In the interview, Locksley revealed that a third-string running back was demanding $100,000 in NIL money. Money doesn’t grow on trees. In order to pay everyone, serious fundraising has to be done. In the NFL, rosters are limited to a smaller number of players. In college, rosters are allowed to be much bigger. If this is going to be sustainable, college football will need some guard rails in place.

Does Mike Locksley have a point? Only time will tell, but it looks like there will be a lot of changes coming to college football in the coming years.