I was reading some comments on a sports thread recently and the name Keaton Mitchell shows up. The East Carolina running back was being lauded for his great performance in Saturday’s football game against Temple. Mitchell rushed for a whopping 222 yards and three touchdowns. He also caught several passes, one for a score.
Quite a performance for a sophomore. Mitchell, of course, possesses world-class speed. With that, someone in the thread expressed hope that Mitchell doesn’t decide to hit the transfer portal looking for a better situation. The transfer portal implemented in 2019 allows players to transfer from one college sports team at any time to another college team once during their college career without penalty. In other words, the player can play immediately at the receiving school.
Personally, I hope Mitchell sees the value he brings to East Carolina, and vice versa. He is getting the notoriety right now at ECU that he would not get at any other school. ECU also benefits from his value here. However, with colleges paying athletes with Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) contracts, money can always be a lure. Both the portal and NIL, in my view, are bad for college athletics and in many cases for the college athlete.
I’ve advocated for paying players in the past. How can you not when coaches, universities, the NCAA, and the corporations who get the TV rights make millions of bucks off the backs of young players? To me, it is a no-brainer to pay the players.
How the NCAA has gone about the payment plan through the NIL, however, isn’t helping matters. That’s especially so when NIL contracts can allegedly be arranged to actually recruit players.
As it relates to the portal, the NCAA was put into a no-win position when it alone made transfer decisions. Lawsuits against the NCAA began to pile up when a transfer was not allowed. Thus, the NCAA opened the door for players to transfer anytime during the year.
At the moment what we have is free agency in college sports without limitations. The NCAA should do all within its power to modify the portal’s impact on athletics. The NCAA back in August did provide small windows for transfer that should help, but I’m not a fan of the portal at all.
The number of transfers in the portal are huge. Large enough that college coaches are doing less recruiting in high school and more on the portal. After all, would you prefer to have a high school athlete whose ability to achieve on a college field is a question mark compared to a player who has an outstanding record?
The portal hurts high school recruits and leaves college teams in limbo when an athlete decides to enter the portal in mid-season or at the last minute before the start of an athletic season. I think it also teaches players, especially those who don’t want to “wait their turn” on a team how to quit and destroys loyalty to both a team and its individual members. I believe it can also affect team culture and teamwork.
Coaches become less likely to build a team with a solid foundation because they become roster managers, trying to fill spots from the portal that were left open when players entered the portal. Building depth and team spirit, I believe, would be nearly impossible. According to the NCAA, some 13 percent of Division I student-athletes currently transfer from another college. I predict that number will continue to rise.
Finally, teams in all divisions of athletic play should have a level playing field. Most players will desire to go to a larger school with more notoriety in a particular sport. That’s human nature. Whether it is the portal creating this situation or NIL contacts, it’s patently unfair to smaller schools that do not have the wherewithal of larger schools.
It’s an issue that needs in-depth study and at least a dated window where athletes have an opportunity to transfer and potential restrictions on how NIL contracts can be structured and/or used for recruiting.
I hope, as I’m sure all of us in eastern North Carolina do, that Keaton Mitchell will remain as committed to ECU as the coaches and community are to him. For two years he has put his name on a huge neon sign that the NFL surely sees. He doesn’t have to go to another school to get that done. Roll on sir, roll on! We’re proud you are a Pirate.
Mitchell Oakley is the publisher emeritus of this newspaper.
