Texas A&M’s struggles set cautionary tale for teams in the NIL era | College Football Enquirer

Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel, and Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde and Ross Dellenger discuss Texas A&M’s decision to suspend three players indefinitely after a ‘locker room incident’ following the teams disappointing loss to South Carolina, and debate if the struggles Texas A&M has endured will help to regulate the NIL market more effectively than the NCAA or Congress ever could.

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[AUDIO LOGO]

DAN WETZEL: Let's start with Texas A&M. Three members of the football program, cornerback Denver Harris, wide receiver Chris Marshall, offensive lineman PJ Williams, have all been indefinitely suspended as a result of a locker room incident last weekend. Exactly the details are not clear. There have been some pretty funny reports, but the accuracy of those reports I do not know.

PAT FORDE: Right.

DAN WETZEL: However, the suspensions are real. This is not the first for a couple of these guys. Harris and Marshall were suspended earlier in the year. Evan Stewart and Smoke Bouie were also suspended. PJ Williams suspended. All members of the 2022 vaunted class. All of those guys top-75 players. All of those guys absolutely did not choose to go to A&M because of NIL.

PAT FORDE: That's right. Don't even suggest it, Nick Saban or anyone else.

DAN WETZEL: According to Jimbo Fisher. The team is 3 and 4. You could imagine that if any of these guys got NILs-- which I know they didn't, but let's talk hypothetically. You can see where money causes jealousy, where all sorts of locker room problems, happen, where there's all sorts of chemistry prob-- you can see all of this stuff. And I don't know if that's why they're 3 and 4.

I don't know why these guys got suspended again and are out indefinitely. But there is certainly plenty of people that are kind of dancing on it, saying, see, this is what happens when you just toss tons of money at high school recruits. And I would say I have-- as everyone knows, I have no problem tossing that money at high school recruits, but, yes, this might happen.

And this is why the entire NIL market-- don't react to what's going on today and start trying to get Tuberville to bail you out with a law. Wait and see. Because if this implodes, if there is a correlation of don't give Lamborghinis to 18-year-olds, they might not hit the weight room at 6:00 AM the way you want, then eventually this whole thing is going to shift, kind of regulate themself. The market will find itself. And I bet there's a few A&M boosters, if hypothetically they were involved in an NIL payment to a guy who's now indefinitely suspended, who aren't too happy about it. Pat?

PAT FORDE: Yeah, back when it was shadow NIL-- or not even NIL but shadow payments to players, the whole thing was always the concern that if you fork over the bag before they've done anything, are they ever going to do anything?

Boosters who are getting burned by this, especially publicly to this degree, will say we're not doing it or we're going to do it differently. There's a real good chance the market regulates itself as well as or earlier than anything that could be put in place politically or via the NCAA.

ROSS DELLENGER: Yeah. And I was talking to an AD this morning about this exact thing, about the NIL kind of correcting itself and the need to wait. The NCAA is going to come out with more guidance, quote, unquote, later this week. And for the most part, it's-- from what I understand, it's going to be fairly irrelevant. It's just answering questions that schools have.

I think the biggest thing is going to be the affiliation between what schools can do as far as with collectives and the affiliation with collectives. There might be some new stuff there, but it's already stuff that's really being done. But we're almost certainly going to see some kind of correction, like any new market, right, like any new thing.

So just wait on that, as this AD says, and then we can go from there. I don't know if they'll wait. They seem to be in quite a hurry to, quote, "fix something" where we really don't know if it's broken or how broken it is.

DAN WETZEL: That's their nature. I mean, they have to regulate. They're so into rules, and that's why I keep saying no regulations.

PAT FORDE: For people out there that think that the alleged bought greatest recruiting class ever was a bad thing, then having it absolutely blow up in a school's face is exactly the kind of real life consequence that may actually lead to some sort of moderation of the marketplace. Except I will say this, if a bunch of those five-star guys all hit the portal, guess what--

DAN WETZEL: Oh yeah.

PAT FORDE: --the other schools will be lined up like, oh, we'll take them. All right, where's our collective, guys? Hey, hey, there's eight five-stars from A&M in the portal. We better go get them.

DAN WETZEL: Oh, they'll be head up. No question. But we'll see. It's just you don't know what you're even creating a rule on.

PAT FORDE: Right.

DAN WETZEL: Just let it play.