College football has long been filled with dishonesty and cheating, going back to the days of Pop Warner and Pudge Heffelfinger. Even sainted Knute Rockne was fixing grades. As the mountains of TV money climbed in the 1980s, it only became worse.
Right after Tuberville took over at Auburn, he started filling in weak spots on his team by luring in transfer players from other programs. NO one cared if they graduated, only that they remained eligible. in 2000, he coaxed a running back named Rudi Johnson into transferring to Auburn from a Kansas community college. Johnson completely turned around the Tigers' fortunes, earning them a berth in the conference title game. Once the season completed, Johnson announced his early departure for the NFL. Word around campus had been that Johnson stopped attending class as soon as he was able to without it affecting his playing eligibility.
If that doesn't qualify as a mercenary, I don't know what does. Johnson parlayed his heightened visibility into NFL dollars. Nowadays, he just would have gotten some of that money up front to farm out his talents to whatever school openly offered the best deal.
For Tuberville, Johnson's success was even more lucrative. The good will and favor translated into millions of dollars for him, the last of which Tuberville earned after burning out on his job and coasting on his responsibilities. Auburn eventually paid Tuberville something in the neighborhood of $7 million to just "go away" and stop tanking the program. He went on to repeat similar work-then-coast patterns at other schools.
Programs have long been built on the talents of kids who don't care if they learn anything or earn a degree. Scholarship athletes whose insufficient talents or injuries make them more expendable are "encouraged" to leave the program. I've seen it first hand, so there's nothing new there.
Coaches have been the ones who amassed fortunes on the risks taken by young athletes. I agree that should have been capped long ago but those coaches would have screamed bloody murder about it. No telling what that would have resulted in.
What I think you're complaining about isn't so much the NIL alone, but the morass created by NIL combined with freewheeling transfer opportunities. But once again, who can blame players for taking advantage of a scenario that only coaches enjoyed previously.
Guys like Saban and Tuberville are only cranky about the situation because it cuts down on coaches' abilities to hoard talent.
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