Several years into the name, image, and likeness era, college football fans are now familiar with most of the resulting changes happening across the sport.
Parity within the major conferences is rapidly increasing, with the gaps between teams dropping dramatically. Players who used to commit to sit on the bench at Alabama under Nick Saban or Ohio State under Ryan Day are now bringing in bigger paydays to start at smaller schools. For good reason.
The combination of NIL and the transfer portal has made rebuilding a program overnight more realistic than it’s ever been. Curt Cignetti turned the Indiana Hoosiers from an also-ran into an undefeated, National Championship-winning behemoth in just two seasons. Bob Chesney came to UCLA from James Madison and overnight, made the Bruins into a legitimate College Football Playoff contender, sitting at No. 5 in the latest Associated Press Top 25 poll late into the season.
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But Georgia Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart may have tacitly admitted to another result from the NIL era: a lack of motivation and aggression for the week-in, week-out grind of major conference college football.
After the Bulldogs easily handled the Florida Gators 27-8, Smart was asked about the number of injuries his team is dealing with, and whether playing a tough SEC schedule could contribute to it. And his answer was revealing about the state of modern college football, particularly with the amount of money that’s now floating around it.
“Everybody is practicing less, but everybody’s getting injured more,” he said.
“I think about the teams we had in ’21 and ’22, and how physical they were and how they practiced. We can’t even get close to that now,” Smart added. “If it’s a different culture that guys don’t want to as much, I don’t know. They were definitely hungrier, because there was a motivation to make it. A lot of these guys, honestly, they make more than I did until I was 40. It’s just a different day and age.”
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It’s an important insight that may have been obvious, but is frequently unsaid. Players may not feel the need to improve as much as they used to, because they’re not fighting for the NFL payday down the road, they’re already making significant money. It’s human nature, and likely true, but it’s one of the perhaps unexpected ancillary outcomes of players now being able to earn money for their contributions.
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Still, Smart’s comments received some blowback, with some adding that Smart’s doing pretty well financially, and that coaches have frequently displayed a financially-motivated lack of loyalty or commitment to stick with their teams. If they can benefit from the money being generated by college football, why shouldn’t the players putting themselves on the line benefit as well?
Unsurprisingly, he clarified those comments on Monday, saying he thinks it’s “awesome” that young athletes are able to earn money in college sports now.
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“I don’t want to come across as whining,” he explained. “I think it’s awesome that players are getting paid. I wish they were being paid when I played because then maybe I wouldn’t have had to get a $5,000 job for the summer trying to work. But that is none of my concern. It is more long-term effect of earning power, what is the value of a dollar, do I actually know how hard it is to go out in the real world, and gotta go work for $60,000? That outlook can be tough on guys. But the earning power they have while they’re here, more power to them.”
Again, it’s an obvious fact that 18-year-olds now able to make that much money, or far, far, more is going to have some other side effects. Motivation being one of them. But like all jobs and careers, if they fail to live up to expectations, because of a lack of motivation, it can all change in the blink of an eye.
Smart added that it’s now even more important to evaluate how a player will respond to making that kind of money, and whether it’ll impact their ability to contribute moving forward.
“That still is an art in recruiting and decision-making: Are you recruiting the right kinds of kids that will not be affected by that,” Smart said. “We used to deal with that all the time when I was at Alabama, when you’d have an (NFL) scout come in and say, ‘Well, is him being a first-round pick or second-round pick going to change him?’ That’s your job to decide that, not mine.
“Well, now it’s our job to decide as coaches. Do you have the right kind of people in your program who will be motivated for the team, and the culture of the program?”
The broader point, he added, was about the change in roster limits also impacting the ability to practice with more physicality. When the 2025 House settlement limited rosters to 105 players instead of effectively unlimited, coaches were less willing to go all out in practice and risk injuries. That, Smart believes, is part of the change to college football.
Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s none of it, and it’s just random variance. It’s hard to know, in the modern era, with how many changes there are seemingly week-to-week. Given the chaos this season has brought already, at least the increase in parity has made for more exciting television.