Michigan football made out well despite blatant tampering and poaching attempts

Michigan players were hot commodities after a National Championship season, not surprising given how much talent remains on the roster. In Alabama, former coach Nick Saban talked about how many players came up to him with their first question being, “how much are you going to pay me to stay?” after losing to Michigan in the Rose Bowl.

Looking past the irony here given the Crimson Tide’s history of securing top talent, Saban had a point. Recruiting now starts with retaining the roster, and every year is essentially free agency. When Jim Harbaugh and then strength coach Ben Herbert left, several sources told us players were openly talking with each other about other options.

Cooler heads prevailed and the Michigan collectives stepped up, though defensive tackle Kenneth Grant admitted they had plenty to think about.

“We definitely talk about it,” Grant said this spring. “But I want to be here, and everybody wants to be here. Everybody wants to be with each other. That kind of outweighs everything else — just the type of brotherhood that we just have for each other is bigger than anything, any of that. So, we just try to stick together as best as we can.

“Sometimes you’ve got to be a man — business is business — but we all want to stay together, definitely.”

Some parents said their sons returned “at a discount” because Michigan meant so much to them. One source with first-hand knowledge acknowledged there were crazy deals being made, and the collectives had to rally to keep them in Ann Arbor.

“There are players on the roster right now being offered deals from collectives north of $500,000. For one player, it was $800,000,” he said. “There are student athletes getting offered from schools in [the Big Ten] … six figure opportunities.

“It’s not the coach calling the kid … it’s the agent soliciting it. The reality is, there is no way to stop that until there is a way to enforce the rules.”

Michigan collectives continue to make strides – and need to

Revenue sharing is on the way, and that will help. For now, though, there’s really only one way to combat it, and that’s to shell out the cash. Speaking at Big 12 Media Day in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Baylor head coach Dave Aranda laid out there what everyone knows.

“We’re paying players,” Aranda said on 365 Sports with Craig Smoak. Asked in a follow-up question if it was that simple, he quickly replied, “Yes.”

“I think the way it stands right now just with our record and with the amount of freshmen that are playing on our team … we are kind of the perfect example of a team to be poached [by other teams],” Aranda said. “So, all that’s in play right now. It’s happening right now and it’s something that I’m spending a lot of time on.

Whether that’s NIL for the current players and getting that to where it’s more competitive or for recruits, it has to be a major focus, he said. Our source agreed, noting tampering is going to continue until rules change or someone decides to enforce the seemingly few that exist that are enforceable.

“It’s the biggest thing in college sports right now,” he said. “But saying tampering is illegal … illegal by who? By the NCAA, who doesn’t enforce it? It’s not illegal in the U.S. … if there’s no labor relationship between the student athletes and either the institution and its collective or the conferences, why even try to enforce it?

“Right now, you have agents representing players that are going out and soliciting offers from collectives even when players aren’t in the portal. These agents are negotiating it before the players are even in it. There’s no secret when you see rumors of a player going to another school, and then they put their name in the portal two hours later and they’ve already announced where they’re going … that agent negotiation with their collective had been going on for months.”

Michigan could “100 percent report schools for tampering,” he said, noting there’s clear evidence of it. Others are reporting it, he added.

“But the NCAA is not doing anything about it,” he continued. “The selective enforcement of their policies and what they deem competitive advantages … it’s a hard system right now for people to be comfortable with because there’s tampering taking place. Kids are getting big offers, and you can’t for a single minute bash a kid or criticize a kid for taking an opportunity that’s paying them 10 to 20 times the amount they’re making at another school. That stance and that mentality isn’t reality.

“Tampering is prevalent right now, and that’s the reality of college football. Some schools are much further ahead because they’ve embraced the ability to work networks of agents to get out and get kids to transfer from one school to another, because NIL is kind of being used as the driving force to do it.”

As of now, Michigan has kept most of the sharks at bay. The Champions Circle did a great job rallying, but there’s still work to do to get Michigan up to where it needs to be to ensure the roster is taken care of.

Again, revenue sharing, etc., will help down the road, but the next several months will be key in ensuring head coach Sherrone Moore and his staff are set up to succeed, because those sharks are going to continue circling whenever they see opportunity.

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