College conference media days are one of the great joys of the sports calendar. It’s a reminder to diehard fans that the season is coming and meaningful games are on the way, maybe a bit like pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training. But what’s most interesting, assuming you’re not a SID at one the universities, is that these made for TV pseudo-events largely force head coaches to make some kind of statement about the state of their program or the sport or anything else reporters looking for something even remotely interesting might ask.
And there is no bigger spectacle in all of college sports media days than the SEC, the self-anointed king of campus athletics. It’s so big that it lasts four days. Even the Big 10 only went three, and the Big 12 got it done in two. But as they say in the SEC, it just means more. So far we’ve already learned some interesting things, like Auburn thinks it can make the College Football Playoffs, and that Tennessee’s quarterback position is still up for grabs. But perhaps the most interesting comment of the event so far, assuming you don’t live and tie by the nuance of how Texas will run its third down formation, came from Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, who as a reminder led the Bulldogs to national titles in the 2021 and 22 seasons. Amongst other things, Smart said that Georgia football must be more about relationships than transactions, and that while yes, players will get paid, it may keep some coaches from demanding excellence from athletes without them leaving. And that with players now earning $200,000 a year – that’s a number he gave, and mind you stars make much more – a lot of players have gotten really comfortable. And people don’t reach great success by being comfortable.
Let’s state the obvious here. Kirby Smart makes $13 million a year to coach the Bulldogs. You can decide whether or not that’s fair compensation and the value of big time championship college football, much of which is driven by the revenue created by the game. But it’s a tough argument to make that some 20-year-old earning $200,000 is going to get soft when the boss making exponentials of that is on a knife’s edge. And yes, I am well aware of the possible emotional immaturity of an 18-year-old with money.
But Kirby’s sentiments seem less about money and whether he thinks athletes are entitled to it than it is about the changing nature of college sports and how that inherently alters his role within it. I’ll take at face value that Smart has moved past the amateur age, where million dollar coaches oversaw scores of unpaid athletes in a system that some critics analogized to a modern day plantation – even if that was a bit unfair. But what I don’t think Smart is fully comfortable with is how to run a college sports team when the power dynamic has gone through a seismic shift in what feels like a weekend. Only a few years ago, pretty much any college football coach in the country could motivate through some confluence of fear and hope. Because even as a starter in the SEC, you were still one bad game away from the bench and likely the end of your playing career, one that came without any financial reward. So yes, athletes were far less comfortable when you were playing for what you hoped was a future payday, angst that could be displaced by running through a brick wall for your coach to win another game.
But now, any decent SEC starter – and Big 10, ACC, and so on – they’ve got options. If things aren’t working out at Ole Miss, well, you can probably get the same salary at LSU next season. And maybe Iowa the year after that. Which means that coaches might need a slightly different motivational strategy for athletes that have a lot more autonomy. Which makes college coaching more like coaching the pros, grown men with enough money for their grandkids to retire – but even they are usually bound by long term contracts.
Make no mistake, big time college football is changing, especially in the SEC. Where coaches lived by the carrot and stick, it’s now a far more complex game of human psychology and economics. Which makes the quest for excellence far more interesting.
