While you may not find Jimbo Fisher on the sidelines of a college football game this fall, that doesn’t mean that he’s totally unplugged from what’s going on in the sport that his life has revolved around for decades.
In a recent interview on College Sports on SiriusXM, Fisher talked about what he calls “the greatest game,” while also sharing why he believes college football is in real trouble.
With issues like revenue sharing, NIL, and the transfer portal acting as means of unregulated free agency, Fisher says that tampering is at an all-time high in college football.
“College football is — I complain about it, it’s still the greatest game. As much as I love NFL, and I’m crazy about it, and I respect it, but college football, man, you don’t know — 18, 22 teams, you don’t know what you’re going to get. I mean, it’s still so — I love college basketball, all those things, I love all college sports, but college football man, we need a commissioner,” Fisher said. “We need revenue sharing. We need a salary cap, for all schools, and if you’re caught — and the other part of this, the tampering that other schools do with players, is utterly ridiculous.
“I mean, the big schools are going and getting players constantly from other schools, and it’s being done illegally. Those guys are developing players, and all of a sudden their guys, you know, that team shouldn’t have an advantage, financially, to be able to take care of a guy that another school doesn’t, and it’s wrong.”
While Fisher was at Texas A&M, the Aggies built a recruiting powerhouse on the basis of NIL. After landing the “best recruiting class ever” in 2022, A&M was expected to immediately rise to the top of college football’s top programs.
However, it appears that having all the roster talent in the world couldn’t create a championship culture in College Station. Unfortunately, Fisher learned the hard way that all aspects of NIL aren’t actually good for the sport — in some ways it’s actually made existing issues worse.
“I’ve had multiple discussions with players I’ve had, teams calling them and offering money. ‘I’ve got NIL, I’ve got this offer here, I’ve got this,’ and you’ve got to sit down with them, their parents and go through it all. Power 4, within our own league, with the things that go on,” Fisher added. “I thought, really, when NIL came in, we thought it would be good, because some of this — there were teams that were doing NIL before NIL was popular, okay? … I thought NIL would at least make it fair, take the cheating out of ball. It’s made it worse.”
We may see Jimbo back on the sideline of a college football team in the near future, but it appears that there need to be some real changes made in the sport before he’s comfortable with how NIL and tampering have affected America’s greatest game.
