Georgia head coach Kirby Smart didn’t mince words this week when discussing the state of NIL—and the lack of leadership from those in power to fix it.
During a recent appearance on The Paul Finebaum Show, Smart said to what many in college football have been thinking—this thing is out control and Congress isn’t moving fast enough to stop it.
“Very little has happened,” Smart said bluntly. “It just shows you how hard it is to make changes and correct things… People have talked about Congress. That’s not easy. Not a lot gets done quickly there.”
The issue? NIL and pay-for-play have essentially become the same thing, and while Smart says coaches are generally fine with compensating players, what they want is consistency and sustainability—two things the current model severely lacks.
“I just want to be able to have a freshman come in and not make more than a senior,” Smart said. “And I’d like for other sports to still survive. You know, we’re on the brink of probably one to two years away from a lot of schools cutting sports. What’s the pushback going to be then when you start cutting non-revenue sports? I don’t want that to happen.”
That last part is key. As revenue surges into football and basketball, non-revenue sports—golf, wrestling, swimming—are sitting on the chopping block. Without federal guidelines or a sustainable revenue-sharing model, many schools are already facing tough decisions.
This isn’t new territory for Smart, who recently lost elite OL prospect Jackson Cantwell to Miami and suggested that “a lot of misleading information” is floating around in the NIL space.
“There’s no consistency,” he said. “Nobody really knows what’s accurate. A lot of schools are approaching it in different ways. We hear something different from every school.”
Until Congress steps in, NIL is a free-for-all. And Smart, like many others, is left to navigate chaos without a compass, map, or any timeline for which he’ll have to remain at his post.
