Utah AD says NIL collective offered a player $1 Million to transfer | College Football Enquirer – Yahoo Sports

Yahoo Sports Dan Wetzel, and Sports Illustrateds Pat Forde and Ross Dellenger discuss Pats chat with Utah AD Mark Harlan about the current landscape of the transfer portal during the NIL era, and debate if that new era is a good thing or a bad thing.

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DAN WETZEL: All right, also-- Pat, you're really working this week.

[LAUGHTER]

You're actually doing--

PAT FORDE: As opposed to all the weeks where I do nothing.

DAN WETZEL: Kind of. I mean, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying you're working. You had a rather eye-popping quote from the-- although not really that surprising-- from the Utah AD. Why don't you lay that one on us? Because it is a topic we discuss here often.

PAT FORDE: Yeah, I sat down with Mark Harlan, the AD at Utah and Friday, the day before they had USC in. A huge, huge home game. And we were just talking about the state of things. And Kyle Whittingham, who's just an absolute pillar of that program, he's been there-- this is, I think, his 18th year as the head coach. He replaced Urban Meyer. He was his assistant and has never left and has made them really just consistently good.

But you can tell he's a bit frustrated with the current way of the world. He's not necessarily wired for a world where collectives are paying recruits up front to go to school. And the term that Harlan used was that-- he worried that basically you can't outwork people anymore. You work and work and work in recruiting, and then somebody sails in with a bag of cash and says, here, come to our school which, of course, has been the way it's happened before. Under the table though.

So anyway, Harlan told me, quote, "We had a player who was offered, I believe, about a million dollars to pull him over to another team by a collective. I called that AD and had a discussion, right? And he's frustrated. Everybody's frustrated. Because this was a friend. It was a friendly call. It was just to say, listen, it happened. My colleague was-- embarrassed is not the right word, but he was frustrated."

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So it was interesting to me. He did not name the school. He did not name the player. But that an AD would talk publicly about this. Yeah, this is the way of the world now. We've got this collective out here that's tied to this school just tampering, going and saying, we want your player. We want this guy, and we're willing to pay him this amount of money.

And then apparently, the player went to the school and said, hey, I'm being-- people are attempting to buy me. If it's a million dollars, it's probably a quarterback, although there's some other NFL-caliber players on the Utah roster. But if that's the way of the world-- that's the kind of thing that drives coaches crazy is don't come buy my player off my campus.

DAN WETZEL: If I had a collective offering a million dollars to a transfer, I would not be frustrated. I'd be quite happy.

PAT FORDE: Would you?

DAN WETZEL: Yeah, I might pretend I was frustrated.

[LAUGHTER]

It's better than not having a collective offering a million dollars.

PAT FORDE: Except how rare-- it's probably pretty rare if the kid says no. And then not only says no, but turns it in, basically.

DAN WETZEL: Yeah, I think it-- yeah, I don't know. There was a story earlier this year from ESPN, from Pete at ESPN, about Zay Flowers at Boston College. He got offered like 300 grand wide receiver from one school and 600 from another and turned them down because he wanted to stay at BC and finish and get his degree. And that's going to be worth more than that money. And it's a nice story.

And he immediately told everybody that it happened. And his dad's got like 11 kids, like a single dad. Drives a truck. And the money would have been big. And it was a big-- oh, is this what we want the sport to be? My thing with all of these things where you're trying to stop it is, no, this is what the sport is. This is what America is. This is what-- this is how it works.

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Utah AD says NIL collective offered a player $1 Million to transfer | College Football Enquirer - Yahoo Sports