Three years removed from the introduction of NIL, college football has turned into the Wild West every offseason.
Players flying back and forth between teams with high-dollar deals and shadowy, middle-man agents. All the while, practically zero rules or regulations for the NCAA to enforce. The result is the seemingly lawless land we see unfolding every time the regular season ends.
Folks can understand when a player leaves because his coach got fired and he wants to follow him, or when a guy transfers closer to home for family reasons. That’s the original purpose of the transfer portal, after all.
But the word that’s all the craze right now is tampering. The NCAA’s legal term for this is “impermissible contact,” essentially when a representative of a school reaches out to a player when they’re not allowed to. That consists of a middle-man of some sort contacting a recruit during a dead period or, more prominent as of late, reaching out to a player from another school when they’re not in the portal to try and induce them to leave.
Here’s how the process allegedly works, according to certain people in the know. Coaches don’t reach out to players through direct channels, of course – that would be a little too damning. Instead, they’ll reach out to a high school coach, a mentor or any other third party with an offer. Then they’ll relay the message to the player.
National championship coaches like Nick Saban, Dabo Swinney and Kirby Smart have previously brought attention to the problem of tampering, mostly calling out opposing coaches for their behind-closed-doors actions. But the testimony of a current Razorback starter calls attention to a party that has grown in influence in the last few few year – unscrupulous agents smelling blood (and cash) in the water.
Arkansas left tackle Fernando Carmona Jr. spent three seasons at San Jose State, anchoring the Spartans’ offensive line with impressive displays that caught the eyes of Power Four head coaches. When he entered the transfer portal about a year ago, he was pursued by multiple SEC programs but eventually decided on Arkansas, where he protected Taylen Green’s blind side this season.
Before that, though, Carmona experienced attempted tampering during the 2023 season, when he was contacted about the possibility of entering the portal.
“It was maybe week nine or 10, I had some agent call me and tell me there were certain teams in college football that would want me to play there and would obviously offer me some money,” Carmona said on his Pin & Pull podcast on Monday. “Or they DM you and they’re like, ‘Hey, we would love to talk to you. We really like the way you play, we want to inform you about our agency.’”
Coaches Share Their Firsthand Experiences with Tampering
“Word of mouth spreads that a guy’s not happy and he’s looking,” Smart said last year. “Next thing you know he’s in the portal and he’s already got somewhere that he wants to go.”
Swinney said it’s not just something that takes place over the phone – it even happens in the postgame handshake line. The problem gets even worse when coaching changes are thrown in the mix, as Saban said opposing coaches were practically “camped out” in Tuscaloosa after he announced his retirement last year.
Pittsburgh head coach Pat Narduzzi has been a scathing critic of tampering, with both his own players and at other programs in the ACC. He publicly called out USC head coach Lincoln Riley for tampering by inducing Biletnikoff Award-winning wideout Jordan Addison to transfer to the Trojans. He also spoke up about North Carolina quarterback Drake Maye receiving $5 million offers from two schools if he decided to transfer there – all while he wasn’t even in the portal.
At the Group of Five level, UTSA head coach and former Arkansas assistant Jeff Traylor has voiced his firsthand experience getting his players poached, directly asking the NCAA how he can report such violations. We’ll never know whether he got a response on that, but tampering is a violation that usually goes unpunished in college athletics. In today’s climate, there’s simply too much of it to stymie.
It’s not just lower-tier schools, either, as SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee — another UA alum — said that people are “bombarding” his roster “trying to pick off” some of the Mustangs’ talent, all while they prepare for the College Football Playoff.
Another probable example of this happened on Monday when Missouri running back Kewan Lacy entered the portal in the morning and was committed to Ole Miss exactly 12 hours later. It’s hard to believe Lacy carried out his entire recruiting process legitimately in that short of a time span. “I think tampering might have been happening here,” analyst Aaron Torres said in a 9-minute-long podcast on the subject.
“This, in my opinion, is probably the most egregious example yet.”
Sam Pittman Speaks Out on Agents and Tampering Within SEC
Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman is trying to focus as best as he can on the upcoming Liberty Bowl, for which Arkansas is hanging on as a 1-point favorite on some websites that also offer users the chance to discover exciting gaming options at an online casino. Pittman, though, can’t deny how much this problem has affected his own team. He’s expressed some choice words on the prevalence of tampering in the last two offseasons.
“Anybody that comes into your office and says, ‘Hey, I’m going to go into the portal, and the next day they already know where they’re going … probably had a conversation or two before then,” Pittman said in 2023.
The Razorbacks have the most outgoing transfers of any Power Four program, with many committing to SEC rivals like Ole Miss and Texas. Similar to Carmona, Pittman also pointed to agents as a sort of “boogeyman” in the transfer landscape who entice players to enter the portal.
“Most of them know where they’re going and how much they’re going to get paid,” Pittman said at last week’s press conference. “So, somebody had to talk to them. That’s very, very difficult, but I think the way of the land right now is agents doing the conversations.”
“There’s no certification…an agent can be anybody,” he added. “It’s a crazy world out there as far as tampering and all that, and I don’t know if many guys have gotten in trouble for that, and I don’t see it happening.”
The Head Hog alluded to the scenario of agents recommending players purposely sit out games to preserve eligibility and increase their value on the market.
“I think it’s more agents and things getting in these kids’ ears and going, ‘OK, if you don’t play, I can get you X amount of dollars, and if you do and you only have one year left, I can get you a lower amount of money.’”
Pittman didn’t name names, of course, but that description fits the bill of Patrick Kutas and Jaylon Braxton. Kutas went back on a handshake deal with Pittman about his redshirt status, only to hit the portal and commit to Ole Miss – a school he was supposedly raised to hate. Braxton only appeared in one game this year nursing a “bone bruise,” before also heading to Ole Miss.
Do with that information what you will, but it seems like tampering might be at the forefront of the emerging Arkansas-to-Ole Miss pipeline. Pittman is far from alone in this dilemma, as the Hogs are just one piece of a bigger picture of skirting existing regulations in a lawless landscape.
Anonymous Power Four staffers have said their best players have been contacted by SEC coaches via burner phones, or through a player’s former JUCO coach.
“It’s bulls***,” one Power Four head coach said. “The whole thing is a complete joke, and it’s also happening with the agent calling the [NIL] collective. Or it’s going through a high school assistant…Most of the really good players aren’t going into the portal without knowing where they’re going. They already have a home.”
This is likely what Pittman is alluding to, and the explanation for why players with locked-down starting jobs at an SEC school are entering the portal. Whether that intel was relayed via a mentor or an agent, they already know where they can go and how much they can make.
Carmona described the agents involved in this process as “money vampires” hunting for commission fees as a bloodsucking reward for getting these players paid. That’s why the lineman said he’s steered clear of sketchy agents ever since that incident.
While many fans have criticized current players for just being in it for the money in the new college landscape, Carmona offered a different perspective – that many players are starting to realize the negative impacts of the NIL world.
Fatigue Setting In Around Haggling?
“What we’re not liking on the player side is that we’re having to talk money with these people that we consider our coaches and we’ve created these great relationships with,” he said.
He added that it’s almost like talking about money with a family member – which nobody likes to do because of all the feelings involved.
“Everybody wants their piece of the pie and everybody has in their head their set value, and so it makes it really difficult to negotiate.”
That awkwardness is the reason Carmona thinks agents have become so prevalent, and is something he feels will be made easier by the addition of a general manager to the program – which Pittman plans to do this offseason. But his perspective is unique in the fact that it points out that the players don’t like how nasty this industry has become, either.
In a college football world that can sometimes feel like all the players are in it for the money, Carmona is a reminder that while compensation is obviously important, some of these athletes still just want to play ball at the end of the day.
Sure enough, the steady left tackle is returning to Fayetteville for his senior season. And in an exercise of school pride that is rare these days, he even went into Kutas’ Ole Miss commitment post on Instagram, commenting “catch u week 3.”
An Arkansas fan told Carmona to “make him regret leaving,” to which he replied, “got u.” When discussing all of the players transferring out of the program in a Tuesday press conference, Carmona said he has conflicting emotions.
“It hurts because a lot of them are good friends, but it’s all love. All that matters is the people that are staying here and being Hogs.”
Carmona’s “got u” post definitely comes off as more friendly than vindictive in this light. At least he made things interesting, however. That pro-Hog mentality is the type of energy a still-reeling fanbase needs right now.
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Check out the full episode of Fernando Carmona Jr.’s Pin & Pull Podcast:
More on Kewan Lacy
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More coverage of Arkansas football and the transfer portal from BoAS:
