In many sports, certain dates during the season become an off-field spectacle all their own. MLB pioneered the trade deadline and has the Sept. 1 call-up bonanza, too. The NBA nearly perfected its own trade deadline.
College football never had one of those, really — until this year. Welcome to Opt-out Week, presented by your local NIL sponsor. Or not presented?
Either way, this is around the point in the season when coaches begin applying redshirts to players who’ve appeared in four games, the max that can be played in a redshirt year. Except these days, it’s not just coaches making that call. And the poster child of Opt-out Week is a quarterback from … UNLV. Quick backstory:
Sluka is not the only one to step back this week. News broke yesterday that USC defensive lineman Bear Alexander, a former five-star recruit, will take a redshirt year too.
Players redshirting themselves isn’t exactly new — Antonio Morales wrote a good explainer on it two years ago — but it was mostly players like Alexander, who weren’t seeing much playing time and didn’t want to waste a season of eligibility while riding the bench.
Bailing because of an NIL dispute also isn’t new, but NIL as the reason for leaving during a potential Playoff run? That’s new, and could become the start of a new trend within the trend. Imagine a college player holding out over missed payments, or even for some newfound value through four games, dangling the transfer portal over a program’s head.
It’s all very messy, and screams for some sort of regulation. Maybe these players — gasp — should become salaried employees. I asked Antonio for more help:
Do you think there’s any chance for reconciliation between Sluka and UNLV?
Antonio: You always try to avoid saying never, especially with how fluid NIL and transfer portal situations are, but after seeing how public this has become, it’s difficult to envision some sort of reconciliation here. UNLV leaked its version of events. Sluka’s NIL representation came out with their side of the story, as did UNLV’s collective, which wished him well with future endeavors. The fact both sides are questioning each other’s word very publicly makes me believe both are truly ready to move on.
Do you think we’re going to see more of this in the, er, unregulated NIL era?
Yes. The reality is this has probably been going on more often than we see, but programs have managed to keep it behind the scenes. I think back to Oregon receiver Gary Bryant Jr., who essentially got the ball rolling on the redshirt-and-then-transfer move when he played for USC two years ago. He was one of the first to take advantage of it, then we saw more and more do the same. It’s pretty easy to believe there will be a player who isn’t happy with their NIL situation who is better than Sluka, has more leverage than Sluka, whose program really doesn’t want to lose them, who will have the ability to stage a college version of a holdout.
Opt-out Week, baby. Go ahead and circle next year’s calendar.
