Bret Bielema on the SEC: 'They kind of want to live in 2005 forever'
The Illinois head coach spoke at Big Ten media days about the Southeastern Conference's attitude towards NIL and the transfer portal.
Video Transcript
I spent a couple years in the SEC, was with Slive and then transitioned to Sankey.
And I just think about it now, everybody's gonna have, you know, opinions, and obviously they're gonna draw the Big Ten, SEC, and, and, you know, all that goes around about that.
But to sit in the room with both of those guys, I think with, with Tony and the vision and experience that he has, and, and to be in the room where Sankey, I know he's gotta protect the SEC, and they kinda wanna live in two thousand and five forever.
But I think the forward thinking of where we are in college football is an awesome thing.
Brett, you just said something earlier about the SEC wanting to live in two thousand and five forever.
Can you just explain what you mean by that?
Well, I think I just made the headline, right?
Well, I became a head coach in two thousand and six, so I was going back before I was a head coach, p- purposely.
A- and I think what I'm saying is, like, I went to the league, going to the SEC, and it was a completely different league, in my opinion, than the one I was in in the Big Ten prior.
And just with the, basically the, the two biggest things, the biggest components are the transfer portal and, and, revenue share, NIL, however you wanna describe it.
When those two elements came into college football- Things the whole world changed.
I mean, it's overly obvious to say that, but I think anything to predate that is just a different time in college football.
It just, it just is.
And it's also really hard-- I said this point somewhat earlier.
You know, so back when I was in the Big Ten the first time, we were going through this, renaming of our league.
I think the eventual winner was the Leaders and Legends.
I don't know how the hell we got there, but regardless.
You know, I remember we were in these conversations, and I was with Coach Alvarez, he was my-- obviously our AD.
And we did a comparative study over twenty years, and I believe they looked at the last fifty years up to that point.
And of course, fifty years' time, Wisconsin wasn't anywhere in the mix.
But in the last twenty years, when we took that data, the only other team that had won more games than Wisconsin was Ohio State.
It wasn't Michigan, it wasn't Penn State, it wasn't Nebraska, who was coming in the league, obviously.
But the four teams they all wanted to talk about and that they were worried about distributing evenly was Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, and Nebraska.
And I'm pissed, right?
Because, like, I'm at Wisconsin, and I look at twenty years, and, and no one's really paying attention to that, right?
And Coach just say-- said to me very plainly, you know, said, "Don't worry about things you can't control.
You can't change people's fifty years of history and the way they think."
I also had that revelation when I, I recruited a young man, Hjalte Froholdt.
He was from Denmark.
And Hjalte was a foreign exchange student in Ohio.
I offered him a scholarship, and then he went on a tour, and I was at Arkansas, and we hadn't won anything at that point.
I was in my first or second year.
And he went to visit us, but then he went and visited Alabama, Florida, Ohio State, Michigan, all these, premier programs.
And he came to Arkansas, in my opinion, because he wasn't blinded by the fifty years that he didn't know, or the eighteen years he had been alive on this earth because he had been in Denmark, right?
Like he wasn't blinded by, by the things that he had been told or learned.
So I just kinda take that in a way that, like, it's a different world, man.
The last three years, like, the quarterback I have now, we would not have gotten if the world was as it existed five years ago.
I know that.
Neither would my left tackle, my left guard, my center, and my right tackle wouldn't be here playing for me, right?
And, and you go around to every team, and the rosters have changed because of those two components, the transfer rule and revenue share.
It's a different world.
Anything beyond that is nonsense.
That's where I'm coming from.
