Pete Golding Highlights Tampering in College Football
At an SEC event, Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding slammed tampering and hypocrisy in college football, highlighting flaws in the NIL recruiting system.
Video Transcript
Well, I gotta say this about a coach who's gonna tell the truth here, which is sometimes very rare.
Pete Golding, the head football coach of the Ole Miss Running Rebels, has actually said something that is truthful when we talk about today's college recruiting: tampering.
Well, guess what?
He's right.
Pete Golding, at the SEC meetings in Tampa, was talking about what Lane Kiffin and some of them were saying, that tampering and going on and recruiting some of the players off of other people's rosters, and he made the comment here.
The Ole Miss coach accused of tampering this off-season essentially defended tampering and calling out, he says, the hypocrisy in a broken system.
He's exactly right.
Are you under the impression now when you have NIL and transfer portal that you think there's ethics when it comes to building a roster?
When you're talking about the amount of money that's being generated in college football today, look at the salaries of these coaches, look at the revenue that's being generated by these television networks today.
You're talking about integrity?
Give me a break.
Integrity went out the window when it comes to college recruiting years ago.
Now you've got NIL and money involved.
Folks, money exposes, and we're seeing the ugly side of NIL and college sports today.
Look, did you not think when you opened up the floodgates and you got the genie out of the jar, that you thought that there wasn't gonna be lateral-- collateral damage when it came to people gambling, money being spent, NIL and how much money if a kids can make here at Ole Miss or LSU?
Why do you think Lane Kiffin left in the middle of a college football playoff run?
Why did he leave?
More money.
Had nothing to do with integrity, had everything to do with salary.
Lane Kiffin's trying to tell everyone, "Well, you know I have a better chance to win a national championship at LSU," which I happen to think he does.
But at the end of the day, you left those kids in a lurch, dude.
You're talking about going to a place because they give you a better opportunity to make more money and to give kids more opportunities when it comes to NIL.
Let's be fair here.
The teams that spend the most money are gonna be the teams that win national championships.
This is just gonna be like any other sport.
College football are turning into about 30 Los Angeles Dodgers.
If you have the most money, you're gonna contend, you're gonna compete.
How do you think the Indiana Hoosiers ended up winning a national championship?
Do you understand the Indiana Hoosier program was the worst college football program in the last 100 years.
How did they turn that around?
Easy: recruiting and money.
That's what turned it around, and this is what you're gonna see more of.
You see these schools in Texas now, they're gonna be spending money, hand over fist to get the best college recruits into their place.
Look at the University of Texas.
They're gonna spend this year $56 million on a roster for college football.
Put that in context.
The Tampa Bay Rays spent $87 million on their baseball roster, and that's a professional baseball team.
You're talking about the University of Texas spending over $50 million to go out and try to win themselves a national championship.
Same thing with Ohio State.
Ohio State's money right now Listen, when you're talking recruiting and you're talking about a system that's broken, of course it's broken.
Look, if I'm a kid that's a second team player at the University of Miami and somebody calls me from Ole Miss and says, "Hey Dan, I hear you're making $100,000 there at the University of Miami.
I'm gonna pay you $750,000 to come and play here at Ole Miss in Oxford," would you do it?
Hell yeah, I would do it.
Loyalty to these programs?
You show me loyalty, and you look at guys like Lane Kiffin, look at all the coaches that leave for better jobs.
Kids nowadays, and this is what they don't like, they don't like the players have the opportunity to do the same thing.
Now, do I think there needs to be guardrails?
Absolutely.
And to Coach Golding's credit, it is a broken system.
How do you fix it?
I don't think you can.
There's only one way.
We brought this up weeks ago.
You know how you can change it?
All the money that you make, you're gonna have to have a salary cap.
You're gonna have to have a situation where you're sharing and profit sharing.
You know why the NFL is the number one sport in America?
Because they share their revenue.
That's every single team in the NFL.
College football's never gonna do that.
You have haves and have-nots, and the more we get into this when it comes to spending money and transfer portal and recruiting, the more and more you're gonna see stories like this.
Of course people are tampering.
They're looking for the best opportunity to win a national title.
And college football, again, it's off the rails right now.
But what did you expect when you opened up the floodgates?
