Could college football implement an NFL-style draft?

It doesn’t take a genius to see that college football is in the midst of a profound sea change. Earlier this month, Virginia’s state legislature passed into law a bill allowing schools to directly sign their players to name, image, and likeness deals. As a result of an NIL-related lawsuit, the NCAA is reportedly in “deep talks” to implement a formal revenue-sharing system and pay athletes over $1 billion in damages.

The state of Alabama has been a national change-maker throughout the last several months. In March, Nick Saban was invited to Capitol Hill to discuss the future of NIL at a roundtable hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz. Just this week, the UAB Blazers became the first Division 1 football team to publicly endorse Athletes.org, an organization describing itself as “the players association for college athletes.”

It begs the question: what’s next for America’s sport? In a podcast episode released earlier this week, Dan Wetzel and Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports, along with Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated, discussed the potential of adding a draft-type event to the calendar.

College football is one of the most popular sports in both America and the world; the television revenue from the Playoff alone rivals that of the entire NHL. The sport has complete dominance over fall Saturdays, especially in the South. However, college football lacks one of the things that makes professional leagues so dominant: marquee offseason events.

The NFL has the combine, the draft, and free agency, all of which to combine to keep viewers engaged when games aren’t being played. The college game has next to nothing. The transfer portal has acted as de facto free agency for the last few seasons, but a formalized summer event could do wonders for the sport’s offseason footprint.

As college football grows more and more explicitly professional, industry leaders could consider creating an event that would act as a draft for high school players, the panel theorized.

“Could you imagine if the conferences got together and asked the top 50 recruits in the country to all come to one place… and announce their commitments one at a time on live TV?” Forde said. “Not in December, in the middle of everything else, but in February and you had a signing day that was actually like a show like that, especially if you could get them to keep their commitments quiet that long.”

“We’ve seen [signing day] be huge in February before,” he added. “You can make it bigger, you can do more with it.”

Forde did provide a caveat that could sink the idea: the lack of communication plaguing the top level of the industry.

“It would require coordination and cohesion, and those are two things college sports does not have. The conferences would have to agree to work together,” he said. “They would have to get television partners who would work together. They would have to take more control of their calendar – all these things that they have been completely unable or unwilling to do.”

Wetzel imagined a situation in which recruits would be able to flip their commitments in front of massive crowds.

“[A recruit could say] ‘you know what, the last three dudes went to Alabama, I’m going to Alabama.’ Hat flips at the end. The crowd could be throwing money, shooting a money cannon at them.”

Dellenger went a step further, envisioning an SEC-only event held in a city like Atlanta, New Orleans, or Nashville.

“Could you imagine all the SEC teams arriving there and they have their seats on the side of the stage and they’re picking these high school players? People would show up. I don’t know if 700K people would show up, but people would show up,” he said.

No formal proposal for an offseason event has been made; the sport will have to sort out its legal situation before instituting a change so massive. However, it’s worth keeping an eye on the spring and summer as college football’s next frontier.

Charles Vaughan is a contributing writer for Yellowhammer News.