{"id":69683,"date":"2024-12-04T07:11:11","date_gmt":"2024-12-04T12:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/?p=69683"},"modified":"2024-12-04T07:13:47","modified_gmt":"2024-12-04T12:13:47","slug":"69683-wake-forest-and-others-having-to-safeguard-players-from-tampering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/2024\/12\/04\/69683-wake-forest-and-others-having-to-safeguard-players-from-tampering\/","title":{"rendered":"Wake Forest and Others Having to Safeguard Players from Tampering"},"content":{"rendered":"

The transfer portal gets here next week. We have already seen a slew of players over the last few weeks announce they are leaving their current schools and looking for opportunities, financial and other, elsewhere. Some didn\u2019t even wait until the season was over. Once they got benched, they decided to move on. Of course, some of it happens less out in the open once the tampering starts. And yes, the tampering is a daily experience. Wake Forest, and others, are having to safeguard players from tampering…from illicitly being pulled into the transfer portal by other schools.<\/p>\n

Once the portal became a legal fact of college sports, it was only a matter of time before the nefarious actions would begin.<\/p>\n

Splitting Hairs<\/h3>\n

Technically speaking, inducing a player to leave their current school for the purposes of entering the portal and ultimately transferring elsewhere is against NCAA rules. As if that ever mattered. The NCAA was never going to enforce the rule. At this point it would just mean more billable hours for their attorneys, trying to defend the policy and the rule in federal court.<\/p>\n

There are 32 states, and the District of Columbia, that have Name, Image, and Likeness laws. All 33 have language that outlaws using promises of NIL deals to induce players to go into the portal for purposes of transferring. But there are a couple of glitches. Technically NIL and the Collectives are not the same thing. No doubt some attorneys could shred the state laws with the defense that their client was offering money from the Collective, and not promising an NIL deal.<\/p>\n

The other problem with the state laws is that there is not an attorney general in any state who is going to bring up any of the schools within his\/her domain on charges of tampering when most schools are doing it.<\/p>\n

Tampering<\/h3>\n

Last month, then-North Carolina head coach Mack Brown called it the 800-pound gorilla in the room. He has been outspoken for years about other schools approaching his players. Yet, he never called anyone out by name.<\/p>\n

Wake Forest head coach Dave Clawson<\/a> has had the same approach, for the most part. An advocate for players getting paid for their work, and for player movement, he has been vocal about how the tampering issue grows by the year.<\/p>\n

Going all the way back to mid-October, Clawson has talked about Demon Deacon players coming to him to tell him other schools approached them about going into the portal. His take has been if his players are coming to him to discuss, it more often than not means they want to stay at Wake Forest and are keeping him in the loop. Of course, there are always the players trying to pit the two schools into some financial bargaining leverage.<\/p>\n

Avoiding the Rules<\/h3>\n

We asked Clawson several weeks ago why he rarely calls out the school. How do things change if the violators are not called out? His answer provides another look into how and why the rules are technically not being broken. Because the coaches of other schools are usually not the ones making the moves. That would violate the rules in most states.<\/p>\n

Instead, it is third-party representatives or even players making the pitch. The post-game handshakes on the field between players have now become much more than just the quick, \u201cHey, good game\u2026good luck.\u201d As we have witnessed first-hand, it is players talking to an opposing player, who could one day soon become a teammate. The opposing players are the ones making pitches about how strong the financial payouts are at their school and how well they (the potential new player) could fit in.<\/p>\n

Clawson quipped in the days after playing Miami, that Wake Forest running back Demond Claiborne<\/a> was not always as popular as he was with Hurricanes players after the game. The friendly \u201cconversations,\u201d were so extensive that Wake had to send staff over to get Claiborne out of the pitches being made and into the post-game locker room.<\/p>\n

Some Players Are Easier to Target<\/h3>\n

There are the occasional, grotesque abuses of the system. Clawson was quite vocal when he lost his starting quarterback after the 2022 season. Everyone assumed he was headed to the NFL. But as the Demon Deacons prepared for the Gasparilla Bowl in Tampa, official representatives from the school in South Bend, Indiana had a hotel room in town and were hosting Wake\u2019s quarterback. The media became aware that week that as Wake Forest was having players-only events, their quarterback was missing from some of them, as he was listening to the pitch from the team that he would eventually play for in 2023.<\/p>\n

When asked in the post-game press conference what his plans were for determining his future, he got up, made a reference as to the plan involving where the best drinks were that night, and walked out of the press conference, never to be questioned by Wake Forest media again.<\/p>\n

In the free agency market that is the new college football, it matters not if you are coming from a team that is on a losing streak, or one going to a bowl game. The tampering, legal by the letter, but sketchy in intent started six weeks ago. The end results will start to show themselves next week.<\/p>\n

\"Wake
Photo courtesy: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The transfer portal gets here next week. We have already seen a slew of players over the last few weeks announce they are leaving their current schools and looking for opportunities, financial and other, elsewhere. Some didn\u2019t even wait until the season was over. Once they got benched, they decided to move on. Of course, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":69686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[79,101,1249],"class_list":["post-69683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-college-football","tag-north-carolina-tar-heels","tag-wake-forest-demon-deacons"],"modified_by":"Tony Siracusa, CFB Managing Editor","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69683"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69687,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69683\/revisions\/69687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}