Texas coach Steve Sarkisian didn’t hide his frustration with where college football stands right now.
In a recent appearance on “The Stampede,” Sarkisian took aim at the chaos created by the NIL and transfer portal era, saying the sport has drifted into a place with too little structure and too few real consequences.
“I don’t want to be worried about my fourth wide receiver getting talked to by another school’s coach in pregame warmups,” Sarkisian said (h/t On3). “‘Hey, come transfer here at the end of the season.
You’re not playing there anyway.’ Those are the things, like, if you do those things, there’s got to be consequences for breaking rules.
And right now, we can’t govern our own rules, and that’s the most frustrating part of where we’re at in college football society right now. We can’t enforce our own laws.
We can’t enforce our own rules. There’s no consequences right now."
He didn’t stop there.
“We’re living in a lawless society, unfortunately, and that’s not good," Sarkisian explained. "That’s not good for anybody.
It’s not even good for those that are breaking the rules and getting away with it because sooner or later, those rules are going to get enforced, and then what are you going to do? So I think that that’s some of the challenges that we’re going through.”
Sarkisian’s comments come at a time when college football has already been turned upside down by player movement and compensation. The changes have opened doors for players and created more freedom, but they’ve also left the sport looking, in his view, like a place with very little order.
The Texas coach pointed to the broader mess around the sport, including Texas Tech’s attempt to play a quarterback who had bet on his own team and had an admitted gambling problem. He also noted that an NCAA “win” in the case of Brendan Sorsby doesn’t suddenly mean the system is working smoothly.
Even the conference landscape has gotten strange enough to underscore the point, with Cal Berkeley now part of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
For Sarkisian, the issue isn’t that college football has changed. It’s that the rules don’t seem to carry enough weight when they’re broken.
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