When the NIL and transfer portal era first arrived in college football, former Ohio State Buckeyes head coach and current Fox Sports analyst Urban Meyer thought that the gap between the sport’s blue bloods and the other programs would widen, leading to more dominance and titles for schools like Alabama and Georgia.
However, while talking to Colin Cowherd on The Herd, the Buckeyes legend admits that things haven’t gone the way he predicted they would and has changed his mind on how he views NIL.
“I misfired on the whole conversation about NIL and transfer portal,” Meyer said. “I thought the rich would get richer. What it’s done is make parity in college football.
“I misfired on the whole conversation about NIL and transfer portal. I thought the rich would get richer. What it’s done is make parity in college football.” – Urban Meyer https://t.co/URKSjxckXE
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 19, 2026
“I’ve talked to many of my colleagues in the last couple weeks. You flip on UCLA, and then you flip on Alabama, what’s the difference? I don’t know. One team runs the ball a little better, and that’s UCLA. It’s amazing what has really happened to the game of college football with the NIL and with the transfer portal.”
Meyer’s comments came after one of the most exciting Saturdays in college football history, which saw the AP Poll No. 1 lose for the second week in a row, multiple other top 10 teams go down, and the UCLA Bruins left standing as the last undefeated team in either the Big Ten or SEC.
Not everyone on board
It’s hard to imagine this sort of parity before NIL and the transfer portal. Still, not everyone has been impressed with the modern era of college sports. Former Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban has been a staunch supporter of reigning things in regarding both NIL and the transfer portal via the controversial Protect College Sports Act.
“Well, I think things got out of control based on name, image, and likeness. And look, I want players to make money,” Saban said on ESPN last month.
“I want players to have their own name, image, and likeness,” Saban responded. “There’s not any business in the world that can function without a budget and some guidelines. If you ask an NFL owner, what would you do if all your players were free agents every year? Oh, we couldn’t operate.
“What would you do if you didn’t have a salary cap? Oh, we couldn’t operate. We’d go broke. Well, what’s going to happen in college sports is you’re going to either take money from the academic side to support athletics because we’re in a runaway, you know, financial situation, or you’re going to drop other Olympic sports and non-revenue sports that are very important to creating opportunities for young people.
“So this is going to put some parameters on that so that we don’t have to take money from academics. We can still provide opportunities for Olympic and women’s sports, which I think is one of the most important things this does. And we still pay players, and they still have authentic name, image, and likeness. So I just think this gives us some guidelines so that we can have some rules and regulations that will actually enhance players’ opportunities to be more successful.”
The PCSA faces an uncertain future in Washington, D.C., so Meyer may be able to enjoy his parity for a bit longer.
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