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It has been less than half a decade since Ed Orgeron was last on a football sideline, but the sport has had a generational shakeup in the NIL era.
Coach O won a national championship at LSU with, in his words, “the best transfer ever” in Joe Burrow on a team he said is “up there” among the greatest college football teams ever. But the landscape has changed so much that even President Donald Trump signed a “Saving College Sports” executive order.
What remains of Trump’s executive order is a bit of a mystery, but Orgeron wants Trump to be “more involved.”
“I think he should be more involved. Something has to happen. Our sport is getting killed, man,” Orgeron said in a recent interview with Fox News Digital.
“I love players getting paid. I think it’s fair. But I think there ought to be a cap, and the transfer portal, there’s got to be rules on it. It’s kind of like the Wild Wild West. I’m talking to coaches, it’s like, ‘Hey man, we’re working 24/7, 12 months a year. It’s crazy when guys are coming, when they’re going.’ But you know what? It’s got to be give and take. Players have got to get a lot, but the schools have got to get some guarantee in return…
“I think the president, he loves football, he’s a friend of mine, the more he can step in and stop what’s going on in college football, the better off it’s going to be.”
Trump recently ripped the supposed “disaster” that is NIL.
“I think that it’s a disaster for college sports. I think it’s a disaster for the Olympics, because, you know, we’re losing a lot of teams. The colleges are cutting a lot of their — they would call them sort of the ‘lesser’ sports, and they’re losing them like at numbers nobody can believe. They were really training grounds, beautiful training grounds, hard-working, wonderful young people. They were training grounds for the Olympics,” Trump said in the Oval Office last Thursday.
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“And a lot of these sports that were training so well would win gold medals because of it. Those sports don’t exist, because they’re putting all their money into football. And by the way, they’re putting too much money into it, into football.”
Orgeron has teamed up with player agent Tzvi Grossman to tap into the new NIL era and has learned a great deal as he tries to find his next stop in college football. But despite all the money being passed around, Orgeron still believes that one aspect of recruiting trumps all.
“You still have to recruit, you still have to evaluate, you still have to get the mamas, the champions, all that to have a championship football team, and then the (key) word develop,” Orgeron said. “Just because you’re paying the guys — I believe all our players should be paid, I’m with that — but the money that they get right now is not the money that Joe Burrow’s making. It’s not the money that Ja’Marr Chase is making, Derek Stingley’s making. So in other words, to develop at the school you’re going to go to is still important.”
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