Jordan Addison still hasn’t made a decision on where he will play in 2022. The elite wide receiver will instantly improve any offense he chooses to join this fall. USC would love to have him. Yet, while Addison makes his decision, it’s worth underscoring the point that the receiver did not have a “done deal” with the Trojans and Lincoln Riley. Those were rumors, and they were proved to be unsubstantiated. They didn’t hold up under scrutiny.
That having been said, there is still a worthwhile discussion to have about the reality that coaches nudge players behind the scenes and gently encourage them to recruit other players in the transfer portal.
This is not a new thing — not in the past year, at any rate. The transfer portal has been with us for several years, and coaches know how the game works.
If coaches can get whacked for tampering but players can recruit other players, coaches will simply encourage players — if they have friendships or familiarity with other players — to do the recruiting for them.
Fans and coaches at rival programs will cry foul, understandably enough, but we all know this is something that can’t be proven as a point of fact.
One big lesson of the Jordan Addison story is that if we want to be serious about formulating better policies and structures, there has to be a reasonable way to enforce rules. In a separate but related vein, there are plenty of rules in sports which aren’t enforced by game officials. (Think of traveling and especially palming the ball in the NBA, also the coach’s box in college basketball.) If rules exist but aren’t enforced, they serve no purpose.
Rules mean something only to the extent that they can be — and are — enforced. That’s an important lesson for the NCAA and the rest of us as NIL and pay-for-play dramas unfold.
We talked about these things on our recent USC football podcast:
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