SEC football coaches sound off on tampering — but what about solutions?

MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — Shane Beamer’s South Carolina team had just completed an 8-4 season, highlighted by upset wins over Clemson and Tennessee, to secure the program’s first top 25 finish since a decade before under Steve Spurrier.

He’d finished his player meetings to close the season and was surprised to later learn that four key contributors had entered the transfer portal.

“You know, it was strange in a couple of those situations based on conversations I had with guys two or three days before they went in the portal,” Beamer said this week from the ongoing SEC meetings in Florida, where head coaches addressed tampering in college football at varying levels of resignation and indignation.

The sport’s adoption of immediate eligibility for transfers teamed with the advent of players being allowed to monetize their name, image and likeness to produce unprecedented roster movement since both were introduced in 2021. But some of that movement, coaches say, is spawned by conversations and appeals to leave that precede a player’s transfer portal entrance. The practice differs from professional leagues since athletes are not under contract but coaches are forbidden by NCAA rules to recruit players on opposing rosters before they enter the portal.

Gamecocks running back MarShawn Lloyd, the team’s leading rusher, left for USC on the West Coast. Tight end Jaheim Bell, second on the team in rushing and fourth in receiving, landed at Florida State. So did edge rusher Gilber Edmond, who led the team in tackles for loss. Edge rusher Jordan Burch, third on the team with 7.5 tackles for loss and second with 3.5 sacks, transferred to Oregon.

“It’s interesting how things happen. But rumors are one thing,” said Beamer, who noted that he hasn’t made official allegations. “Proof is another thing.”

GO DEEPER

Tampering in college football: Ingrained, inevitable, impossible to stop

Though some accept the widespread practice as impossible to stop, it hasn’t stopped coaches from expressing complaints, within the industry and to some extent publicly.

“Tampering is out there. I’m aware of it. I think it shows up in different forms,” Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea said.

“There’s no doubt tampering is real,” Florida coach Billy Napier said. “It’s a real issue, and until something is done about it, you’ll continue to see it.”

While complaints have been frequent, punishments have not.

“I don’t know anybody that’s really been caught,” Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher said. “If they get caught, there should be severe penalties.”

No coach has been punished by the NCAA for tampering since the rule changes. How do coaches feel about how the rules have been enforced?

“I don’t know, have they been?” Arkansas coach Sam Pittman asked, tongue in cheek Wednesday afternoon.

For the most part, coaches have quietly self-policed the rules behind the scenes, making terse phone calls when they hear rumors and settling the issues with their colleagues quietly or at least learning whether rumors were true.

“It all goes back to whatever your definition is. Is calling a high school coach and saying, ‘Hey, is Jimmy gonna go in the portal?’ Is that tampering? By definition, it is. I guess it’s hard to prove,” Pittman said. “I just call coaches if I feel like it’s happening to us. However, once you make that call it’s already too late because the kid’s already gone.”

Public spats, though, have been rare. Pittsburgh coach Pat Narduzzi is a rare case of a coach willing to name names publicly. He called out USC coach Lincoln Riley for tampering with Biletnikoff Award winner Jordan Addison, though Riley denied the accusation.

Asked earlier this month if he regretted his handling of the situation, Narduzzi told The Athletic: “Hell no.”

Just don’t expect many more coaches to name names publicly.

“Coaches that want to do it? They do now. But the business is all about if you make somebody mad, you cut that possibility of a job market off your resume. We gotta figure that out a bit,” Pittman said.

Pittman said he was particularly annoyed at situations in which players inform coaches they’re entering the portal one day and announce a destination the next.

“People want to blame the coaches for the tampering. A lot of times it’s the player that’s negotiating or looking for greener pastures. Sometimes they create tampering,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said. “It goes both ways. It’s hard to police.”

A fix is complex. Chief among the issues are go-betweens and third parties that represent schools and players and the ambiguity of conversations between them before they reach players.

As players are initially recruited as high schoolers, those relationships can remain. And they can be avenues and vehicles for tampering.

People in a player’s sphere of influence can offer clues of that player’s intentions and how those intentions might change if money were involved or the offer of a bigger program became a reality.

“You hear things all the time, ‘This player may go in,’ ‘All right, well, go watch him.’ That’s what we do, but we better not be trying to reach out and trying to influence people’s decisions on whether or not they go in the portal,” Auburn coach Hugh Freeze said. “I don’t know the percentage, but there’s so many players involved in these players now, and I’m not talking about coaches at the college level, but there are a lot of people involved trying to insert themselves or been asked to insert themselves. There’s a lot of that going on.”

As far as solutions, SEC coaches this week offered few.

Said Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin: “I always just go to professional sports when these things come up. Over time, those guys have figured it out. When the fines or penalties become so big, that’s the only time it ever stops.”

“The chaos we’re experiencing is the result of pulling back of regulations,” Lea said.

Freeze acknowledged that he didn’t think the sport would ever go back, but said eliminating immediate eligibility for transfers unless a coach left or was fired or the player had graduated would make the problem disappear. But it would also conveniently tip the power dynamics back in favor of coaches in how they treat players, too.

“It puts an importance on the culture within your building and the experience your player has, all aspects of the player experience are important, and in the player evaluation process, it becomes even more important,” Napier said. “Why is the player coming to the University of Florida? What’s the motivation? All those things are going to be more important in today’s dynamic.”

As coaches huddled in a conference room at the Hilton Sandestin with a host of topics on the docket, of course tampering was among them. But for now, with toothless enforcement and no solutions, little is being done about the stream of complaints across the sport. The only defense?

“At the end of the day, the integrity of the staff is how you solve that problem,” Tennessee coach Josh Heupel said.

 (Photo of Arkansas coach Sam Pittman: Chris Gardner / Getty Images)