INDIANAPOLIS — The Illinois players didn’t want to wear ties.
Bret Bielema couldn’t help but flash back to his own first experience at Big Ten media days as the second-year Illini coach told the story Wednesday. In the early 1990s he was an offensive lineman at Iowa who was invited to the event. He brought a Hawkeye jacket that had probably been worn by 15-20 people before him. His coach, Hayden Fry, required that he dress for the occasion.
Contrast that with this year’s trip, Bielema said, when players went to a local clothing store and gave the owner an opportunity to purchase a suit for them. When Bielema got wind that the players wanted to go without the neckwear, his inclination was to mandate it. His assistants unanimously told him they disagreed.
His player reps at Lucas Oil Stadium took it a step further Wednesday.
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“They don't have ties on, and they're all wearing tennis shoes,” the 52-year-old Bielema said. “I think about the world we're in, and I think about how Hayden Fry would literally probably slap me in the back of the head if I showed up with a pair of tennis shoes and no tie, but I think that's the part of college football that's awesome, right? There's never been a time or a place where I think college football could be more exciting.”
So exciting that Big Ten coaches this week spoke as much about big-picture topics swirling around college athletics as the game itself. Many centered around the explosion of individual rights — manifested in name-image-likeness legislation, the transfer portal and the idea of revenue sharing with student-athletes. Others hit on expansion of both the Big Ten and the College Football Playoff.
Players are doing more of what they want, when they want. Conferences are in flux. Coaches and schools can only adapt and support.
Penn State coach James Franklin spoke positively about his quarterback, Sean Clifford, and other Nittany Lions who are engaged in talks with PSU and the Big Ten about increasing player benefits — medical and others — in a way some have characterized as a union.
“I couldn’t be more proud of them,” Franklin said.
Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh floated the idea that players should receive a cut of the looming media rights contract — projected to be worth more than $1 billion — the Big Ten will secure in the coming weeks and months. Call it an NIL deal, he said. That’s the way things are heading.
Multiple coaches declined to speculate on how large the Big Ten might be in both the short and long term. Ohio State coach Ryan Day was on a golf course with his friend Chip Kelly when he found out last month that USC and UCLA were joining the league.
Day leaned out of his cart and yelled to Kelly, UCLA’s coach, “Hey, we’re in the same conference now!”
His peers were universally supportive of the additions — at least publicly — while acknowledging travel complications of a nationwide conference spanning four time zones.
“You’re going to wake up watching Big Ten football and go to bed watching Big Ten football,” Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald said. “It will definitely be a new thing and a new opportunity, but I think the commissioner (Kevin Warren) said it best, change is kind of the word of college football right now. We'll lean forward and embrace that.”
Said Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck: “The first thing that came to my mind was ‘L.A., are you kidding me?’ That's perfect. The Big Ten now is represented from the West Coast to the East Coast.”
And Rutgers’ Greg Schiano: “You do what you need to do in the times that you're in.”
Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz — the dean of the league entering his 24th season leading the Hawkeyes and who turns 67 next week — was the loudest dissenter on the NIL front, saying he is “really concerned about the path that college football is on.”
Iowa, the rare school that didn’t bring in anybody from the transfer portal this offseason, recently formed a collective that Ferentz has come around on. The coach urged caution for student-athletes — many still teenagers — suddenly being pulled in myriad directions.
“I think sometimes we lose sight about just how young our players are and just how recently they maybe are in the backyard catching a pass or out playing in the street playing touch football,” Ferentz said. “It goes quickly for those guys.”
Harbaugh responded to a recent Day comment that OSU would need $13 million in NIL money to keep its roster intact each year by saying Michigan “could maybe double that.” Fitzgerald said Northwestern — now the only Big Ten school without a collective — has one “in the works.”
What it looks like in the future is unclear, all agreed. A uniform, national rule on what is and isn’t permissible would be ideal.
In the meantime, uncertainty rolls on. And the conversations won’t end when games arrive.
“We’ve got to continue to find a sweet spot with how (NIL) is managed and how it's used,” Maryland’s Michael Locksley said. “I’m all for it. I've been on the record for being all for NIL. We'll continue to navigate it as we learn it.”