Explosive New Book and CBS Report Expose the Chaos of NIL, Portal Era in College Football

This looks to be the most popular and entertaining college football season ever, but at the same time, the game is threatening to destroy itself with money, money, money, coupled with a near-absence of structure, accountability and rules.

That's the examination undertaken by two investigative journalists, Armen Keteyian and John Talty, authors of a new book called The Price: What It Takes To Win In College Football's Era of Chaos.

This weekend Jeff Glor of CBS Saturday Morning profiled the two as part of a segment on the state of the game, a couple of hours before Florida State met Georgia Tech in Dublin, Ireland.

After years of denial and delay by the NCAA, the 2021 Supreme Court decision produced an explosion of change. Players could now profit from their Name, Image and Likeness. They were free to transfer schools within two established windows.

Fans love the hope that the portal created, but there's a seamy underside to all the mayhem and upheaval in the game. Keteyian said, "I've been covering college football for like, 40 years. I've never seen the amount of frustration and exhaustion and anger and confusion that's going on right now."

NCAA president Charlie Baker admits, "Right now there really isn't a framework."

In the absence of one glaring excesses emerge. Coauthor Talty said, "In our book we tell the story of before a bowl game, multiple Maryland players asking the head coach for $50,000 to play in the game. Either you're gonna pay it or we're not playing. That's what coaches are facing now."

This June for a recruiting event at the University of Texas, Steve Sarkisian and his staff parked a row of Lamborghinis in front of the athletic center. "Welcome to Texas," Keteyian said.

The erosion of control within the program became a big motivator in Nick Saban's decision to retire from coaching. This spring he told a Senate panel, "All the things I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics."

It's the speed and escalation of change that threatens to undermine college football. NCAA head Baker remains optimistic. He said to Glor, "It will take a couple of years for the dust to settle, but that will be time to put it place something we don't have now, which is rules, transparency, accountability and a framework."

Keteyian believes college football desperately needs voices to advocate for reason and limits. "They need people that have a big picture and want to get in the trenches and try to work this out and don't have their own self interests at heart," he said.