Freeze Finds Changing College Football Landscape "Extremely Hard" to Navigate

The college football landscape is facing new, groundbreaking changes, leaving Hugh Freeze struggling to keep up

While happy with the change to the transfer portal, Hugh Freeze isn't to keen on the change to NLI Mandatory Credit: Dale Zanine-Imagn Images / Dale Zanine-Imagn Images

The Auburn Tigers are faced with another change to the ever-shifting landscape of college football.

The NCAA has eliminated the national letter of intent program. It was a binding agreement between a prospective athlete and their chosen school. The program has been in place since 1964. It will go into effect immediately, starting with the 2025 recruiting class.

According to ESPN, the NLI will be replaced with a new financial aid agreement. It will have a lot of the same aspects of NLI but will likely include a contract related to an impending revenue-sharing model across college athletics.

In addition to that change, the transfer portal window has been shortened from 45 days to 20, something that coaches throughout the country will tell you they don’t mind.

Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze joins every coach in the nation in having to dedicate time to learn the new landscape of the sport. There is going to be a bit of a learning curve.

“Extremely hard,” Freeze said on the difficulty of making yet another adjustment. “I don’t know how people keep up with things because I’m not on any news right now. I just heard all of this in our staff meeting and I have no idea. When you say there’s no more National Letter of Intent, what binds the kid to us in December?

“It just made our world even more complicated.”

Freeze was pleased to hear the transfer portal window was shortened but would like to see it get cut down further.

“I’m all for that,” Freeze said. “I wish it was only seven days, I don’t think it should be that long (20 days). I think all the coaches would agree with that, that it’s still too long, but I’m glad it’s shortened some.”

Freeze is among the growing number of people who are not pleased with the direction college athletics appears to be heading and want changes to be made.

“You combine that (the longer transfer portal window) with all the free-roaming other schools that want to ravish your roster constantly, that’s already started,” Freeze said. “We’ve created a world that’s not real healthy, I don’t think, for our sport.”

Despite being unenthusiastic about some of the changes being made, Freeze still realizes the platform he has as the head coach of a college football team. However, it’s clear that he misses the way the world of college sports once worked.

“We as coaches still have the opportunity to impact a lot of kids and a lot of lives and do a great job,” Freeze said. “We’re all blessed to have very good jobs. It’s sad that some of it is tainted by different things that have changed it so drastically that I don’t think teach very good life lessons.”