Georgia's Smart Has NIL, Scholarship Solution

Bulldogs' football coach Kirby Smart advocated for a solution on NIL and scholarship that he said he's 'comfortable with'

With the retirement of Alabama head coach Nick Saban, one of his proteges, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, one could argue, is the standard-bearer for the SEC.

He’s certainly one of the coaches everyone goes to for a quote - and he had some things to say about NIL.

In an interview with 247Sports he talked about his long relationship with Saban. Smart was Saban’s defensive coordinator at Alabama from 2008-15 before taking over at Georgia in 2016. He’s taken Georgia to back-to-back national titles and is 94-16 as a head coach.

He said a lot about Saban, and then the conversation turned to NIL.

Smart said he’s worried about both NIL and the transfer portal “negatively impacting” both players and coaches. He’s not sure if all of the options that student-athletes have now is a good thing.

“What wears on so many of our players and players across college football is, ‘What else could I be doing? Where can I go and get immediate success? Where is the best pathway for me?’” Smart said.

He believes, too often, student-athletes are looking at the alternatives and not focused on what they currently have.

Smart has lost some talent in the transfer portal this offseason, but he’s also had big-name players return for another season such as quarterback Carson Beck.

NIL plays a role in that, and everyone is trying to determine a solution to NIL that works across the country. The NCAA wants a congressional solution. In lieu of that, the NCAA is pursuing solutions that would somewhat smooth out the blurred lines between universities and collectives.

Smart has his own solution, and it’s different. After acknowledging that coaches can be free agents, and making the argument that they can also be fired or bought out and players can’t, he proposed that players check a box when they arrive on campus -NIL or a scholarship, but not both. And the NIL players could be, in effect, terminated.

"I would be really comfortable if a kid just checked the box before he came to school and said, 'I'm going to be a student-athlete on scholarship, and I get to keep my scholarship for four or five years,' Smart said. “Or if a kid said, 'I want to come in and have NIL, but I also can lose that and be terminated.' Most kids would choose the NIL path, but 15-20 kids a year would take the scholarship and make a commitment to stay in 2-3 years."