Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) raised eyebrows this week when he suggested that Congress may need to consider ways of penalizing college athletes who break NIL contracts.
Public reports of Tuberville’s comments, which he offered Monday at the Morning Quarterback Club in Birmingham, drew criticism on social media, where people recalled the former college football coach prematurely abandoning his posts at Texas Tech and Ole Miss without appearing to suffer any financial consequences.
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Indeed, Tuberville’s departure from TTU in 2012 became a textbook example of the historically one-sided expectations of loyalty when it comes to college athletes and athletic departments’ existing employees. Tuberville was having dinner with some Red Raiders recruits at the time when he was announced as the next coach at Cincinnati. Reportedly, Tuberville left the recruits mid-meal and did not return.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Tuberville said in seeking to stabilize college sports, he is not looking to hold athletes to a different standard of commitment than coaches or administrators.
“Everyone should have skin in the game,” said the first-term senator.
Asked about his own employment history in coaching, Tuberville said: “Here’s the deal: I think coaches should be held accountable. … But, you know, if you can get an AD or a president or a school to give you just a one-way contract—where, if they fire you, you get paid, but if you leave, you don’t have to pay anything—I mean, you’ve, you’ve hit the jackpot. But that’s what’s happening with colleges. I mean, these kids are coming in, they’re not getting a contract, but they’re getting promised a certain amount of money. And then, you know, there’s no consequences if they get up and leave.”
Tuberville added that despite the many public examples of college coaches jumping ship midway through their contract term, with seemingly no repercussion, buyouts in employment agreements do often serve as a deterrent.
“Sometimes guys have $3 million buyouts and another school says, ‘Hey, it’s worth it to us to pay $3 million for this coach,’” Tuberville said. “But you gotta remember now that that $3 million is taxable to the coach. There’s a lot of repercussion from that. There were times that people would call me and say, ‘Coach, what’s your buyout? Five million? Well, we can’t afford that.’ Then they’re going down the road. So there is some repercussion. It is not just the ones you see that work out. There are many, many more that don’t work out.”
On the flip side, schools have increasingly shelled out more and more money to pay coaches not to complete their contracts. According to Sportico’s college sports finances database, public FBS schools made football-related severance payments of $147 million in 2022-23.
Additionally, Sportico‘s coaching salary guide, released Thursday, includes 21 college football coaches in the top 100, underlining the healthy financial circumstances of the most prominent names.
With Republicans set to take control of the Senate next Congress, Tuberville, who sits on the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, struck a slightly pessimistic note about the likelihood of passing NCAA reform legislation in 2025. In July 2023, he introduced a piece of NIL legislation with outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.V.), one of over a dozen Congressional bills that failed to reach the floor for a vote.
“There’s no perfect bill,” Tuberville said. “There’s no perfect way to do this. At the end of the day, we just gotta look out for the … institutions, players, families—everybody that’s gotta be on board with this to make sure we save it. And I’m not sure we’ve got enough people to do that right now.”
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