As transfer portal chaos and NIL have made college football more and more like the NFL, Ryan Day has a solution to some of it that he admits sounds crazy, but believes is worth exploring.
A draft for high school prospects, the same way America's big four professional sports draft players out of college or internationally.
"It's not too far-fetched for me to think there's a way that you could actually have a draft and build it like the NFL," Day said an interview with ESPN on Wednesday. "I know that seems a little bit out there. But we're gonna need a lot of help to get there, I can tell you that right now."
Fascinating exchange with Ryan Day here. I asked him if he could wave a wand and change something about college football, what would he do?
— Kevin Clark (@bykevinclark) April 1, 2026
"It's not too far fetched for me to think there's a way to actually have a draft and build it like the NFL."
A detailed explanation: https://t.co/mPSVtpO7w2 pic.twitter.com/bkogScDdR2
Day's argument for a potential draft stems from his broader view of the state of the sport at this juncture. With the ways that teams are essentially buying their prospects with NIL and the transfer portal basically giving each player free agency every year, he sees one of two paths to long-term sustainability: Either fully commit to what the pros do or revert back toward the pre-NIL days of amateurism.
"Once we started going down this road of NIL, we have to go one of two ways, in my opinion," Day said. "We almost have to go back to the way we were before, or we need to go all the way toward the NFL. I think right now, we're sort of in purgatory. And I think until we start to make some hard decisions and create that overall structure, we're still gonna be in this phase."
Day doesn't have an exact idea of how the draft would work, but it feeds back into that larger vision.
"If you want to become part of it, then you put your name in, and there's a lot that comes with that," Day said. "I know it's kind of an out-there idea. But I think it's sort of that or going back to the way we were with amateurism. I'm having a hard time figuring out how we work through this right now with this NIL."
Above all else, what Day feels college football needs is leadership. The NCAA famously put little guardrails around NIL, and early enforcement made by NIL Go, Deloitte's clearinghouse for NIL deals, was met with backlash and has seemingly become toothless since.
"That, to me, is the No. 1 thing," Day said. "We've gotta figure out an enforcement system that can start enforcing rules. I have a lot of ideas on it, probably not for this conversation, but that would be the No. 1 thing. I think most college coaches would say the same thing."
