Dabo Being Dabo

You'll be shocked to hear this, but Dabo Swinney got in front of a microphone and dished some scorching takes that were decidedly unpopular with the masses.

First, we have this bizarre response to a very fair question where Dabo essentially compares his players to Delta baggage handlers.

Q: Do you understand when people say, 'Well, coaches like Dabo Swinney and Nick Saban are making in the $10 million range, why shouldn't the athletes be able to profit even before they get on campus?'

"Well, Nick Saban is 70 years old. I'm 52 years old. None of us set markets on what we do. We live in a capitalist society. The head of Delta probably makes a lot more than the people who are checking your baggage in, but those people are as vital as anybody. None of us set markets on what we do. It's a free market we live in, in anything. It's just that our jobs are so visible and so public. I can tell you this: None of us got into coaching to make money, but I don't apologize for being successful."

He simultaneously defers to the free market for his salary while also lobbying against a free market for players in nearly the same breath. Also, "baggage handlers" doesn't feel like the correct comparison for guys that are going to draw millions of eyeballs and generate millions of dollars in revenue for their athletic programs.

Reminder: a high schooler just inked an $8 million NIL deal. Delta pays their front desk workers and baggage handlers about $16 an hour.

But Dabo wasn't done! In the same press conference, he basically said that he had no intention of using the transfer portal to build his roster.

"My transfer portal is right there in that locker room because if I'm constantly going out every year and adding guys from the transfer portal, I'm telling all those guys in that locker room that I don't believe in them, that I don't think they can play," Swinney said. "We're also not doing our job as coaches and recruiters if we're bringing in a bunch of transfers."

That's very noble of him to stick to his guns like that, but it will be fascinating to see how this works out for him while Alabama and Ohio State are adding guys like Justin Fields, Jameson Williams, Henry To'oto'o, Trey Sermon, Eli Ricks, Jonah Jackson, and Tanner McCalister.

It's one thing to be against the portal, it's another thing to just allow other teams to have an advantage over you because they're using it and you aren't.

Real Spring Games?

It's spring game season which means folks across the country will pretend to get hype about a two-hand touch intrasquad scrimmage because that's the only semblance of college football we're going to get for the next five months.

But what if the spring game could be a *real* game with an actual opponent trying to win?

But there’s also an option I’ve rarely heard raised publicly, though it has been thrown out to me privately. Why not cut the regular season down to 11 games and move the 12th game to the spring? Last season, 115 of the 130 FBS teams played FCS opponents, in games that we all know were scheduled to pad win-loss records (and also to drive revenue for the FCS team’s athletic department). They’re called guarantee games for a reason.

So play those games in the spring. Sell tickets for them closer to what you’d typically charge for a single-game ticket. Pay the FCS team like you would in the fall.

The money would still flow to lesser-resourced athletic programs, which is a good thing. The FBS program would get an actual competitive environment, which would allow new or younger players to get experience and coaches to get a live look at various position battles. And it would put butts in seats at stadiums that don’t sell spring-game tickets the way Georgia or Nebraska do, at a time of the year when fans are starved for football content and theoretically would be happier to see a lopsided matchup than they are in, say, mid-November. Fans already pay anywhere from five to 20 bucks to attend some of these scrimmages. Imagine if there was something more at stake.

This is never going to happen, but I wouldn't hate it! The only downside I see is that fewer players would get to play and the spring game is typically the only time most walk-ons and practice squad players actually get to take the field in the 'Shoe.

Outside of that, this seems like a win all around.

Respect

Ohio State and Michigan have the most bitter rivalry in all of sport, but some things just transcend the hate.

All class and nothing but respect – the way it should be.

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Up Next

• Saturday: Ohio State football spring game, Noon (Big Ten Network)