College football has spent the last several years moving lines that once seemed permanent. Players can transfer without sitting out, schools can share revenue directly with athletes, NIL has changed what players can earn, and the old four-games-in-five-years eligibility model has given way to a five-for-five system. Almost everything about how a college football roster gets built looks different than it did when Dan Lanning took the Oregon job five years ago.
Then we reached a place that apparently made a lot of people in college football say enough. A series of court rulings opened the door for players who had already pursued NFL opportunities to return to college, including players who had signed professional contracts or spent time on professional rosters. Lanning was asked about it Saturday after Oregon’s second scrimmage, three days before the Big Ten formally drew its own line.
“Once you go to the NFL, to me, you’re in the NFL. You don’t get the opportunity to come back,” Lanning said. He eventually called the situation “unfair to the sport,” but the most interesting part of his answer came when he started talking about what that would mean for the players already on a college roster.
By Tuesday, the Big Ten and SEC had moved to keep former professionals from returning to their schools. The Big 12 followed Wednesday with a rule barring member schools from rostering athletes who had declared for a professional draft without withdrawing, appeared on a professional roster or signed a professional contract. The legal questions surrounding all of this are not finished, but the direction from the major conferences is pretty clear.
I agree with Lanning, although probably not for the reason that would have made the most sense 10 years ago. I do not think this needs to become another argument about protecting amateurism because that version of college football is already gone. The players can receive revenue sharing, NIL money and other benefits, and pretending the sport still fits neatly into the old amateur model does not make much sense anymore.
The better argument is simpler because the work has to mean something. Lanning’s point about roster limits matters here because teams spent the winter recruiting those rosters, then went through spring football, summer workouts and fall camp with the players who chose to be there. If an NFL player comes back in late August, the school does not simply create another chair in the meeting room. Somebody who has been there has to lose one.
That is where this stops being an abstract argument about eligibility and becomes a football argument about fairness. For the last three weeks, Oregon has asked players to compete for almost everything, and that competition only works if the result eventually counts.
The offensive line has spent camp trying to separate a group large enough that Lanning believes six, seven or eight players might be capable of winning football. Receivers have been told that playing time will go to the players who earn the trust of the other 10 people on the field, while Chris Hampton has moved defensive backs around and forced younger defenders to prove they can execute enough of the defense to stay on the field. Special teams repetitions have been charted because Joe Lorig has made it clear that one opportunity on Saturday may be the only opportunity a player gets.
After Oregon’s first scrimmage, Lanning reduced the evaluation to two questions: “Are you accountable and are you capable?” Players who could answer yes would get more opportunities, while players who could not would see their repetitions shrink. That became one of the clearest ways to understand the middle portion of Oregon’s camp because it connected competition directly to what happened next.
A player may spend an entire spring changing his body, learn another position during the summer and fight through three weeks of fall camp just to move from fifth to third in a position room. Another player may lose that same competition and have to decide whether he is willing to keep working when the role he wanted goes somewhere else. That can be uncomfortable, but everybody entered the competition knowing what the rules were.
Dropping a player with NFL experience into that room after the competition has essentially been completed changes those rules after the work has already been done. After watching Oregon go through this particular fall camp, I think that matters more than ever because almost every major theme has come back to earning trust, earning repetitions and making the work translate into a role.
