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Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden made an interesting analogy about the current state of college football, as the Super Bowl winner compared the game to rented golf clubs.
Jon Gruden, 61 yers old, began his coaching career at the collegiate level in the mid 1980s at the University of Tennessee. He then worked at Southeast Missouri State in 1988 and Pacific in 1989 before making the jump to the NFL a year later.
College football has changed a ton in the last five years, let alone in the last three decades, and the former Super Bowl-winning head coach clearly isn’t a fan of the direction the sport is headed.
“The repetition is the mother of learning. Right now you’re just seeing a bunch of rental clubs,” Gruden said during an interview on Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich. “You ever play golf and get a set of rental clubs? It’s like, ‘I don’t know how to hit this club. I never putted with this putter.’ You make a lot of excuses. That’s what I’m seeing in college sports right now. Everybody is looking out for the transfer portal and how much NIL money we deserve. It’s kinda sickening really.”
Back in September, Gruden was seen wearing University of South Florida gear on the sidelines at Raymond James Stadium when Bulls hosted the Miami Hurricanes for a Week 4 matchup, speculating that Gruden could be eyeing a gig at the collegiate level. The former Super Bowl winner has instead gone the content creation route as he recently joined Barstool Sports, where he blessed us with a recent soliloquy on why he roots for the zombies in The Walking Dead.
While NIL and the transfer portal have upended college football, as it allows players to bounce from program to program, college basketball has been dealing with the phenomenon of rental players for 20 years now ever since the NBA decided in 2005 that players could only be drafted after they’ve spent a year out of high school.
