Former Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer is wrong with his NIL take

The Ohio State football program is one of the programs that has embraced NIL. It's a big change in the college football landscape that hasn't gone over well with some programs. Some programs have failed to get collectives together to raise enough funds to be competitive.

Former college football coaches hate NIL. It's one of the things that drove Nick Saban into retirement this year. A man who used to lead the Ohio State football program hates it too. Urban Meyer had some interesting things to say about NIL recently.

Meyer believes that NIL has evolved into cheating. He says that's not what the intent of the rule is. He's right about the intent. What it's evolved into is not what administrators thought it was going to be. But his general take on NIL is wrong and it's very typical of a former coach to say.

NIL is not cheating. It's giving kids a chance to receive money in a way that's out in the open. The best recruits were always getting money under the table, including a few in Meyer's program. It happened everywhere. Now, everything is out in the open and accounted for.

I do believe that it's giving the bigger and best programs an advantage they don't need. They already have everything going for them. It's part of the reason why the bigger programs are about to split off into a completely different division. Smaller programs have no chance of winning a national title with NIL right now.

What this does do is level the playing field between the top 30 programs in the country. All of them have a shot to get the best recruits because they can all offer money to these kids. It widens the national championship pool among those programs.

Meyer and other former coaches don't like NIL because it's different from what they are used to. But it's not going anywhere so they need to get over it.