What Charles Huff said on Capitol Hill

Charles Huff joined several other coaches, athletic department members and student-athletes for a roundtable with Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell to discuss the Protect College Sports Act.

The Protect College Sports Act is a bipartisan bill aimed at establishing rules governing NIL, compensation and the transfer portal. 

Agents:

Huff spent a lot of time discussing agents and their impact on student-athletes. He focused on agents taking advantage of young athletes who don’t know how the system works. 

“The other side of that is having the conversations with these agents who are preying on the naiveness of the student-athletes,” Huff said. “They’re encouraging them to make decisions without all the information. We’ve had multiple cases. I’ve had agents that are charging 35 percent. Those numbers you’re preying on the naiveness of the young man and their families. And, I’m all for them having representation and protecting themselves, but we have to have some governance on the agents.”

The head coach is clear that he’s in favor of agents, but there should be some sort of system for agents to become certified to represent players.

“This bill is going to help put some control over the agents,” Huff said. “Nothing wrong with having them, but they have to be governed. They have to be registered, so that, again, these young men and women aren’t getting preyed upon by people who are taking advantage of things they don’t have to necessarily go through a registry or a process.”

Stability:

The stability in college athletics was another topic that Huff focused on during the roundtable. He talked at length about the new problems that have popped up with all of the new things coaching staffs have to worry about, and how things are getting out of hand.

“The stability is what we need,” Huff said. “The issues that we’ve had, we’ve been in coaching for so long, and we’ve had boundaries and things that have been governed. Now those things are no longer governed.”

He compared the current landscape as “an arms race” and said that the separation between the Power programs and Group of Five programs will only grow if something doesn’t change. 

“If we don’t get some stability, and we don’t get some protection of our rules, the separation of the issue you’re talking about (equality) is going to become greater because over time it’s going to become a fight to stay in the arms race. It’s going to become a fight to fight the agents. It’s going to be a fight to pay the money. It’s going to be a fight to try and keep up with the transfer portal, and fighting those battles is going to take us further and further away from making sure that our facilities and our opportunities match.”

Shots at gambling:

While Huff mainly talked about issues that the bill is aiming to fix, he took a few shots at the recent gambling situations around college athletics. In the last year, multiple players and coaches across multiple sports have been involved in gambling rings, with some players even admitting to throwing games for a payment from bettors. 

Huff took a shot about how coaches now have to spend less time coaching and more time making sure their players aren’t gambling.

“We’re spending less time coaching, developing, engaging our guys in our communities, engaging our guys in our universities, and governing should you not be gambling in the game you’re playing in tonight.”

Later in the roundtable, he brought up the Brendon Sorsby case by saying that his gambling story took away from celebrating Texas winning the Women’s College World Series.

Closing:

Huff was the final invitee to speak at the roundtable, and he wrapped up the event by touching on multiple points, including the importance of college athletics for people across the country.

“I think everyone has touched on some really good points from different perspectives, but let me say this. College athletics is one of the very few things still left in our world that is pure. Brings cultures together, brings race, creed, gender. Whether it’s 100,000 people in a stadium or 100 people on the edge of a pool for two and a half hours or whatever the game time is, we all come together. And, I think a lot of people who have nothing to do with college athletics their lives are going to change because the purity of what we’ve known, whether you’re cheering for Texas, or Oklahoma, or neither and you’re just at the game tailgating and enjoying that celebration, that’s going to be no longer because we’re going to be in a system that is completely broken.”

He spoke about how much college teams impact a community and how some teams might not be around if things continue to move the way its moving. He closed by saying that this bill, or a similar bill, is needed for college athletics.

“This is going to affect our nation. This is not just going to affect our student-athletes, and we need you guys to continue to carry this torch, please.”