The game on the field is fine. It’s everything around it that smells, and Manny Diaz isn’t pretending otherwise.
The Duke head coach told Jim Rome this week that the churn of NIL deals, transfer portal chaos, and conference-level squabbling has created a product where the football is good but the ecosystem around it is rotting. His fear isn’t about next season’s record. It’s about the kid who never falls in love with the sport in the first place.
“I know everybody’s sick of hearing it and it sucks because the game is good, but everything out of the game kind of stinks right now,” Diaz said. “The issue is we can’t agree on what’s best because we’re all competing. And no one’s really in charge, so everybody wants what’s best for them. We’re not collaborating on what’s best for the game.”
Then came the line that ought to hang on every athletic director’s wall: “I think about the 12-year-old kid who, like when we were 12 when we fell in love with the sport. The games are good, but there’s all this other stuff and it’s just not the same. And I worry that if we continue to screw this up, we’re going to alienate our next generation of fans.”
Diaz knows the problem from the inside. Duke sued quarterback Darian Mensah after he announced plans to enter the transfer portal despite signing a two-year deal with the Blue Devils in 2025. The dispute was eventually resolved, and Mensah landed at Miami. But the episode crystallized what Diaz sees as the sport’s central contradiction: players want to be compensated like professionals, yet the agreements they sign carry no real teeth.
“If you want to be compensated, if you want to be business, if you want to be grown-ups, then you have to honor your contract,” Diaz said. “If you don’t honor your contract, then there’s going to be consequences.” He pointed out that every professional league already solved this. College football doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel — it just needs to pick one and put it on the axle.
Diaz was asked about Georgia Tech head coach Brent Key’s recent remark that adults are often the bigger problem in college athletics. He agreed, with a caveat. Adults screw things up, sure. But in the pros, adults live with consequences. In college football right now, nobody does. That’s the gap, and it’s widening.
The question of who actually governs the sport remains unanswered. The Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan bill working its way through the U.S. Senate, aims to bring federal stability to college athletics. Diaz acknowledged the oddity of a sport with billion-dollar television contracts turning to Washington for a lifeline.
“Right now, are we depending on Congress?” he said. “We know we don’t have a commissioner over the sport. So in a weird way, going to D.C. and asking them to save us is quite extraordinary, but I don’t really know what other options we have.”
Twenty-two years on a sideline teaches you that when everybody’s in charge, nobody is. College football has 134 FBS programs, a dozen conferences, and not one person who can bang the gavel and say, “This is how we’re doing it.” The pro leagues figured this out decades ago. Diaz isn’t asking for anything radical. He’s asking for a rulebook that means something and somebody with the authority to enforce it. The film doesn’t lie — what’s on the field still works. What’s off it is a different story, and the clock is ticking.
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