News broke today from Pete Thamel and Mark Schlabach that the SEC is considering instituting a so-called "luxury tax" on teams in the league that are going above and beyond the revenue-sharing cap for players. According to the report, this could be approved as soon as early December, before the early signing period begins.
This could finally help curtail some of the egregious spending we've seen out of teams like the Texas Longhorns, whose investments in the top end of their roster have not exactly played out the way they wanted them to this year. Texas paid up for their premium positions this season, but with Hollywood Smothers and Trevor Goosby out for the year, not to mention the injuries to Colin Simmons, Cam Coleman, and Ryan Wingo.
The Longhorns are routinely cited as one of the top spenders in the sport, with a number of lists having them in the top overall spot— which helps explain how they can get a guy like Coleman on their roster out of the portal in the first place. Again, those investments have not paid off for them, as they are close to elimination from championship contention in their "all-in" year, but a rule like this may end up curtailing their ability to lure unsuspecting players into their aimless program.
Reported "luxury tax" could finally curtail excessive spending from teams like Texas
Thamel and Schlabach report that the exact details of how the tax would work have not been hashed out yet, but the idea overall has been met favorably in large part. Some apparently want the tax to be lower to encourage teams to "just... pay it directly and report it, and everybody's on the same page and people stop playing games."
As the article mentions, there is no central database where contracts can be looked up, so exact numbers are not available. This means that schools and players are sometimes operating off of educated guesses, and often this leads to a guessing game as to whether an agent is fabricating a number or not.
This would solve that issue as well, and allow more transparency, which would benefit everyone overall. There is limited reporting on the exact deals particular players get— CBS Sports, for example, reported on Marcel Reed's number for this year, but that's because of his visibility on the team; fans don't know, for example, how much Marco Jones's revenue-sharing deal is worth.
This seems like a good idea to help limit some of the crazy spending that has been going on out in the wide world of college football, and help rein in some of the teams like Texas who have been looking to buy a championship since time immemorial. The Aggies are well-equipped in this new world, but are far less aggressive than this kind of team, with several members of the Aggies' currently-top-ranked recruiting class mentioning that A&M's was not the biggest offer on the table for them.
I think most fans would be in favor of this, in other words. Sometimes, there are correctives you don't anticipate that come to these excesses that everyone hates in the sport— and in that vein, though I don't think anyone would have been pitching a luxury tax when NIL began, it seems like a common-sense solution to some of the problems the sport currently has.
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