Joel Klatt can’t stand NIL re-signing announcements

Joel Klatt has had it with college football’s latest social media phenomenon.

In the wake of USC quarterback Jayden Maiava’s re-signing announcement, racking up nearly five million impressions on X, Fox’s lead college football analyst didn’t hold back his frustration with what’s become a growing trend across the sport.

“I can’t with the re-signing of players, I’m sorry,” Klatt said.

USC’s social media account posted Maiava’s re-signing announcement on Dec. 16, followed by a flurry of similar posts for other Trojans players. Tobias Raymond, Chasen Johnson, Romero Ison, Jahkeem Stewart, and Kendarius Reddick all got the graphic treatment announcing they were staying with the program.

But for Klatt, these announcements feel fundamentally different from how free agency works in professional sports.

“I started seeing some of these announcements on social media, guys would text me these announcements, and this is going to sound like I’m picking on guys,” Klatt said. “This is not their fault, but like Malik Washington, Waymond Jordan, LaNorris Sellers, there’s all these stories about like, ‘Oh, they’re re-signing. They’re working on a deal to stay.’ And I’m like, I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to see it. You mean, wait, was he about to leave?”

Joel Klatt isn’t blaming the players. But in the NFL, fans know when a guy is a free agent and can walk. So when he re-signs, it makes sense. In college, a player is already on the team, already getting NIL money, and then announces he’s re-signing? It just makes fans wonder what they missed.

“This is so different than in the National Football League when your favorite team has a player that you love that you know is a free agent, and then they re-sign him, and you’re like, ‘Nice!'” Klatt contiuned. “That feels a lot different than like I’m a fan of a college team and I just think that this player who’s committed to this school, who’s at this school, who has more eligibility left, and is making a large sum of money through NIL, and then all of a sudden he’s like, ‘I’m re-signing.’ It’s like, ‘I didn’t know you thought about leaving.'”

But Klatt’s real issue isn’t the social media pageantry. It’s what’s happening behind the scenes.

“I don’t think that this is good for players, either, I really don’t. And let me tell you why: these contracts can be binding, and they can be loose, but it all depends on how they’re negotiated because there’s not a formality to the process,” Klatt explained. “So, the schools can kind of do whatever they want to do. They’re making their own rules, and then there’s some representation out there that is representing college players, and they want to play by their own rules.”

The lack of regulation in college athlete representation is a real problem. Unlike NFL players who are represented by NFLPA-certified agents, college athletes can hire essentially anyone to negotiate their NIL deals. There’s no registration requirement, no oversight, no baseline standard.

And according to Klatt, some of these representatives have no idea what they’re doing.

“And some of the representatives, by the way, are not very sophisticated. Guess why? Because they’re not representing a client that’s part of an association or a union, so they don’t have to register,” he added. “So the players can hire whomever. It can be like Uncle Eddie. We don’t know who these representatives are. That’s not to say that all of them are bad, but there are some that certainly don’t know what they’re doing. So, there are players because of that, that are signing contracts that they don’t even really know what they’re signing.”

Despite all his complaints about NIL representation and re-signing announcements, Joel Klatt still believes in college football.

“I remain very optimistic about our sport,” Klatt said. “I really do. I think college football’s in a great spot. I think that it can get better, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the problems.”

But his optimism won’t stop the re-signing trend. Schools will keep celebrating players who decide to stay, and fans will keep wondering if they were ever really thinking about leaving. It’s just part of college football now.