Accountability arrives for some players in the transfer portal era

Credit: Jordan Prather-Imagn Images

By Chris Marler

There has been an outcry and clamoring for guardrails around certain parts of college football for a while now. The Wild Wild West we heard about in the eighties with the Southwest conference doesn’t hold a candle to the chaos that is currently happening in the transfer portal and NIL era.

We are however finally seeing some pushback, some guardrails, and most importantly, some consequences to the actions by the people running amok in the portal.

There isn’t a better example of what’s wrong, and now potentially what’s right in the sport, than the Demond Williams saga. The 19 year old Washington quarterback signed a $4.7 million NIL deal. Just a day later however, he entered the transfer portal and was rumored to be heading to LSU.

The reason Demond Williams entered the portal days after signing a deal with UW, is because there’s never been a consequence for players to do whatever they want.

Washington is drawing the line.

If you hate the “Wild West” world of college sports – you should be supporting UW pic.twitter.com/7uAluQliA0

— Aaron Torres (@Aaron_Torres) January 7, 2026

Another example is former South Carolina tight end Michael Smith. Smith was the first player for South Carolina to enter the portal back in October and then sat out the rest of the season in order to preserve his eligibility. He then committed to Fran Brown at Syracuse in December before the portal even opened.

Things got weird from there. Smith and South Carolina’s staff remained in touch and when classes restarted after Winter Break, he was in Columbia with every intent of rejoining the team. What he failed to tell the staff was that he visited Syracuse over that break and signed an NIL agreement with the Orangemen.

He was shocked when he found out that they were going to hold him to the agreement.

We have seen over and over the NCAA be pushed around and their authority challenged in recent years. With good reason. The NCAA has been the most “that’s going on your permanent record” governing body imaginable. While they weren’t the ones who stepped in to make things right, it was still good to see anyone in this sport have to relearn something that a lot of people in this sport have forgotten – accountability.