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MORGANTOWN -- Once upon a time building a roster in college football was a pretty straight-forward thing.
You would go out, recruit freshman, sit them out a year that was called a redshirt, work them in their next season mostly on special teams, let them work as a backup the third year and play as a junior and senior.
If you really needed to fill a hole in the roster, you would take a transfer, but that transfer had to sit out a year so it was not a very popular way to go about it.
If that sit out year worked against you bringing them in, it kept them from leaving if you wanted them to stay because they didn't want to sit out a year.
This is a new world of college football. It's college football, yes, but not amateur football like it used to pretend to be. Rosters are fluid for players to come and go on a whim. Not playing? Leave. Don't like the coach? Leave. Your girlfriend is transferring? Leave.
Someone is offering you more money elsewhere? Leave.
And you don't have to sit out.
"Everybody in college football is learning this on the fly and the rules, they change, you know," West Virginia coach Neal Brown said.
Most point to the transfer portal, but Brown insists it isn't that bad.
It is with the NIL rules, which have turned college football playing into a profession by putting money into the equation and somehow, whenever money gets involved, things go crazy.
It's how you handle this now that determines what kind of football team you are going to have. Brown, and his coaching brethren, must not only recruit freshmen and sell them on the school, he must do his best to keep them around.
He has to satisfy their need for playing time, see that their academic needs are met, but he mostly is caught up in being dependent upon what their economic needs are.
"The portal by itself has pros and there are cons to it, but there are pros," Brown said. "The pros are you can fill a need. Devin Carter is an example. We lost a lot of production at receiver and we didn't have to go sign a freshman or get a junior college kid. We were able to get a Division 1 kid who was really productive."
Carter transferred in for a sixth -- yes that's right -- and final year from NC State and since then through transfers and recruits, Brown has made up for losing his top four receivers last year.
But the portal does more than just fill holes.
"It helps you get to 85 scholarships. We have 83 now. Depending how the next few weeks go we could be at 85 when we play in the fall," Brown said.
Under the previous rules, that would have been almost impossible because if you had any attrition, you couldn't fill it."
It can help the team. It can help the players.
"Look at Tony Mathis," Brown said, referring to his starting tailback last year who has transferred out. "Really good kid, did everything we asked him to do, graduated in four years, wanted to be the bona fide guy but that wasn't to happen here, so he went somewhere else.
"In those instances, it works, like Reese Smith. Good kid' I like him, he wanted to be the guy. He was going to play here but he wasn't necessarily going to be the featured guy. He wasn't going to be happy here.
"In days past, he would transfer down or have to sit. Now he can go to a place where maybe he can be the guy."
Most agree, though, that the cons outweigh the positives.
"The negatives of it are it's really, really hard to plan," Brown said. "The part that really bothers me -- and I'm getting better at it -- but any time we got a kid that decides to transfer it ruins my day. The first thing that hits me is we got an investment in a player … it goes back to recruiting, the relationship building, the financial investment and the time standpoint from a development phase," Brown said.
"There's a waste of an investment there from a coaching perspective. It's hard to plan. You used to be able to sit there and say, 'OK, in this position room, we're going to be able to redshirt this guy; this guy will be a starter for two years.' It's hard to do that anymore.
"Some people feel strongly about the transfer portal. I don't. The windows (which dictate when transfers can make their moves) make it fair. The window in December and January is really big. They were a good addition,"
But …
"The problem is the transfer portal and NIL together," he said. "On the NIL front, players need to have a piece of the pie, but this has grown into a huge commercial enterprise."
It has become, in Brown's eyes, college football getting what it deserved for past sins.
"I believe this and will say it … we're in this situation from a college football standpoint because the industry made selfish decisions for a long time to keep the players out," he said. "We wouldn't necessarily have to deal with this if there was some kind of revenue distribution made when the money started to change in the game. We really created some of the problems we have."
Brown thinks often about how to fix the situation that the portal plus the NIL money has created.
"In football, very rarely is name, image and likeness what you think it is. When I'm thinking name, image and likeness, I'm thinking of somebody on social media who is an influencer or has gotten to the point where they can do advertisements and billboards and things like that," he said.
"What we really have in football and men's basketball is roster bonuses. They are benefitting by being on the roster. I don't know if that was the intent, but that's what it is. So now with the portal and NIL combined you have roster tampering, which is really difficult to prove but does happen. You get bidding and there's no system about what's real or not.
"For all intents and purposes, we're dealing with a professional model but we don't have professional rules. You look at the professional sports. There's rules and there's severe punishment for any type of tampering. Everyone has an equal opportunity. We are dealing with professional aspects but don't have the rules to match it."
All of this has created a difficult situation for everyone.
"Roster building is probably the biggest challenge we have," Brown said. "There's probably not a day that goes by that I'm in the office where I'm not dealing with some kind of NIL issues or roster issue. That's in fall camp, even when you are in the frozen period or not."
And there is an unintended consequence in that the money comes through an independent trust. At WVU, it's called Country Roads Trust, a group that gathers donations that it spreads around to the players, giving it a place in recruiting that takes away some of the power the coach normally would have.
"You're not (in total control). There's a third party," Brown said, but maintains that it has been a huge benefit to WVU football.
"The thing that is beneficial to us is that our collective came about after thorough planning. The infrastructure of that is good from Ken Kendrick to Oliver Luck to Steven Ford, who runs it on a day-to-day basis, to the board they put together," Brown continued.
"It's well thought out. They are doing a good job raising money. It's equitable and that gives us a chance. But, the days of being in total control, outside of Alabama -- and he earned that right -- are gone. There's just some things you have to be uncomfortable with and deal with it."