That would auger poorly for Napier’s future if he can’t persuade someone like Etienne to stay committed to his vision.
Poster on another board claims to know and speak to players on the team. Claims the players love Napier and that Etienne and James plan on returning. Said he didn't know about Dez. Claimed he was accurate about the information he gave the prior year as well if people doubted him.
While losing Etienne would be a big blow, running backs in general are dime a dozen, rather spend money on the O and D line
The only way for change in the NCAA were “legislation or litigation.” NCAA stuck to wanting all the money and lost 9-0 in SCOTUS (how often do you see a 9-0 decision). Basically, the NCAA said “you get no insurance, no pay and must live with our stupid rules AND you can’t do anything outside our framework.” Kavanaugh went further, saying: “Businesses like the NCAA cannot avoid the consequences of price-fixing labor by incorporating price-fixed labor into the definition of the product.”49 Although Justice Kavanaugh did suggest that the NCAA could protect itself from future judicial scrutiny by engaging in collective bargaining with student athletes,50 he also flatly concluded that “[n]owhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. . . . The NCAA is not above the law.” There is no doubt that the current situation is a sad cluster, but the NCAA did it to themselves (and us fans). Note that SCOTUS’ ruling was narrow (NIL) but there is a requirement under antitrust law for understanding multimarket factors to justify anticompetitive behavior. Few quotes: Justice Gorsuch remarked that the asserted benefits of the rules “[a]dmittedly” accrue only to “consumers in the NCAA’s seller-side consumer market rather than to student-athletes whose compensation the NCAA fixes in its buyer-side labor market,” but that “the NCAA argued [that] the district court needed to assess its restraints in the labor market in light of their procompetitive benefits in the consumer market — and the district court agreed to do so.” Justice Kavanaugh also alluded to the fact that the purported competitive benefits of the rules do not accrue to the student athletes, lamenting that the “enormous sums of money” that collegiate athletics generate “flow to seemingly everyone except the student athletes.”84 The Court’s references to the fact that the NCAA’s multimarket balancing went unchallenged could suggest that it has reservations about such balancing; at the very least, the references suggest that the Court would invite a line of argument regarding the permissibility of multimarket balancing.” NCAA has a window to fix this with an approach tailored to the revenue sports including collective bargaining (with associated transfer/pay limits). They likely will not b/c they just want their money and right now alumni are paying the players and the NCAA/schools/conferences keep the TV money, so who cares if the fans hate it? Point being that the NCAA drove us into this ditch and I find it highly unlikely they will get the game out of it.
Etienne is extremely close with his brother playing in nearby Jacksonville and I believe has an NIL deal with him. Sure it can be argued he should be getting more carries, but it's not like he's riding the bench. Imo, I don't think there is anything to worry about concerning Etienne.
