Miami (Ohio) head coach Chuck Martin said the quiet part out loud.
Many players use the transfer portal to move from Group of Five schools to bigger opportunities each offseason. Behind closed doors, there are sometimes conversations between those bigger schools and prospective players, either starting a recruitment or encouraging them to enter the portal in the first place, tampering that is against NCAA transfer portal rules.
While previewing the RedHawks' special teams entering the 2024 season, Martin took issue with the phrasing of a question which asking about what the team is doing at kicker now that it “lost” starter Graham Nicholson from last year. He accused Alabama of tampering to land him.
"We didn't lose him, he's at Alabama. We know exactly where he's at," Martin said. "You media people, it's all pretend. No, Alabama stole our kicker, they illegally recruited our kicker and stole him from us. That's a fact."
Martin didn't want to pretend that he took no issue with what happened, but did acknowledge that it's the current state of the sport. There were other schools which tried to illegally recruit Nicholson, Martin added.
"That's college football," Martin said. "We live in this la-la world like hey, let's not talk reality. I don't know why. Everybody knows what's going on. So yeah, Alabama stole our kicker, a couple other schools tried to steal him."
Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer denied wrongdoing in a response to Martin’s comments on Thursday.
“I don’t know anything about that comment,” DeBoer said. “He entered the portal and we reached out to him. That’s how it goes, right? So we did everything that we were supposed to.”
Kalen DeBoer response https://t.co/eXaHbucjFU pic.twitter.com/zlK03aM67X
— Nick Kelly (@_NickKelly) August 22, 2024
Nicholson became the first kicker in MAC history to win the Lou Groza Award as the nation's best kicker in 2023, going 27-of-28 (96.4%) on his field goal attempts and 35-of-37 on extra points (94.6%). He was a consensus All-American.
