(upbeat music) - Recently, my colleague Mary Gamba, on our sister series, "Lessons in Leadership," sat down with Bryan Felt, who's the director of Athletics and Recreational Services at Seton Hall University.

College athletics.

Student athletes.

Are they always students?

We know they're athletes.

Are they professionals?

They're getting paid.

Name, image, and likeness.

Getting paid for that.

The transfer portal.

Some kids going to four different colleges in four years because some other school offers them more money.

Complex, changing time.

And what is the role of the federal government right now?

Congress is dealing with this issue and may take a strong hand in regulating what's going on in college athletics.

Mary Gamba and I talking with Bryan Felt.

Check it out.

- Good to see you, Bryan.

- Good to see you.

- All right, so... Describe your job as the athletic director in a world that is constantly swirling and changing every minute.

- Well, it's different than the one I started.

You know, it certainly has changed and morphed into something else.

Well, I mean, I think the most fundamental change is how we treat or, really, utilize a lot of our student athletes today in terms of, you know, listen, they're now, you know, able to be paid.

So these are, you know, they can be looked at as, you know, a lot of different things.

You have people out there.

There's a camp that wants to call them employees.

There are some that wanna keep them as student athletes.

But, at the end of the day, they're partaking in the portion of the athletic department's revenue.

So we are revenue sharing with student athletes.

Without question, the biggest change in college athletics.

And that's just one of many.

- So teams that, schools that Have big quote, "NIL money," name, image, and likeness money, to pay their athletes for their name, image, and likeness, they have a certain advantage.

And there's a thing called a transfer portal.

Can you explain that, Bryan?

Why that's so incredibly impactful to intercollegiate athletics.

- I think more than anything, Steve, what it is that it makes it so impactful is that the revenue sharing and the transfer portal play off each other in such a perfect storm, if you will.

And many would agree, not perfect.

But to my point.

So you can revenue share with your student athletes.

You can now, because it used to be, the old rule was, if I wanted to transfer, I would have to sit a year residence wherever I went.

So I lost a year of eligibility while I sat before I could play.

Now, you can transfer whenever you want as many times as you want.

So what that does is, because of revenue sharing, again, we're talking about football and basketball specifically here being the sports that are really, really driving these numbers.

- Because of revenue sharing, what happens is these student athletes can go into this portal every year.

And it really becomes like, you know, they're going shopping, in a sense, right?

The market for the costs of these players, and these student, again, student athletes that are getting to transfer every year just continues to keep rising and rising and rising at really, at paces that it's really almost gonna be difficult to sustain in the long run.

- Absolutely.

Mary, jump in.

- Yeah, Brian.

Talk about the wellness of these students though.

I mean, obviously, they are still in their transformative years.

It's hard enough.

I had two kids that did competitive ice hockey, club hockey.

We traveled all over the East Coast.

The finances involved, and the pressure, and the strain.

Then they get to college.

And it's now compounded by this additional factor.

How are you ensuring at Seton Hall and how are other universities ensuring their wellness throughout this entire process and helping them to balance this huge demand that's put on them now?

- Well, I would remind everyone that our business, my business, my job is those 270+ student athletes that are here at Seton Hall, my job is to ensure that they have a tremendous collegiate experience.

Granted, wins and loss play a part in that.

They always will.

But education has got to be the top of the list.

We're trying to ensure that they get educated.

That they, obviously, come here.

And, to your point, they're taken care of so that mom and dad know they're sending them to the right place.

Or anytime you're gonna send your student, your child to a college, as you mentioned, I have two in college, you know, you're worried about their wellbeing.

Same goes for our student athletes.

I mean, mental health is become more and more critical every year.

We spend a lot of time and our resources to ensure that we have all of that available.

All of those resources available to our student athletes.

And, I mean, when you look at a student athlete's, you know, experience in four years, their time in our athletic training space with our sports medicine staff is crucial.

So that's where our focus always has to remain.

And I think that's what we have to remind ourselves sometimes, is that we talk about all of the chaos with the business right now.

And there's no business, I think, that's changed more dramatically in the last couple years than college athletics.

But what, at the end, our business is is ensuring young people have tremendous collegiate experiences and go on to graduate college.

That's what is at the core of what we do.

- You know, I was mentioning, excuse me, to Bryan earlier that I was watching a business program on CNBC.

And Senator Ted Cruz.

This isn't about politics at all.

It's about the fact that Senator Cruz and a Democratic colleague of his have introduced bipartisan legislation to address a lot of the issues Bryan's talking about.

More specifically, and Brian, I'm not gonna go into it, and if you want to find out more, go on to Senator Cruz's website to find out.

But one piece of the legislation, which is not a law, it's being discussed in the United States Senate and Congress, is to change this issue of the transfer portal, saying that, instead of having an athlete, a student athlete go to potentially four schools in four years, every year go to different school, because they're getting more money from that school, whatever it is, that Senator Cruz is proposing that you get one transfer.

And the only way you can get a second transfer is if there's some sort of hardship.

Or the coach leaves, right?

To what degree do you believe that government, in this case the feds, jumping in to regulate the transfer portal and putting some caps on it makes sense?

Or should they just stay out of it?

- You know what, Steve?

I think if you'd asked me this two years ago, I would have probably said, why get involved in politics and government, right?

Shouldn't we be able to figure this out on our own?

- It's not their business.

It's not their business.

- But, quite frankly, we haven't been able to do it.

And I think we need federal support here.

- Really?

- Because you have too many different state laws around it.

You know, there's too many different laws.

Like a New Jersey law regarding NIL is much different than the law in Georgia, or Tennessee, or wherever it might be.

There are different factors at play here where I think it's going to be incredibly important to get something done in Washington.

And I know that, sometimes, that takes time.

But there was a previous act called the SCORE Act that was introduced.

Now, we have this new one that comes from Senator Cruz and Senator Cantwell from Washington.

- That's right.

- A Democrat and a Republican.

- Which is the best thing I see about this bill, is it's bipartisan.

So it gives me tremendous, it gives me hope in, sometimes, a very, you know, hopeless place.

But the Protecting College Sports Act is what it's called.

And it's gonna be critical to see where this can go.

Because you mentioned the most incredibly important point of where we are right now.

And that is the transfer portal.

Because I believe the transfer portal is really at the root of a lot of our issues.

And if we can help kind of curtail where that is going, I mean, listen, again, we just talked about all these great things in college athletics, right?

You know, Mary, you asked a great question about what was- - The college experience.

Four schools, four years?

- Four schools, four years.

Guess what's not happening?

You're not graduating.

The ultimate goal of what we're trying to do.

You're not gonna graduate.

- You're saying a high percentage of student athletes, and the word student here is now getting shaky if it's four schools in four years, a high percentage of them do not graduate?

- Steve, when you transfer, you are never gonna be able to transfer with the amount of credits you had.

You're always gonna kind of lose some credits.

It's just natural.

It's just part of the process because some of them are always not gonna transfer to the next institution.

So, yeah.

Many of these young people are gonna go to four schools in four years.

Make no real connections.

Really, you know, really lack having that experience.

And I know the fan's frustrated by this.

They don't get to witness the growth of a student athlete, right, when they see somebody wearing the jersey every year is different, right?

Well, that student athlete doesn't really, I don't think gets to experience that growth either, you know, because they're not in that one place.

They're not coached by the same individual.

Or they don't have the same support system around them all the time.

And then, at the end of the day, the worst thing is what you just said.

They're not gonna graduate.

- Ouch.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, we'll talk more about this, I promise, Bryan.

It's an ongoing issue, not just in New Jersey, but across the nation.

Bryan Felt.

Director of Athletics and Recreational Services at Seton Hall University.

As always, Bryan, thanks for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Great to be with you.

- You got it.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by New Jersey Sharing Network.

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