ESPN football reporter Laura Rutledge is no stranger to the politics and controversies that brew within the sport.

She covers the NFL as well as the NCAA, as she hosts NFL Live on ESPN while also serving as a sideline reporter for college football. As the new era of college football is ushered in, one full of head-dizzying NIL deals, hundreds of transfer portal entrants and a sport increasingly looking like a pay-to-play mercenary outfit, Rutledge has some opinions on the state of the sport.

Speaking with The Varsity Sports podcast, Rutledge shared her honest opinions on what it was like trying to cover the sport as a whole in today’s new NIL landscape. What she said comes as little surprise and is probably pretty mild compared to what most fans think of this new age of NCAA football.

“When it comes to covering it, it’s incredibly difficult,” Rutledge said. “I cover the NFL daily. When I transition out of college and into the draft coverage, there’s a ton of crossover because I’ve been covering these (college) players all year long. When we hit like July, SEC Media Days, August range, I’m thinking, ‘who is on what team?’ What is going on with this?”

But as mentioned, fans likely have a completely different perspective on what NIL and particularly the transfer portal has on their respective teams and Rutledge seems to understand.

“From our perspective, it’s so minor compared to what these coaches are dealing with, but it definitely makes it more difficult,” Rutledge said. “I truly understand when fans say it makes it harder to root for my team, who am I actually rooting for, because so much of it changes. And you can’t blame the players for their lack of commitment at times, because it is about their own families and their own opportunities.”

Now, as a former student-athlete for Tulane University, I am not “jealous” I didn’t come up in the NIL era. I went to school to become a Naval Aviator and earning a scholarship to play a sport at a great academic institution was just icing on the cake.

But it does bother me in the sense that this game has gone from being one of the last true and honest slices of Americana, where money played little role, and athletes competed on the gridiron for the sake of legacy and loyalty to their teammates, fans and their chosen school.

In fact, NIL and the transfer portal have become so ridiculous that it is now just one big game of merry-go-round and musical chairs. The lack of regulation allows for predatory agents to take advantage of young men and women athletes, one needs to look no further than Tulane’s situation to see this, as well as the degradation of the game as a whole.

Of course, fans will keep watching. Ratings won’t drop. And who really knows how this will turn out.

But Rutledge is absolutely undeniable in her observation. NIL and the transfer portal have made it incredibly difficult to cover this sport.