Manny Diaz laments lack of clarity regarding NIL, transfer portal as poaching season approaches

Transfer portal season is hurtling toward college football at an increasingly fast pace, as week after week of the regular season ticks down. Duke coach Manny Diaz has to be somewhat dreading the moment, knowing what happened to his team in the portal last season.The Blue Devils lost star quarterback Darian Mensah and top receiver Cooper Barkate to the portal and, ultimately, to Miami. And very little has changed since in terms of last year’s backdrop.[ $19.99 gets you a FULL year of On3 | Rivals national coverage ]“It’s extraordinarily hard to look to the future, and extraordinarily frustrating because our regular season ends in five weeks, and we know the portal is coming, and we do not have any guidance, you know, in terms of what the rules of engagement are going to be going into ’27,” Diaz said on The Drive with Tim Donnelly. “And this is exactly the same thing that happened last December.”Duke has remained quite competitive in football despite being raided by some more traditional football powerhouses. That’s a huge credit to Diaz and the work his staff has done.The overall outlook, though, is something he would really like to see changed. The lack of clarity surrounding NIL, in particular, is a huge hurdle toward building a championship contender at a place like Duke.“It happened when the basketball portal was showing up in April, and nothing happened, and the chaos of basketball, and we’ve had seven, eight more months to do something about it and have been unable to,” Diaz said.Worse, there’s no one to really turn to. Diaz highlighted that with a hilarious quip when asked if he could lean on his athletics director, the conference or someone else for guidance.“You might as well go to a fortune cookie,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t matter who you go to. Like, I mean, it’s just because no one knows right now. There’s really no one that can definitively say, ‘Hey, listen.’ You know, you saw the Big Ten try to pass a rule yesterday. No one knows if that’s going to stand up in the court of law. And ultimately, that’s the issue, right?“The issue is our rules are being litigated in courtrooms, and so we’re always bouncing from one ruling to the next ruling, and then somebody will make a ruling, and then we have to, that has to survive appeal, and so it’s just it’s just really, really difficult. And then that’s why people have capitalized on it. Just, you know, people who don’t want the rules to change that are on top right now because they’re just the big spenders. They’re the most quiet ones because they don’t want the system to change, and right now they feel like they’ve got it changed.”Can Diaz and Duke remain competitive long-term in that environment? For his part, Diaz doesn’t see much of a choice. It’s adapt or die, even if you’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to be adapting to.“Look, you can sit there and be frustrated about it, but at the end of the day, you got to adapt,” he said. “You got to find a way amongst the chaos and what the rules are to make it work for you. And you know, to Duke’s credit, we’ve been flexible. We’ve been found a way, but man. It’d be nice to have a little bit of stability and a little bit of guidance as to how this thing’s going to go.”