The NCAA has been buried under endless slander, accusing it of being a powerless organization. Some of it has come from the organization failing to control widespread tampering, which created chaos in the last hours of the transfer portal this year. But now that the NCAA has taken a hard-nosed approach to begin fixing this crisis, it’s got some notable people looking.

“They nutted up,” Urban Meyer said on the Triple Option Podcast. He said that one of the harshest of the NCAA’s proposed tampering punishments is a guilty head coach being prohibited from all kinds of football activities (coaching and recruiting) for six games in the season. “I want to see this happen.”

Meyer, ever the no-nonsense coach, wanted the NCAA to go even more gung-ho. “If you [the head coach] mislead or lie to the investigators, you’re done. Your college coaching career is over. And your AD is done.”

The former Ohio State head coach is among the strongest voices in college football advocating for reforms. He is part of the roundtable that will be hosted by Donald Trump in the White House, which will discuss the future of college sports. The important detail is that they golfed together a couple of weeks ago, so Urban Meyer’s words will be valued by the president.

“I got invited to play golf with Coach Nick Saban and Governor Ron DeSantis and Donald J. Trump, our President,” Urban said. “What brought this on is just conversation about the positives and negatives of not just college football, college sports. The governor of the state, our governor, I live in the state of Florida, played baseball at Yale. The President of the United States is very interested in sports and just listened.”

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“It was an awesome day. Awesome. Sense of humor and also real serious conversation about what… It’s interesting to get Coach Saban’s take, my take, who’ve been in it for so long.”

That’s why there’s some weight to his thoughts on the NCAA’s response to tampering.

The other two proposed punishments are that the school suffers a 20% fine on its total budget and that it would have five fewer scholarship players for the next season. However, Meyer claimed that these two won’t keep coaches from tampering. It is the one that attacks head coaches directly that will keep them in check, he claimed. This would be a proper blow to a program guilty of tampering. It goes for the people who are responsible for the troublesome practice.

This proposal will be put to a vote in the Division I Cabinet in April. Meyer claimed that he has “no confidence” in the voting, but if ratified, these punishments will be among the harshest the NCAA has ever rolled out. And it will be effective immediately. However, one can expect the NCAA to be surrounded by a plethora of tampering complaints because of how rampant it is. But for the organization to truly emerge as an entity worthy of being feared, it cannot afford to waste time.

Urban Meyer wants the NCAA to act quickly

The NCAA has been known to take quite some time to arrive at these important decisions. Its handling of Michigan’s sign-stealing scandal is a perfect example of why it has such a reputation. But Meyer, impressed only a little with the rule that goes for the head coach, wants these measures against tampering to roll out as soon as possible.

“[This] can’t be three years later, especially if you got it.”

Tampering has plagued coaches for years now. In the 2025-26 portal alone—the only one ahead of the upcoming season, three cases of tampering have come up. The most dramatic of them was Ole Miss luring Luke Ferrelli away from Clemson. Head coach Pete Golding personally reached out to the linebacker while he was enrolled with the Tigers. Yet, he was not punished. The same goes for Miami luring Duke’s Darien Mensah and Lane Kiffin’s unsuccessful attempt at poaching Washington’s Demond Williams Jr.

No coach has ever seen any repercussions when it comes to tampering. But if these new rules are enforced, they will have to watch their step from next year onwards, because who knows, there might come a day when Urban Meyer‘s proposed punishments could also be incorporated into formal rules sometime in the future.