Consider it a high-stakes game of telephone.

You may have noticed the uptick of college football quarterbacks cupping their helmets to muffle the sounds of the loudest stadiums in the country. That’s because coach-to-player helmet communication arrived this season for all 134 Football Bowl Subdivision programs.

Thirty years after the NFL debuted the technology, the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel approved the use of helmet communication (as well as sideline tablets) for FBS teams in April, following a trial period in last season’s bowl games.

Here’s how it works.

Who has access to helmet communication, and how does it work?

One player on the field for each team — one on offense and one on defense — can have helmet communication. On offense, that player is typically the quarterback.

The designated player is identified by a green dot on the back of his helmet, just like the NFL. If more than one green dot per team is detected on the field by the officials, the team will be penalized with a 5-yard equipment violation penalty, automatically initiating a conference review, per the NCAA.

The conference review would examine whether teams intentionally allowed a second green-dot helmet in the game at the same time. The review would occur in the days following the game and any additional discipline would be up to the conference, an NCAA source with knowledge of the review process said.

On the sideline, each team is limited to three coach-to-player caller radios and belt packs. Presumably, teams allocate those to the head coach, offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator.

Coach-to-player helmet communication shuts off at the 15-second mark on the play clock or when the ball is snapped, whichever happens first, and remains off throughout the down. When the play clock is reset to 25 or 40 seconds, the communications are restored. (The play clock is set to 25 seconds after a penalty, charged team timeout, media timeout or injury timeout for an offensive player and to 40 seconds after a play ends or after an injury timeout for a defensive player.)

The cutoff operator is hired, assigned and managed by each conference.

On free-kick plays, the coach-to-player communication is not in effect.

Each team can use a maximum of 23 regular headsets within the team area, coaches’ box or coaches’ booth. Any team personnel can wear one, and two additional headsets are used by technicians to monitor the system and address any technical issues.

Is coach-to-player helmet communication mandatory?

No. The technology is optional, as is using tablets to view in-game video — including broadcast feeds, All-22 sideline and end zone angles.

A team can use helmet communication even if its opponent does not. If a team opts not to use or fully rely on the technology, a coach can communicate with the QB through the traditional methods of sideline signs and hand signals.

If one team’s communication stops working, however, the opposing team must also cease use of its helmet comms.

What happens when an FBS team plays an FCS team?

Helmet communication is not permitted at the Football Championship Subdivision level, but FCS teams can use the technology when playing an FBS opponent.

North Dakota State did so when it opened its season against Colorado in Week 1. Bison offensive coordinator Jake Landry said in August the single-game adjustment would still be “a learning curve” for the team, which fell to the Buffaloes 31-26.

“How much is too much information?” Landry said, according to 247Sports. “How much do you want to know? What little tidbits can we provide?”

Important ones, according to Georgia quarterback Carson Beck.

This offseason, Georgia’s QB1 said he “loves” that offensive coordinator Mike Bobo can talk into his ear “because there’s maybe like a little cue that he might say for a play, like look out for this coverage or look out for this, if they do this, do this — just like little things.”

Advantages vs. disadvantages

Michigan staffers on the sideline of last year’s championship game. College teams have long used signs — some unorthodox — to communicate plays to the team on the field. (Photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)

A coach can do more than tell his QB which play to run. Helmet comms can also be used for bigger-picture reminders of time, down and situation and when it’s time to take a risk or play it safe.

Another big advantage is what it could help minimize — sign stealing.

Using electronic equipment to record, or “steal,” opponents’ signs is not legal in college football. The NCAA also prohibits off-campus, in-person scouting of future opponents during the same season. An alleged scheme at Michigan concerning the latter led to an NCAA investigation this past year.

But on-field, in-person sign stealing is allowed. Former Michigan QB J.J. McCarthy estimated “80 percent” of college football teams steal signs, “which is legal,” he said in January.

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Teams haven’t stopped using sideline signals. But move some of that communication to the helmet, and you can take away — or at least, reduce — the interception of it, right?

“Sign-stealing happens every game,” Nebraska coach Matt Rhule said in March. “There’s nothing wrong with teams looking over trying to steal our signs. There’s nothing wrong with us trying to look at their signs. That’s why you should have mics in the helmets.”

Coach Rhule touches on sign stealing and if he noticed it when they played vs. #Michigan 👀 pic.twitter.com/NsZQDtXNY3

— 247Huskers (@247Huskers) October 23, 2023

The enemy of coach-to-player helmet communication is, ironically, noise. College games “just have a tendency” to be louder than NFL games, said Rhule, who coached the Carolina Panthers from 2020 to 2022.

“In general, how loud (the fans) can be in a stadium really impacts the game,” Rhule told reporters following Nebraska’s Week 1 win over UTEP.  “It’s not just, ‘It’s third down, let’s try to make them jump offsides’ anymore, it’s ‘Make it really hard for them to hear the play calls and the checks,’ because it was hard for us at times.”

While helmet communication is helpful, it is imperfect. Auburn coach Hugh Freeze said the team is preparing for alternate solutions as it heads to a hostile road environment in Georgia on Saturday. The Tigers played their first five games of the season at home.

“We’re making it loud at practice for them to have difficult time communicating and see how they handle that,” Freeze said, according to AL.com. “Having alternative plans of how we are going to do play calling, or whatever it takes to try to make sure our kids at least have a good understanding of what’s fixing to go on.”

Required reading

(Photo: James Black / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Ever hear the one about the daredevil plasterer who lit an Olympic flame in a four-time first-team All-Pro defensive end?

Jared Allen roars at the mention of Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards, the face of the 1988 Winter Games and embodiment of Pierre de Coubertin’s mantra. The beaming, bespectacled British ski jumper finished last in the 70m and 90m events in Calgary but won hearts and minds the world over.

After 136 sacks in 12 NFL seasons, a happily retired Allen and an old friend watched the feelgood 2016 biopic that celebrates the life and times of Michael David Edwards. It had consequences.

“Yeah! Eddie the Eagle! Great movie,” Allen tells The Athletic on the telephone from Nashville. “That’s what inspired me to make a bet with my buddy to try to make the Olympics!

“Eddie the Eagle had to work his butt off to qualify and become a ski jumper, which was the inspirational side of it. But the point I loved about it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I just need to go find a sport that’s not on the books that we don’t really do well at and go join that’,” says Allen, bursting into laughter.

And what of the bet?

“The number was pointless. My buddy threw a number out. I was like, ‘Sure, whatever’. Yes, it was over beers… It’s more just a gentleman’s bet. But nobody wants to welch on a bet! I don’t want to have to tell him he was right — I want him to have to eat crow and tell me that I was right!”

So Allen got to work. In 2018, he formed the All-Pro Curling Team with three former NFL players — quarterback Marc Bulger, linebacker Keith Bulluck and offensive tackle Michael Roos — and set his sights on Beijing.

“I started off as skip, no one had curled ever — we were four football players. Life took off and I ended up joining some other teams. I had no ego, so I ended up playing lead and playing pretty good at lead and sweeping pretty good. So that’s kind of where I found my spot. I really like playing second — I think second is a fun position. But wherever they tell me they need me is where I’ll fit in.”

While he didn’t make the 2022 Games, Allen has had some minor miracles on ice.

“I beat (John) Shuster two years ago at the nationals in Denver, we beat a team last year that were top 30 in the world, we had some success over in Switzerland and Canada, I’ve got to play some really tough teams, and it’s been a fun deal.”

But brace yourselves. Just as the Milan-Cortina Winter Games loom into view, here comes the plot twist.

“I’ll probably not play this year,” Allen, 42, says. “My team kind of broke up. One guy in my team retired. Another guy has moved on. And then I actually got invited to play with Korey Dropkin as his alternate this year, but USA Curling and the USOPC put the kibosh on it, saying I didn’t have a good enough curling resume.

“Their exact words. We won nationals and all the trials, but they have replaced me as the alternate.

“And then they changed our rules — we used to have a two-year point run-up for Olympic trial qualification and now they’re taking the top three point-earners for the year based on their year to date, and then they’re doing a one tournament play-in.”

Does that mean that the Olympic dream is… over?

Allen playing in London (Michael Steele/Getty Images)

“No! No! I’ve still got time. I still love curling, I’m still gonna practise, we’ll figure it out,” Allen says. “A lot of people aren’t playing this year. Unless you can go to the Slams, Shuster, Dropkin, and (Danny) Casper pretty much already have the top three spots locked up.

“Everybody is like, ‘Why are we going to travel, waste our time on these tournaments that mean nothing for us over the next year and a half?’. So everybody’s trying to just practise for the next year, put a team together for The Challenger and try to win the play-in.”

Should Allen win his wager, it would represent another tale to tell for one of the NFL’s biggest personalities of the 21st century.

Drafted by Kansas City in 2004, Allen was traded to Minnesota four years later as the then highest-paid defensive player.

The 2009 Vikings are one of the NFL’s great nearly teams, with quarterback Brett Favre steering them to the NFC Championship in the Superdome. There, they were beaten by themselves (six fumbles, three lost, two interceptions and 12 men in the huddle in the fourth quarter to knock them out of field goal range) and the New Orleans Saints, who were later punished for the Bountygate scandal.

“If we beat the Saints and we go out and win the Super Bowl, our 2009 season arguably goes down as one of the best seasons in NFL history,” Allen says. “Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the Super Bowl because we lost that controversial game.”

Allen headed to the Chicago Bears in 2014 and was traded to the Carolina Panthers in September 2015 for a last hurrah. The 15-1 Panthers almost went all the way, losing Super Bowl 50 against the Denver Broncos.

“It was a blast. It’s one of those surreal moments. I tell people it was my least productive statistical year of my career — I was dealing with injury and all sorts of stuff — but it was the most successful of my career because the goal is to get the Super Bowl.”

Allen after setting the Vikings franchise single-season sack record (Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)

Allen’s is a career worthy of Canton (he has been a finalist for the past four years). He led the league twice in sacks (2007 and 2011), the second seeing a tally of 22, making Michael Strahan sweat about losing his all-time record (22.5).

The highlight reel moments are many. They include his one-handed sack of Eli Manning and the tete-a-tete with Donald Penn. And then there’s his contribution to one of the most infamous plays in NFL history. You know the one.

It was 2008 and while playing for the winless Detroit Lions, quarterback Dan Orlovsky stepped out of bounds in the Metrodome for a safety. Orlovsky — now a stellar ESPN analyst — can look back and laugh. Allen is chuckling at it still.

“I wish he wouldn’t have ran out the back — I could have actually hit him! It was my sack. I was actually laughing because Kevin Williams had like four sacks that game, so I was trying to catch up to him. He was pissed. We were in a tight sack race that year. I got a cheapo. I got a freebie!

“To my credit, I did whoop the tight end. I was wide open! Could have throttled him. It was a good job they called a safety,” Allen says.

Johnny Knoxville was not so lucky. As the wider public embraced Allen with his signature mullet and everyman appeal, in 2010 he was invited to California to film a segment called The Blindside for Jackass 3.

“That was a fun deal. Knoxville is a great guy — I still talk to Johnny. I actually found out later I separated his sternum when I tackled him from behind.

“We filmed the run where he catches the ball over the middle a few times. He’s like, ‘Man, come on!’ Like, well, if you want to see what I actually do, let’s drop back for a pass and I’ll hit you from behind. So we did that. There was only one take on that one!”

Allen, who returns to England for the first time since the Vikings beat Pittsburgh at Wembley in 2013, will be inducted into the London Ring of Honor during Sunday’s game between the New York Jets and Minnesota.

He likes what he has seen so far this season from his former team.

“They’re aggressive. What’s most impressive is they are getting what they need to get out of their new acquisitions, who are already making massive impacts. That’s what you like to see when you pick up free agents.

“Hats off to the coaching staff for getting the players that fit their system and creating a system and an environment that they can be successful in.”

And he may well come face-to-face with a familiar foe. It will be almost exactly 15 years ago to the day that Favre and the Vikings beat the Packers on Monday Night Football. Allen had a career-high 4.5 sacks against Aaron Rodgers in a raucous Metrodome. “That was a great day,” he says. “Goodness. Time flies. Whenever I see Aaron it’s very cordial!”

But first, he wants to find some decent grub. “My wife and kids are coming, so I want to show them some of the sights. I want to find some good pubs, have a couple of pints and some bangers and mash.”

Who knows, perhaps he’ll bump into Eddie the Eagle.

(Top photo: David Berding/Getty Images)

Of course this was going to happen. It’s only a wonder it hasn’t happened sooner.

College football is a sport where more than three years after players were finally allowed to monetize their name, image and likeness, there are still no clear guidelines governing the marketplace.

There is no governing body with real teeth to enforce what little rules there are for either side of a contract, and if anyone tries, an offended party can hire a lawyer, go to court and add another chapter to the NCAA’s long line of failures in convincing a judge that its business model is fair.

Last week, UNLV starting quarterback Matthew Sluka posted that he planned to leave the program after “representations” made to him “were not upheld.”

pic.twitter.com/oK5BDRpoxK

— Matthew Sluka (@MatthewSluka) September 25, 2024

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His father, Bob Sluka, told The Athletic there was essentially a verbal agreement from January to pay Matthew $100,000 for his final season of college football. Instead, he’d been given only $3,000 for moving expenses, and despite efforts to pursue what was owed, Bob Sluka said, had yet to be paid anything further from UNLV’s collective since graduating from Holy Cross this summer and showing up in Las Vegas.

However, Blueprint Sports CEO Rob Sine said in dealing with Sluka’s representation beginning Aug. 29, there was no mention of any money owed, and UNLV’s collective denied a deal existed and UNLV said it had honored all “agreed-upon scholarships” for Sluka.

The No. 25 Rebels, who host Syracuse on Friday and are near the front of the line for a Group of 5 bid to the College Football Playoff, are moving on.

Unfortunately, plenty of pitfalls exist in a quickly changing, largely lawless system that is evolving from an exploitive Stone Age into a sport that treats players — its most valuable asset — equitably.

Eventually, I believe college football will reach a place with something resembling player contracts, the ultimate fix for situations like these, produced by schools and with mostly standard language. Eventually, college football will share some of the billions of dollars in television revenue with the players, making sure that schools have at least some money to give players.

But this doesn’t have to be you or your program. There are lessons to be learned from this unsightly saga.

1. Don’t do anything unless everything is in writing.

Both sides agree there was never a written agreement. But the Slukas say a verbal agreement with Matthew’s agent and UNLV offensive coordinator Brennan Marion was made in January, months before Sluka made the move from Massachusetts to Nevada.

There are barely any norms. And what norms there are vary from collective to collective and school to school.

“A lot of the conversations I had, the head coaches would bring up money directly,” a player who navigated the transfer portal told The Athletic this offseason for a survey about the inner workings of NIL. “They would talk about the numbers that they give to players at my position based on how much value they deem based on the level of recruit that you are and how much playing time you’ll have.”

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No player is more valuable than the starting quarterback, though Sluka still had to win the job over Campbell transfer Hajj-Malik Williams, who led the Rebels to a win last week over Fresno State.

In February, a federal judge in Tennessee blocked the NCAA from enforcing what laws the organization did have governing NIL. Sluka arrived at UNLV in June and began classes on Aug. 26. In all that time and through three games, he didn’t get it in writing. But he wanted to be a team player, so he kept playing.

And eventually, Skuka realized he went to Vegas and rolled snake eyes.

Fair or not, his decision to leave a team chasing a Playoff bid a month into the season will cost him his reputation in the eyes of many.

Nobody should make major changes in their life based on financial arrangements without a written agreement enforceable by lawyers.

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2. Get the right representation.

There is no agent certification process in college football beyond what some states require to do business as an agent, and the quality of agent varies widely.

Sluka’s agent, Marcus Cromartie, splits his time between college and NFL clients, but he was reportedly not certified to operate in the state of Nevada, which gave some around UNLV pause in dealing with him.

“That was very odd to me,” another agent told The Athletic.

It’s unclear why an agent would take a promise by an offensive coordinator as binding. But it was never made official.

“We tried everything. We’d take payments. Anything. And they just kept deferring it and deferring it, and to this day, we do not know why,” Bob Sluka, Matthew Sluka’s father, told The Athletic last week.

Emails obtained by The Athletic show Cromartie never broached the $100,000 in his brief communications with UNLV’s collective.

Former Florida signee Jaden Rashada did get his contract in writing, but his representation also allowed Florida’s collective to get in writing that it could terminate the contract at any time. They shorted him more than $13 million. Rashada sued the collective and Florida head coach Billy Napier this May.

3. Coaches: Know your collective.

Coaches can endorse their third-party collectives and have conversations with them, both things that were initially banned when NIL was instituted in 2021 and collectives sprouted from the NCAA rule change.

The most effective schools have great communication between the two, and the chief reason for that is budgeting. Coaches and staffers need to know how much money is on hand for a collective or how much could reasonably be raised for a transfer prospect or a high school recruit.

Bob Sluka said his son’s agent was hoping to speak with Hunkie Cooper, a UNLV support staffer, after the team’s win at Kansas on Sept. 13, saying he recalled Cromartie saying “that’s the guy who’s avoiding us right now about the money.”

A later conversation produced an offer from Cooper for $3,000 a month for the next four months, telling the Slukas to take it or leave it.

In the world of collectives, $100,000 is not a lot of money for a quarterback and especially not for a starting quarterback of a Top 25 team hunting a Playoff spot. For UNLV to be able to offer only $3,000 a month for the rest of the season points to a glaring disconnect between the coaches’ vision for their roster and the means of the collective.

Few, if any, coaches are going to make a promise they have no intention of delivering. Word travels fast, and there’s no quicker route to eroding trust with your current roster and future prospects. A member of the coaching staff discussing financial numbers for a player is against NCAA rules, though according to agents interviewed by The Athletic, it happens all the time.

“I prefer to deal with the coaches because they’re so out of their element. They’re like, ‘We can get it done.’ There’s an ego thing — you want to get it done for your position group and your school, show you’ve got money,” one agent told The Athletic this offseason in the NIL survey.

Whether or not Marion made what he believed to be a firm verbal offer, Sluka believed it was and felt strongly enough to leave the program over it. Negotiating the finer points of an offer with a coach is rare, an agent told The Athletic this week, but somewhere between the recruiting process and fulfillment of an NIL offer, the Slukas and Marion weren’t on the same page.

4. Honesty is the best policy.

If there was no money, UNLV would have been well-served to explain that to its starting quarterback.

I spoke with people around UNLV’s program this offseason who were complaining that a lack of NIL support was a big reason why the Rebels were unable to keep starting quarterback Jayden Maiava, who committed to Georgia before flipping to USC, where he’s now Miller Moss’ backup instead of chasing a Playoff bid with a team he helped lead to nine wins a season ago. He threw for more than 3,000 yards and ran for almost 300 more in Marion’s innovative Go-Go offense.

Maiava left for much more than $100,000, a person briefed on the situation told The Athletic, but that lack of support is what put UNLV on the market for a transfer quarterback in the first place.

And this situation could hurt the program and hurt both Marion and head coach Barry Odom on the recruiting trail, despite the program’s denials about what unfolded or Odom’s level of involvement.

UNLV said in a statement it interpreted Sluka’s “demands as a violation of the NCAA pay-for-play rules, as well as Nevada state law.”

That might technically be true, but those NCAA rules were already defeated in a Tennessee court in February, and the way college football is operating in 2024 is that players expect to be paid, especially if they believe they had reached a deal.

Blueprint Sports, which runs UNLV’s collective, released a statement that there were “no formal NIL offers” made to Sluka and that the collective “did not finalize or agree to any NIL offers.”

That’s true. And it’s going to hold up in court and prevent Sluka from pursuing any legal action.

But it doesn’t tackle the real issue, which is that he says he was promised money from a coach, who had had no agency to deliver it, and it wasn’t there to begin with.

5. Think through all your options.

When Sluka hit “post” on his announcement last week, he chose the nuclear option. He is moving home to Long Island, his father said; his time with the program is done.

Sluka leaving the team opened the door to him being called a quitter. There’s a portion of the population who will never see it any other way, even if they would also quit their job if they believed they had been promised $100,000 and were paid $3,000.

But he had options. Might I suggest a more creative one?

Given how fruitless the Slukas say their efforts had been to resolve the issue privately, Sluka could have publicly explained his situation, either by posting a video or statement on X. Sluka could have publicly professed his willingness to be a team player, kept working and kept his coveted spot as the starting quarterback for a Playoff contender.

Barely 12 hours after Sluka’s post announcing his exit, Circa Sports CEO Derek Stevens reportedly offered to pay him $100,000 to resolve the dispute but was told by UNLV the relationship was already too far gone.

By going public only after the relationship had been severed, he didn’t get any of the money he believes he was promised and in the eyes of many lost the public relations battle.

That’s a tough 1-2 punch, and it didn’t have to go down that way. Whatever happens between now and next season, it’s hard to imagine Sluka will end up in a better on-field situation.

 (Photo of Matthew Sluka:Kyle Rivas / Getty Images)