Louisiana State University gymnast Olivia "Livvy" Dunne successfully completes a routine. Courtesy photo

SHEPHERDSTOWN — The name, image, likeness earthquake that has shaken college athletics in conjunction with the transfer portal continues to change college football in so many ways.

Athletes can be paid for endorsements, for making public appearances, for autographs and for a number of other things. Many schools even try to outbid rivals for certain players, by offering more NIL money than Ole State University can.

Transfers seem to come and go at an alarming rate. People need a game program just to keep up with who is still at each school, not just who the starters are or a depth chart.

The players want money to come to a school, then to stay at the school from one year to the next.

Football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball are the sports with the highest court-mandated payrolls. But individuals in other sports, like gymnast Olivia “Livvy” Dunne at Louisiana State University, are paid as much as $4 million a year.

The engine that runs this money train, at almost every way station, is football. And individual football teams are changing as rapidly as they see fit, to keep their noses just ahead of the scrambling competition.

Instead of giving the grasping competition the chances to poach their players, some mega-name schools have cancelled their spring football games.

Without the opportunity to scout out players, schools are basically saying, “Get your information elsewhere. We aren’t going to help you evaluate our athletes so you can then take them from us.”

Texas, Ohio State, Southern Cal and Nebraska are four mammoth programs that have cancelled their spring football games.

Recruiting has always been the life blood of nearly all the royalty of college football. Now, the talent hunters will have one less occasion to coax somebody else’s players away — no matter how much money they have to ply with their always-opaque actions regarding bringing in players.

Recruiting will always be an intricate part of the often scurrilous equation, but now schools are going to make the chasing and corralling of talent a little less easy for the poachers.

The NIL and transfer portals are still earthquakes-in-motion. The tremors and aftershocks still reverberate across the landscape.

Where money is involved, most of the vultures will revert to the basic instincts coated with “me first” tar. The long-held maxim that, “The love of money is the root of all evil,” must have been coined by a season-ticket holder with seats on the 50-yard line.