What’s a football gathering of coaches without talk about NIL, the transfer portal?

Put four college football coaches in a room together for two hours, at a banquet or anywhere else, and two subjects are unavoidable: name, image and likeness, and the NCAA transfer portal.

So it was Friday as North Carolina’s Mack Brown joined N.C. State’s Dave Doeren, Duke’s Mike Elko and East Carolina’s Mike Houston at the 20th Bill Dooley Chapter Pigskin Preview at Cary’s Embassy Suites.

Preseason practice is just weeks away. There’s a lot of planning already done as the schools prepare for their 2023 openers — ECU is at Michigan, for starters — and the ACC coaches will be in Charlotte next week for their last major preseason media confab at the ACC Kickoff.

But NIL and dealing with the portal are an ongoing, everyday, consume-so-many-hours kind of thing for college coaches. ECU’s Houston calls the current college landscape the “Wild, Wild West” and Elko said it was a “very combustible environment.”

“We all agree the student-athletes deserve a little bit more piece of the pie than they were getting,” Elko said. “But I don’t know if this open, free-market NIL was what any of us anticipated.”

What to do? Adjust, yes. They have to.

“It’s about learning how to navigate it,” Houston said.

But the four were united in asking that the federal government help navigate it by stepping in and setting regulations and parameters to bring more order and oversight to the NIL situation.

“Nobody minds the kids getting money, but everybody wants there to be some direction, some guidelines,” Brown said. “I think that has to happen, and Congress and the states and the commissioners, everybody has to get on the same page and say what is best for college football.”

Houston said ECU “turned an institution in” this spring because of tampering. He said the complaint to the NCAA was about members of the other school’s football program being involved and not some overactive, meddling boosters offering an NIL inducement.

“We heard what was going on, we called the institution and told them, ‘Listen, this is what’s going on and you need to nip it in the bud,’ ” Houston said. “It continued on, so that’s when we turned them in.”

Houston would not identify the school but said it was “not in this region.” He said he had not heard from the NCAA.

“You’ve got a kid on your roster that’s happy and he’s where he wants to be, he’s thriving, and you get people in his ear starting to mess with him and talk about money,” Houston said. “That’s the stuff I don’t like.

“If the kid’s in a bad situation and he feels like somewhere else is better for him, I support that. But just messing with kids who are thriving in the environment they’re in, the back-channel stuff, has got to stop. … And it’s happening everywhere.”

Many schools’ athletic fundraisers are feeling the stress. Booster clubs raise money for scholarships and facility improvements. But many of the same boosters are being asked to pony up NIL money through the school’s collectives.

N.C. State held a gala this past week that raised more than $700,000, including $80,000 for a portrait of former Wolfpack quarterback Philip Rivers, who attended the North Ridge Country Club outing.

“Right now it’s not sustainable,” UNC’s Brown said. “Because we’re asking fans for NIL money, we’re asking fans for facility money, asking them for coaches money, asking them for season ticket money. It’s just ridiculous.”

Looking at the transfer portal, Houston does not foresee a slowing down of the flood of transfers, saying, “That horse is out of the barn.”

UNC had two players — linebacker RaRa Dillworth and defensive back Tamir Brown — transfer to ECU after the 2022 season, but Houston said it did not create a rift with Brown, who he has known for many years.

“He still cares about them and the progress they’re making,” Houston said.

All four coaches at the Pigskin Preview — N.C. Central’s Trei Oliver was away at the MEAC media day — had their teams play in bowl games last season. Three will be playing in the new-look ACC, the divisions a thing of the past and the championship to be determined between the top two teams in the standings

Brown, who said he is back at his “old playing weight” after shedding 35 pounds, again will have quarterback Drake Maye, the 2022 ACC player and rookie of the year. But he was quick to praise Duke quarterback Riley Leonard — “He’s one of the best in the country and not getting the publicity he deserves,” Brown said — and the Pack’s Brennan Armstrong, the transfer from Virginia.

ECU no longer has Holton Ahlers at QB, but Houston said he is confident Mason Garcia can be the guy. Garcia served as Ahlers’ backup but is in his fourth year in the program.