Category Archives: The Portal Masters

There’s a Loophole for Everything

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Agent Swinney has been on the case. With his previously reported press conference where he exposed tampering coming from Pete Golding and Ole Miss (shocker), ESPN dove more into the way that tampering has become more prevalent, sooner, and easier, thanks to agents.

For years, if college coaches and staffers wanted to pursue a player at another school, they would find a way to get to them. They would call their high school coach or reach out to a trainer or family member to express interest and try to persuade them to transfer. Coaches knew they risked NCAA sanctions for impermissible contact, so they had to be cautious about making these overtures.

But now that players have agents, impermissible contact has dramatically escalated.

“The tampering got much more brash and blatant,” one agent said.

The current transfer rules now make it seem impossible to navigate the chaotic portal process without the help of an agent and their rolodex of contacts. This year, the portal window began on Jan. 2 and was open for only two weeks. To meet enrollment deadlines, players on the move had to get official visits booked and deals negotiated as fast as possible.

For all parties, tampering has become imperative. Teams need to find out who will be available. Players need assurances they’ll have somewhere to go. Agents play the role of matchmaker throughout December, if not sooner.

Agents say they started getting calls from general managers as early as September last season, and many agencies will distribute their client lists to front offices to initiate discussions. Purdue coach Barry Odom said his staff received a list of impending transfers from an agency who mistakenly included Purdue players. By now, these general managers know they can’t be naive. While they’re doing early shopping, their players are being shopped around as well.

In other words, it’s hard to call it tampering and impermissible if everyone is doing it. Wasn’t this supposed to be the era of above-the-table deals and negotiations? While the relaxing of the transfer portal and NIL deals would suggest that it should, it seems there’s going to be a shady side to college football, regardless.

An ACC GM told ESPN he received a call in late October and learned his top receiver already had million-dollar offers on the table from SEC and Big Ten programs. It didn’t stun or even bother him. If you have good players, it’s inevitable. There’s no sense, he said, in phoning the GMs at those schools and calling them out. All you can do is put in the work to try to retain them.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever going to call a press conference and be like, ‘I lost a player because he went to his agent and said he wants more money in the portal, shopped his name around and got three offers,'” the GM said. “That’s called recruiting nowadays.”

From the agents’ perspective, it’s not really tampering or tortious interference when you’re talking about players on expiring one-year deals. The way they see it, their clients are well within their right to explore their options.

“I don’t even see why schools get mad about it,” one agent said. “If you don’t want your kid to be tampered with, sign them to an agreement that’s fair and the kid won’t be looking to go elsewhere.”

In other words, don’t sign the star athletes to one-year deals, hedge your bets on their development and sign them to a long-term contract? Am I reading that right? And how well does that work when the athlete decides to head somewhere else, anyway? It seems like buyouts from other programs are being tossed around in some of these stories, like Damon Wilson, but given that it seemed like no litigation actually started to move until a year later, I’m of the assumption that Georgia never got their money back. And who is supposed to regulate that if they can’t regulate tampering?

It won’t be the NCAA, I can assure you of that.

Student. Athlete.

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More narrative is coming from the Louisville contingency that is trying to reform the wild, wild, west of college football. In this article by Larry Benz, he points out that the Portal may be enticing, but for many, it doesn’t materialize into that greener grass.

In 2023 alone, more than 31,000 student-athletes across all NCAA divisions entered the transfer portal. In Division I — the level where the stakes are highest and the scholarship dollars are largest — the numbers have grown every year since the portal launched in 2018. By 2024, unlimited transfers were authorized. No restrictions. No limits. Enter as many times as you
want. The 2025-26 cycle has arrived with even greater numbers — each year setting a new record for how many athletes declare themselves available, and each year the market absorbs fewer of them proportionally than the year before.


Nobody asked what happens to the ones nobody wants.


31 percent of Division I athletes who entered the portal between
August 2023 and July 2024 never found a new school at the same level.
That is the NCAA’s own data.

Thirty-one percent. That translates to somewhere north of 17,000 athletes per year who enter the portal, wait, and hear nothing. Some drop to lower divisions. Some sign with community colleges. Some leave organized sports entirely. And some — like the former three-star recruit at a Power conference school, quoted in Northwestern’s Medill Reports last January — spend a full
year sitting at home, watching their former teammates play on television, while their eligibility clock keeps running and their scholarship has been handed to someone else.


In football, where the stakes are highest and the mythology of opportunity is loudest, the numbers are worse. According to the NCAA’s own data, 40 percent of scholarship FBS players who enter the transfer portal do not find scholarships at a comparable level on the other side. Forty percent. In a typical Division I football program, coaches have 15 to 20 scholarship slots
available in any given year — split between high school recruits and transfers. With over 2,900 scholarship FBS players entering the portal in a single cycle, the math is not complicated. Supply crushes demand. Coaches become extraordinarily selective. And the athletes who entered the portal expecting a scholarship offer discover that they are one of hundreds of resumes on a coach’s desk who has no obligation to call any of them back.

Men’s basketball is in even more dramatic shape. In the 2025 spring portal window, more than 2,400 Division I men’s basketball players entered — representing over 40 percent of all DI men’s basketball players simultaneously declaring themselves available. Based on current cycle
data, 30 to 40 percent of those players will not find a new school at the same level. Rick Pitino at St. John’s announced he wouldn’t recruit a single high school player — his roster would be built entirely through the portal. He is not the exception. This is the trend. And the consequence is that the recruiting pipeline for 17-year-olds who grew up dreaming of a Division I scholarship is
quietly being replaced by a marketplace that prefers experienced commodities.

There’s a phrase for this in business: a buyer’s market. And in this case the sellers — the athletes — are carrying all the risk.

But we’re doing it al for the kids, amirite? While there’s definitely an upside for the Carson Becks and Damon Wilsons of the world, many of the guys hitting the fence and testing the waters on the other side are finding not only no pasture, but no future. While some may say that’s the breaks, and that’s what you get for being greedy rather than remaining with your commitment, it does give one pause to think that a system that seems to have no structure or organization just allows this to keep happening.

On one side, you’ve got what some see as a balancing between the days of under the table shenanigans that built power programs to now where other programs can do the same over the table and utilize their vast and powerful donor network to buy a championship. On the other, you’ve got people who advocate that this is long overdue and players should’ve been compensated for their performance and revenue injection into the athletic departments and communities.

In the middle, though, is the reality – there is no perfect system. Not unless you really had equity in resources, scholarships, and player compensation – across all sports – which you never will. There have been few examples of female athletes signing mega-NIL deals (I say few, I know they exist) and we likewise don’t see this as much in the Olympic sports at colleges, either. For a system that limited revenue-generating programs from running the athletic department under the umbrella of Title IX, it’s sure odd how the discussion around equal compensation for other sports and genders isn’t louder now than expected.

Between it all – equity, lost opportunities, and a reckless open-market where athletes are seeing their careers stall or end – it doesn’t seem like it’s working for the majority of those it was meant to serve, the athletes. Never mind the students, who the article suggests aren’t even landing scholarships after the portal, but the athlete compensation that was dreamed about isn’t even working as those who advocated for it had expected.

But it does seem to bring in TV revenue, doesn’t it?

And that’s all that matters.

Mr. Saban Goes to Washington

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If there was ever a post and a picture that encapsulated my hatred for the past few years of college football, it’s two people in this post:

Little Nicky went to Washington to discuss the state of college football and how it’s not playing by the traditional rules. You know, the ones that helped Nick become the GOAT of college football coaching.

To make things more nauseating, there was a word from Greg Sankey:

Are those the same standards and same rules that Alabama and Texas were held to during their days in the SEC? Inquiring minds want to know. Greg and Nick are not exactly the poster boys for equity and fair play that some may think they are. Just ask Georgia, who watched not once, but twice, where Alabama could insert a backup quarterback into a game to win a Championship when all was lost, which is not the standard in today’s game.

I’ll spare you all the video reminder of the 2018 (season 2017) National Championship game followed by the 2018 SEC Championship game. But I digress.

The level of hypocrisy being espoused by these folks is unrivaled. But, wait, there’s more:

If we’re talking about financial health, most SEC programs can claim to be healthy while Notre Dame is the Dom Deluise of the college football world. They aren’t hurting for money, with a revenue stream and TV contract in the billions, not millions. Arguing over ethics and equity when you’re the richest kid on the block is no different than a silver spoon living in an insulated tent for a night with the homeless and then spending the next 30 years empathizing with the “homeless plight in America”. Hanoi Jane comes to mind.

Spare me your sympathy.

We don’t care about athletes getting paid, or whether the transfer portal is closed or open, but we’re concerned about the experience. Focus less on payer compensation and more on ad revenue and disruptions to the game. Or amateurism, while we’re on the subject, being compromised when players are making business decisions to declare for the pros or find the next highest bidder (Miami) who will pay an NFL wage, isn’t as important as the idea of not knowing your starting roster’s names from one season to the next, like in college football or baseball.

It’s not about people with talent getting paid. It’s that we can’t keep up with the movement, or the fact that a team like Indiana, who has been understood to be a football afterthought, becoming National Champs while men play against boys, or when the fan faithful can’t tell you the names of half their roster even in times of accomplishment. Name one Indiana running back from this season’s championship. I’ll wait.

Now name a running back from any of the three Georgia national championship rosters. Even if your aren’t a fan of Georgia.

Pretty easy, right? Not so easy for the Hoosiers.

Now I’m not a homer for the good ole days of paying under the table, but when “Blue Bloods” become an afterthought and you have Maryland or the University of California Brisbane suddenly relevant because of one big money donor, and the whole scope of the season is lost because you couldn’t hire mercenaries to win a game, then the sport is cooked. Proper cooked.

I say all this to say, the same people whining at the table cultivated the problem we’re seeing today, it’s just happening above the table now. They hope to return to the good ole days, which are the days where we played our best, fought the good fight, only to lose to the haves while we were the have nots. It was roster management and talent acquisition 101, and Saban was the professor while Smart was the understudy.

Time and chance, as I said earlier this week, happens to us all. But I find it funny that this all shifted, from NIL to CFP expansion, once Georgia established the blueprint for success. Weird how that works. It seems once we sniff success, people find a way to burn the pathway to the ground.

Spare me your false woes, Notre Dame and Greg Sankey. What you’re speaking of has existed, will continue to exist, and will only perpetuate for years to come.

It just won’t happen where you want it to, will it?

Ole Missed the Combine

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The courtroom drama that Is Chambliss v NCAA continues to unfold. Not long after Chancery Judge Robert Whitwell, and Ole Miss alum, ruled that Chambliss could play an additional year followed by promptly getting his autograph, the NCAA is appealing the decision to the Mississippi Supreme Court.

I can’t imagine what would’ve been authored in a 658 page filing, which is equivalent to the length of Frank Herbert’s Dune. That’s a lot of creative writing by the NCAA’s counsel.

Now, here’s a fun scenario:

  • Chambliss risks it all on the chance that he can get another year of a sweet NIL deal through the injunction, playing at Ole Miss and continuing to develop.
  • The NCAA is successful in its appeal and the Supreme Court overturns the injunction ruling.
  • Chambliss has missed the Combine, and will be lucky to get drafted late in the Draft if he can’t get a workout with a team.
  • Chambliss then sues the NCAA for potentially lost revenue by not getting to participate in the full Combine Process.
  • The Falcons sign him to a multi-zillion dollar deal, anyway. I kid. Kind of.

Something tells me this saga is far from over, especially if the NCAA is successful.

I hope Pete Golding is hanging on to that win over Georgia, it might the lone bright spot right now for him as he deals with the remnants of Kiffin’s mess in Oxford.

Class of 2044 Recruit: I Blame the Parents

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Prayers up for the mother.

Searels and Smart need to land a chopper at the hospital and bring some 6-month old sized Georgia gear to the maternity ward. They better hurry, the offers are coming in fast.

Now that’s just parody and snark, but it has a tinge of reality. After all, art imitates life. Case in point:

It’s already happening with 8U players.

Yesterday I asked a question regarding “who the hell has the money” to entertain spending millions to make a team relevant again, but I forgot that, on the other end, there is an abundance of folks out there looking to sell their kids to the highest bidder thanks to their athletic talents. After spending to showcase them at camps, it’s now another cash cow for the youth league alpha parents who are going to cash in quick.

I can’t necessarily fault a parent, to be honest. Still, the chance your thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in youth sports, travel leagues, trips, etc., actually turning into a scholarship are low, and I’d image getting a huge NIL payout is lower. But it’s certainly enticing, ain’t it?

It’s a sellers market in college sports. Buyer beware.

Louisville Sluggers

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College sports, and the once, long-held belief that NCAA needed to do all it could do to preserve the spirit of amateurism in the sports, seems to be in peril. As more Indiana stories being to pop up, and as Texas schools push football funding into the $40 million dollar plus range, something needs to change. Recently, Iowa State decided to abandon their gymnastics program due to increasing funding needs for other high-revenue sports (when even Title IX can’t save things, it’s a problem), and the teachers and staff at Kansas are making headlines regarding their low pay and funding deficits while the University finds way to revenue share with athletes through student funds and reserves:

Oddly enough, the folks who are attempting to step in and fix things are in Louisville, where a group is arguing that college sports is going to dissolve into a class system of the haves and have nots, and that extends beyond NIL and championships, but the loss of college sports altogether.

Benz is the Louisville Board Chair, and he proposes that three things need to happen in order to save college sports:

  • A governing body that can actually regulate and manage college sports (NCAA, clearly you’ve lost control of this)
  • An NIL spending cap similar to salary caps in the NFL
  • An act of congress. Seriously.

From the Groups’ From the Arena, Not the Sidelines: College Athletics is Running Out of Time:

Yet despite generating more than a billion dollars a year in economic impact, Louisville’s athletic department — like most programs nationwide — operates in the red. Our current athletic budget reflects expenditures of approximately $167.4 million against revenues of $154.9 million, a deficit of $12.5 million. That gap is projected to widen significantly under the House v. NCAA settlement, which has added an additional $20.5 million in new direct athlete compensation obligations.

To bridge these shortfalls, Louisville has relied on a $12 million institutional subsidy, a $200-per-student athletic fee and a $25 million line of credit. Reserves that once stood at $34 million have been drawn down to approximately $3.4 million. These are not signs of mismanagement; they are symptoms of a structural problem that no single institution can solve on its own. Louisville’s situation is not the exception — it is the rule. Across the country, from the wealthiest programs in the nation to those fighting simply to stay afloat, the financial picture is remarkably and alarmingly similar.

The full scope of the crisis runs deeper than those opening figures suggest. Ohio State’s $37.7 million deficit came despite generating nearly $255 million in revenue, and its outgoing athletic director acknowledged going “berserk” with spending to chase a title — the university’s actual FY2025 spending subsequently came in at $320 million, the highest in college athletics history.2 Rutgers’ $516.9 million in accumulated losses since joining the Big Ten in 2014 reflects spending that has surged 175 percent in eleven years, with its new athletic director projecting expenditures exceeding $200 million in the current fiscal year — before a single dollar of House settlement revenue-sharing is factored in.3 Penn State closed FY2025 with $534.7 million in athletics-related debt — more than tripling the prior year — driven largely by the $700 million renovation of Beaver Stadium.4 Florida State’s $437 million debt represents a $200 million increase in a single fiscal cycle.5 The University of Texas set a new national record with $375.9 million in operating expenses in FY2025 — a $50 million jump over its own previous record — while carrying $192.2 million in athletics-related debt.6 Even Colorado, buoyed by renewed fan enthusiasm, projects a $27 million department deficit for FY2026 driven primarily by the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap under the House settlement and a near-doubling of head football coach Deion Sanders’ salary.

I only highlight the statements in the third paragraph to point out the return on investment. Ohio State bet the farm – and it worked – winning a national title while simultaneously becoming the whipping post for college football purists who saw Ohio State as “buying a championship”. Ditto Indiana, and Michigan is bemoaned because of Harbaugh and cheating – not just athletically but apparently everywhere else in the moral world of man, as well.

Texas set a record and promptly laid an egg, not even making the CFP. Florida State should be forced to shutter their football program with that kind of deficit on principle alone. And who thought it wise to double Deion Sanders’ salary?

Not only is the spending in the modern era perverse, but it’s being done recklessly and without consideration of investment and risk. Anyone in their right mind who looks at the train wreck that is Colorado Football and thinks “this is fine” needs to be jailed for life. Coaches are getting European soccer star salaries with guaranteed contracts only to become collective billionaires with the combined buyouts…for failing.

Could you only imagine the furor that would’ve occurred if Richt’s years at Georgia and the requests for improved facilities were denied because the AA was still paying the contracts buyouts for Goff and Donnan? Additionally, where the hell is all this money coming from and who is crazy enough to finance it? Go get the brightest, shiniest toys and make life meaningful again by making my alma mater or favorite team competitive again? And given there can only be one champion, most of the investment is fruitless and doesn’t achieve the results that are desired (see: Texas Tech, Oregon, Texas, etc…).

And to what other end as it pertains to entertainment? Is the quality of the sport improved? Would we be just as intrigued without the ESPN hype if we watched a “lower tier” version of college football on Saturdays that featured “traditional” college football teams that were free from NIL? I find the quality of football watching the FCS playoffs to be just as fun to watch as a football purist, but it’s not getting the same level of marketing from Mickey, because, you know, money.

While I, too, tired of always seeing Alabama, Ohio State, and Clemson in the consideration for a decade, we’ve swung the pendulum to the other side where we’re now thinking “where the hell did Indiana come from” and “Ryan Day? Seriously?”. Neither are necessarily desirable, but both teams in the National Championship this year was made of a patchwork of college football mercenaries for hire so patchwork that it could compete with a crazy woman’s quilt.

Meanwhile, whole states or programs that don’t benefit from an injection from rich alumni (see: South Carolina sports) or tons of money from alumni are going to become irrelevant, if not fossils of an age of sports gone by. I made a post last year

I’m rooting for Louisville here. I hope they can actually gain some traction on this, but my guess is this won’t make the headlines on the ESPN app or anywhere else because money talks.

Tradition walks.

It’s Senior Night. No, Literally, Let’s Recognize the Only Senior

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Folks, this is the future of college football, in a graphic.

That’s a 16-team SEC conference, with a roster that is around 15 guys, so out of 240 rostered athletes, there’s only one that remained at the program until a designated senior year. That’s less than 1% of athletes that will remain with a program until their senior year.

Given that there are multiple options for pro contracts out there in basketball, it’s not all NIL or Portals, but it’s definitely a huge contributing factor. Football is a bit different, with requirements for years in college football applying to be draftable, and there’s always the Indiana example where you can just hang around and play until you start getting mailers from AARP, but what’s the likelihood that you’ll see a true senior on senior day…not only in basketball, but anywhere?

Recent reforms have all but killed the idea of walk-ons, so seeing the guys stick around to the end is becoming less and less likely, with even practice team guys transferring to other programs while chasing playing time and NIL dreams.

But it’s staggering to think that we’re in a time where it’s hard to say who is on your favorite college team’s roster this year compared to last? Blue Cain is a junior and, comparatively, feels like he’s been with the Bulldogs Basketball program for a century. Similarly, outside of Tre Phelps and Dan Jackson, it’s hard for me to tell you who plays for the Diamond Dawgs.

Football under Kirby Smart feels different from the rest of college football right now, and, even if that means we’re not winning National Championships, which feels less earned and more bought nowadays, makes me appreciate Kirby Smart even more. We live in golden times, as I’ve said multiple times here, but golden because Kirby is holding fast to some traditional college football themes in some non-traditional times.

I’ll take it. On top of that, there’s this:

Perhaps Kirby is that Captain of the ship, lost at sea in the darkest of nights, watching fifty foot swells coming at the bow of the ship while the crew is being tossed around like socks in a dryer in the cabin below. Nauseated, bruised, and disoriented from the turbulence, they are simultaneously terrified and excited the same, grasping at anything they can and having faith that the crusty captain of the ship knows what he’s doing.

Meanwhile, he’s at the helm, saying prayers in his head while recalling distant memories of these combats at sea, thinking it’s been worse while keeping a focus that there’s better conditions ahead. The seas rise and fall, are rough and sometimes steady, but knows that, regardless, the outcome has been predetermined and the sun will rise and fall, clouds come and go, yet time and chance happens to all.

If this is his time, he’ll go down fighting, true to his training and intuition. If the sea takes him, he’s fine with it, because it’s on his terms. And that’s why he’s steady, sure of what’s to come, even if it’s not clear in the bursts of foam and water that surrounds him.

From Invictus:

It matters not how straight the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the Captain of my soul.

Glad Kirby’s on the mother, even if we find ourselves starting to jump overboard.

You Have the Full Support of the Government Behind You

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Shot:

Chaser:

First, let me start off by saying, to South Carolina fans everywhere:

Secondly, if USCe doesn’t have the financial means to keep up with the NIL era, but Mississippi does, then that’s saying a lot for South Carolina. But, as evidenced by the Trinidad Chambliss eligibility circus, all it takes is the right judge and the backing of the state government to sweeten the pot for NIL deals, and, presto-change-o, you’ve got a competitive team again.

You’re not going to get that cannon shot for free, Cocks. Time to put a little money into refurbishing it because you’re not winning any wars with 19th century weaponry.

Those Were the Days

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Hard to believe that this group is talking about a time that was only about four years ago.

“And there wasn’t no bid offer for us to go nowhere else”.

I don’t know if it’s NIL, or the unlimited transfer portal that ruins it the most, but it definitely interrupted Kirby from establishing Georgia as the “New Alabama”.

So You’re Saying There Was a Chance?

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Breaking needless news.

“Really, what it came down to was Indiana and Georgia,” Fernando said.  “Kirby (Smart), great recruiter, great coach, great program.  They were this close to making a national championship. I was really going back and forth between the two.  And honestly, I was really confused.  I was lost in the sauce because they were both great situations.  It was a win-win. It was a really tough decision.”

Mendoza then goes on to say that he at one point tried to call Coach Smart to commit to Georgia, but the call didn’t go through, and that ended up delaying his decision.

“I think there was one time even where I was about to call Kirby to commit to Georgia and the call didn’t go through,” said Mendoza. “And I thought, ‘Alright, let me sleep on it tonight.’ I really believed God helped me with that.”

Eventually, Cignetti sold Mendoza on the message that he would be the best quarterback he could become at Indiana, and that he develops quarterbacks. That was what ended up leading to Mendoza committing to the Hoosiers, and now, the rest is history.

I would like y’all’s honest opinion…would Mendoza have gotten a look over Gunner? I’m nearly 99% certain that Gunner was deemed to be the 2025 starter after the SEC Championship game, so Mendoza would’ve been likely sitting on the bench watching Gunner start while Indiana would’ve gotten it done with…well, who knows.

I’m not sure it would’ve made a difference, but what do you think?