In a word…

• Welcome to the dog (ahem, DAWG) days, folks…Spring practice is well in the rearview, and August camp—and the real football it mercifully dangles before us each year—seems too damn far away. We’re Clark Griswold stumbling through the Arizona desert.

• But decisions that will significantly impact college football’s future are being made now, and we at TTM endeavor to keep you informed. So strap in—we’re thinking Matrix style—and let’s get you caught up. Hell, you may know Kung Fu by the time we’re done here…

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For All You Nervous Nellies, An Update on the Shifting Sands...

By BurtReynolds69

Around this time last year, I was preparing to put pen to paper on one of our first-ever articles, my call-to-everybody-calm-the-hell-down piece on the admittedly scary pace of change that continues to impact the glorious game of college football.

About a year later—a year into this sultry, scandalous experiment we call Teams That Matter—it seems an appropriate time to provide an update on those shifting sands. Are we any closer to resolution on boogeyman issues like the transfer portal and player compensation? Has the flame of conference realignment flickered out? Strap in, folks. We’re here to get you all caught up.

NIL / Player Compensation

Let’s start with NIL (short for Name, Image, and Likeness), the primary avenue through which college athletes, and especially college football players, are currently being compensated. Unsurprisingly, the NCAA is clinging to a bygone era—and, to be honest, a lie—by insisting these NIL payments are not “pay-for-play” arrangements, despite the fact that everyone and their grandmother knows that they are. Even a stone cold five star defensive tackle prospect—an exceedingly scarce asset on the recruiting trail—isn’t worth $1 million in endorsement deals as an unproven true freshman. That $1 million NIL deal is to get the kid in the door, not sell luxury German automobiles at Ashley Schaeffer BMW. Anyone who’s paying attention understands this.

What’s it matter, you ask? And isn’t the NCAA largely toothless now? Yes—well, in football at least…see NCAA President Charlie Baker’s recent bombshell admission that the NCAA will not be in charge of enforcing new rules of the road around NIL—but this distinction between third-party compensation for endorsement deals and university compensation for actually playing football is going to matter in the coming paradigm, the foundation for which is being laid by…

The House settlement.

“What’s the House Settlement, Burt?” “Shut up and pay attention!” The House settlement is a legal settlement currently being negotiated as a resolution to a court case (House v. NCAA) over revenue-sharing in college athletics. It includes as one of its core tenets a per-athletic department annual cap on university-paid player compensation expected to begin somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million.

Under the settlement, which could be accepted any day—it’s currently being reviewed by a federal judge in California—instead of dubious endorsement deals, most college football players would begin receiving their piece of the sport’s multi-billion dollar pie through a sharing of their school’s millions of dollars in annual TV revenue. (As a reminder, most power-conference schools bring in well north of $100 million annually in athletic revenue, with SEC and Big Ten schools set to receive upward of $70 million each year from their new TV deals alone.) Schools would have the freedom to apply their media-rights revenue across their athletic departments as they saw fit—meaning schools like Kansas and Duke, for example, might apply a decent chunk of it to basketball—but most power programs would likely apply the lion’s share of that revenue to the 800-pound gorilla that enabled it in the first place, which is football.

So for those—like myself—concerned over the current setup whereby fans are largely financing their teams’ roster-building efforts, the House settlement has the potential to precipitate a huge step in the right direction. Player compensation would, at least in large part, be coming from the media-rights goldmine that their play on the field—and their insane schedules, the added pressures they face (alongside, of course, a fair amount of privilege), the long-term risks to their physical health—has enabled, as we also stop pretending to adhere to the fake rules of a lame-duck organization like the NCAA.

As for NIL, though it would cease, under House, to function as a trojan horse for uncapped, unregulated pay-for-play compensation, it would not cease to exist. Instead, endorsement deals would be permitted under House—but would now be subject to a third-party clearinghouse, likely operated by Deloitte, who by the way already does the same thing for the NFL! (As the NFL operates under a salary cap, it must police for cap-gaming, like, for example, bogus endorsement deals funded by some company run by a billionaire team owner.)

NIL deals would need to be certified by the clearinghouse as representing “fair market value,” meaning a Texas (with its stupid oil money), or an Oregon (with its stupid Nike money), or an Auburn (with its crazy redneck money) would have a difficult time funneling $1 million to that beefy five star defensive tackle recruit. The net result? Big-boy programs will max out their House revenue-sharing cap—schools would be permitted but not required to disseminate $20 million to their athletes under House, and in fact some may not have that much to give—as their NIL collectives hunt for supplementary but legitimate endorsement deals to increase compensation for star players with real market value.

With player compensation more or less on a level playing field—or at least, on a level playing field between big-boy programs fully invested in competing at the highest level—what’s recruiting come back to? It comes back to your coaches. It comes back to your tradition. To your NFL production. To your university. Your town. Your program’s culture. Your fanbase. It comes back to the things we all want it to be about. Only the players aren’t getting screwed out of their piece of the pie anymore…

Look, I should say this: I’m no lawyer. What I’ve tried to do here is give you a high-level understanding of what’s going on…to ensure you know what you need to know. I hope you’ll forgive me if there’s a nitty-gritty detail or two I’ve left out. Further, while I continue to hear that House is expected to be finalized and accepted during this offseason, it’s entirely possible that House is either delayed, or that it’s agreed to…and then challenged in court and struck down. We’re talking about wholesale regulatory change in a multi-billion dollar industry. That takes time, and it involves lawyers. It may even require a second and a third try, and it will certainly require iteration—little tweaks—over time. Loopholes will be found; loopholes will need to be filled. But I hope you can all see the direction this is headed. We’re making progress here.

The Transfer Portal / Player Movement

Right up next to NIL among the list of issues absolutely burning the buns of many long-time college football fans? The transfer portal, and the significantly greater degree of year-to-year player movement it’s enabling relative to eras past. On the portal front, not much has changed since last year. But it’s about to…

For one, legit momentum is building to establish a single portal period annually (there are currently two, including one in the winter that opens during the damn playoff—not great, Bob!). This would be a highly beneficial change, and it’s one we expect to happen sooner rather than later. College coaches voted unanimously to support adoption of a single portal window at their postseason round of meetings, and SEC coaches continued that drumbeat in their media sessions at the conference’s annual spring meetings this week.

Second, as House-enabled revenue-sharing comes into effect and the specifics around that get ironed out—and as NIL deals become both more standardized and more sophisticated—players will likely increasingly be financially incentivized to stay put and see out their contracts. The portal will remain an avenue for certain players to seek out better opportunities, but the Wild, Wild West—great film—days of rampant tampering egged on by bullshit promises made by unscrupulous agents? That’s coming to an end. Another positive development.

Irrespective of these coming changes, I do want to make a quick point on the current state of the portal: Under the current paradigm, starters aren’t really transferring, and they especially aren’t transferring from big-boy programs. So I don’t want to hear ‘Bama fans, or LSU fans, or Michigan fans, or fans of any other blueblood program—who have the money to retain their starters and are also now benefitting from essentially a minor league system of smaller schools where they can scout and acquire proven college talent—complain about how ravaged their poor rosters are by the portal. Portal entries are overwhelmingly backups looking for an opportunity to start somewhere else, so let’s root our complaints in reality, folks. Now, for middle-tier programs like Georgia Tech? Yeah, it’s tough…There’s no pretty way to spin that. Those programs are currently exposed to tampering by higher-profile teams. For a school like Tech, which has legitimate tradition but a smaller donor base—and hella hard math classes—the only way out right now, pre House settlement, is to spend like a big-dog program (which, to their credit, Tech has begun to do). The hope, again, is that House will at least somewhat even the playing field for programs like Georgia Tech, or Kansas State, or NC State, who very much want to compete at the highest level and have done so in the past, but who don’t have barrels of cash to burn like the oil tycoons at Texas A&M.

To put a bow on the portal discussion: Positive changes are afoot, and a more limited, better regulated portal is ultimately going to move college football to a better place. Players will no longer be locked down at a program where the coach who recruited them just left for a more high-profile opportunity, while coaches won’t have to worry about re-recruiting their rosters every single day…and fans won’t have to worry about learning a substantially different roster each season. As with NIL—and as often occurs with paradigm shifts—the door was blasted open and the target overshot, but the pendulum is now swinging back toward a more reasonable middle ground.

Conference Realignment

Shockingly, the SEC and Big Ten continue to throw their weight around as college football’s newly-minted Power Two. They’re now demanding four guaranteed spots apiece in a future 16-team playoff format. The SEC and the Big Ten—alongside their television partners in ESPN and FOX—have maneuvered, cajoled, pillaged, and yes, won (particularly in the SEC’s case) their way to the steering wheel of the sport. With their perch atop the game secure, are we now done with conference realignment? Negative, ghost rider. Why, you ask? Because now the two big dogs want to kill each other, of course! Well, maybe not kill…but certainly dominate…

And we’ve written about this before! If you missed ‘em, and if you’re like me and you enjoy daydreaming about how the sport might be structured in 2030, 2040 and beyond, I’d highly recommend you check out our articles on potential next moves by the SEC and Big Ten. They outline the factors we feel will guide those conference’s strategies in the next round of realignment. For those of you whose teams are not discussed in those articles, it is my solemn vow that we will soon write about the third league likely to emerge alongside the SEC and Big Ten, because we all know there are more than 40 programs who care about—and are prepared to compete at a high level in—college football (I see you, Hokies! And I don't mean that facetiously...), and we’re at a critical juncture for those programs.

Final Thoughts

I said it last offseason and I’ll say it again here: Folks were and remain right to scrutinize wholesale rules changes to a game they already loved. And many of these changes—for the precise reason that they upended a longstanding, but in my opinion, somewhat dishonest paradigm—initially overshot the mark. But these changes will ultimately move us toward a better, more sustainable future.

Say it with me, folks: College football is professional football, and it’s been professional football for at least a couple decades now—through its $12 million per year coaching contracts, through its giant stadiums and million-person fanbases, through its enormous TV deals, through the mammoth advertising revenue that materializes alongside those deals, through the billions of dollars flowing through its veins.

It’s been pro football to everyone but the players, and we’re rectifying that now.

OVER AND ABOVE the moral sense of player compensation (a topic I know I’ve beaten to death already), any real college football fan knows, and especially those of us who grew up outside the larger media markets—which often means those of us who grew up in the South or the Midwest—any real college football fan knows that college football is pro football for us. For our schools, for our states, for our families, on our day—Saturday, a far superior football day, by the way—and it’s occupied that place in our hearts for as long as we can remember. At least for me, the NFL—no shade! It's just not my thing—will never match the soul of college football. And that soul, pending some sensible tweaks, is well intact.

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