When the Colorado Buffaloes named Fernando Lovo as their next athletic director, the move resonated far beyond Boulder, drawing attention from some of the most prominent figures in college football.

Among those offering the loudest praise was three-time national champion coach Urban Meyer, who witnessed firsthand Lovo’s rise from a student assistant at Florida to an indispensable executive at Ohio State and then the NFL.

The Urban Meyer Connection and a Proven Pedigree

“He’s the best at what he does, regardless of the responsibility,” Meyer said of Lovo. “He will be a great athletic director. He’s the ultimate team player with extremely high character and high work ethic. He was always a guy I could trust. When he was an undergraduate at Florida, very early on… his reputation started to make its way to me as the head coach. He was a guy that I brought with me to Ohio State. He’s elite.”

It’s an endorsement that carries immense weight because it’s rooted in firsthand observation of a championship-caliber work ethic. For Lovo, moving from Florida to Ohio State alongside Meyer wasn’t just a career jump; it was a testament to his ability to manage the high-pressure, high-stakes ecosystem of elite college football.

Meyer’s success was built on surrounding himself with people who could handle the grind of a championship program, and Lovo was a primary pillar in that structure. At Florida, Lovo was part of the 2008 National Championship staff working as an equipment manager. He then followed Meyer to Ohio State, where he helped the Buckeyes win the first-ever College Football Playoff National Championship in 2014.

To be hand-picked by one of the most demanding and successful coaches in the history of the sport speaks volumes about Lovo’s operational brilliance and the high regard Meyer held for him, even early in his career.

But it isn’t just about Lovo’s resume; it’s about the “trust” Meyer mentioned. In the modern era of college athletics, an athletic director must be more than a figurehead; they must be a tactical partner who understands the nuances of football operations, NIL, and revenue generation. Meyer’s public backing confirms that Lovo possesses the rare combination of character and the relentless work ethic required to navigate Colorado through its current financial and competitive hurdles.

Alignment with the “Coach Prime” Vision

While Rick George was the architect of the Deion Sanders hire, the future of Colorado football now rests in the synergy between Lovo and “Coach Prime.” Though early indications suggest the two are already in lockstep. Sanders, who participated in the hiring process, was quick to express his enthusiasm for Lovo’s arrival, emphasizing the need for a leader who understands the “city and wonderful university.”

“He is a man of character and the type of leader this department, city and wonderful university deserves,” Sanders said. “He has a great knowledge of football and understands what it takes to win in today’s game. I’m motivated to show all of our incredible fans the tremendous heights we will take this program.”

For Colorado to reach those “heights,” the relationship must mirror the professional alignment George and Sanders shared. Lovo’s background as a “football guy” first ensures that he speaks the same language as Sanders, providing the administrative support that “Coach Prime” will need.

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Why the Lovo Hire Is Pivotal for Colorado

Colorado’s decision to hire Fernando Lovo comes at a defining moment for the university. Rising costs, NIL, revenue sharing, facility demands, and increasing competitive pressure in the Big 12 have fundamentally reshaped the role of the athletic director. However, Lovo’s track record at New Mexico, where he helped lead the department to a record revenue year and a 17.6 percent budget increase in just twelve months, aligns perfectly with what CU’s Board of Regents set out to find.

He’s no longer just a rising name in athletic administration. He brings years of hands-on experience in revenue generation, operational restructuring, and facility management—areas that have become inseparable from competitive success at the Power Four level.

With his experience and the trust and support of influential voices like Urban Meyer and “Coach Prime,” Lovo steps into Boulder with momentum already behind him. Now, the task is turning that momentum into results.

The offseason decision for Damon Wilson II appeared to be two-fold: Return to Columbia, or head to the NFL as a junior.

There was a third option, which came in a surprise announcement on Tuesday afternoon.

Wilson, the star Missouri football defensive end, will enter the transfer portal, he posted to Instagram on Tuesday. The news was first reported by Hayes Fawcett and On3. The move does not necessarily mean Wilson won’t head to the NFL, where he had received some top-100 projections for the 2026 draft.

But it appears that if Wilson remains in college, it will not be at Mizzou.

Texas quarterback Arch Manning reportedly made more than the large majority of college football head coaches last season.

Manning is estimated to have made $6.8 million through NIL deals during his first season as the Longhorns’ starter in 2025, according to The Athletic’s Will Leitch.

USA Today reports that 35 college football coaches made more than $6.8 million last season.

According to Leitch’s estimate, Manning made more in NIL than coaches like Auburn’s Hugh Freeze ($6.734 million) or Kansas’ Lance Leipold ($6.65 million) made in salary in 2025.

Leitch’s estimate is higher than the valuation provided by On3, which projects the value of Manning’s NIL portfolio at $5.3 million.

Evan that total would have ranked Manning 46th among coaches’ salaries last season, as reported by USA Today.

Texas fell short of a College Football Playoff run after finishing Manning’s first starting season with a 10-3 record.

Manning will hope to change that in 2026. He is set to return for his redshirt junior season with the Longhorns rather than declaring for the 2026 NFL draft.

Quarterback prices are rising around the NCAA. ESPN’s Pete Thamel reporedt in December that top transfer quarterbacks could receive $5 million just for the 2026 season.

Manning could potentially pull in even more NIL earnings than last season as he prepares to enter what could be his final college campaign next fall.

Former Ole Miss quarterback Austin Simmons has signed, committing to transfer to Missouri, according to On3’s Pete Nakos. As a sophomore last season, he has two years of collegiate eligibility remaining.

After losing his starting position in Oxford two games into this past season due to injury, Simmons will start anew in Columbia under Tigers head coach Eli Drinkwitz. Simmons finished the 2025 season completing 45-of-75 passes for 744 yards and four touchdowns.

Simmons opened the 2025 season as Ole Miss’ starting quarterback, leading the Rebels to wins over Georgia State and Kentucky with a combined 576 passing yards and three touchdowns. But an ankle injury in the fourth quarter against the Wildcats forced him to miss multiple games, which opened the door for former Division II Ferris State transfer Trinidad Chambliss to step in and establish himself as the Rebels’ QB1 with four straight victories, relegating Simmons to a backup role once he returned from injury.

Simmons has thrown for 1,026 yards and six touchdowns in 17 total games across two seasons in Oxford. He signed with Ole Miss as a four-star prospect in the 2023 recruiting cycle after reclassifying two full years having completed the prerequisite courses to graduate. The 6-foot-4, 215-pound Simmons was ranked as the No. 19 quarterback and No. 266 overall prospects in the 2023 class out of Moore Haven Junior/Senior High in Pahokee, Fla., according to the Rivals Industry Ranking.

After entering the transfer portal on Jan. 2, Simmons pledged to remain with the Rebels through their run in the College Football Playoff. While playing out the season might be atypical of transferring quarterbacks, Simmons may have already had a destination in mind given his “do-not-contact” tag in the portal, according to On3’s Pete Nakos.

Missouri has been considered the favorite to land Simmons since he entered, according to ESPN’s Pete Thamel. The Tigers are looking to replace 2025 starter  Beau Pribula, who announced his intentions to enter the portal last month after just one season in Columbia.

Despite losing his starting position, Simmons never lost the faith of now-former Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin, who left himself to take over at LSU ahead of the Rebels’ College Football Playoff run.

“I think we have the best quarterback room in the country,” Kiffin said Nov. 11. “I think Austin (Simmons) is a great quarterback, was playing really well for a first-time starter, and I think he’d be having a great year if he was still in there. I have all the confidence in the world in him. So I think we have two that are better than a lot of people’s No. 1.”

BERKELEY, Calif. — Cal quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele is a college football conundrum.

His debut for the Golden Bears in August defied traditional expectations for a true freshman. He was composed. He was accurate. He showcased his big arm and the physical attributes — at 6-foot-3, 225 pounds — that made him one of the most coveted high school quarterbacks in the 2025 class. For anyone who remembered Jared Goff’s debut in Berkeley over a decade earlier, the feeling was familiar. Here was a player for which college football would serve as a pit stop to the NFL.

In another era — like with Goff, not that long ago — Sagapolutele’s arrival would have translated into optimism about the future. If he was this good already, what will he look like as a junior or senior? How good will the team be once he develops?

Sagapolutele’s emergence, though, was processed differently. It was still natural to wonder about how he would progress, but it was accompanied with inevitable speculation: Can Cal keep him?

From the beginning, Sagapolutele said what Cal fans wanted to hear.

“This is where I want to be. I want to be at Berkeley. I want to be a Bear,” he told ESPN in September. “And going forward, I just hope everyone knows that. This is where I want to be. This is my home.”

As the season unfolded, the dips arrived. Turnovers. Missed reads. They were normal hiccups of a freshman quarterback learning on the fly. Meanwhile, Fernando Mendoza — Cal’s starting quarterback for most of the previous two seasons — had developed into a surefire first-round NFL draft pick and was on his way to winning the Heisman Trophy and leading Indiana to the top seed in the College Football Playoff.

Nothing in college football exists outside the quarterback transfer prism anymore. Every roster decision, coaching hire, NIL budget and depth-chart conversation is filtered through the same question: Who’s the quarterback, and how long do we actually have him?

EVEN BEFORE TRANSFER restrictions were lifted, quarterbacks always moved at higher rates than other positions. Only one is on the field, and without a clear path to playing time, players were willing to sit out a year — even losing a year of eligibility — just to try their shot elsewhere.

Now, with the ability to transfer and play immediately, things have been accelerated. When the transfer portal opened last week, there were more than 100 quarterbacks on the move. Done correctly, the portal offers a fast track out of offensive irrelevance. The safest formula has proved to be the least imaginative: bring the quarterback with the coach.

This past year, John Mateer went with his offensive coordinator, Ben Arbuckle, from Washington State to Oklahoma. Devon Dampier did the same at Utah, moving with offensive coordinator Jason Beck from New Mexico. And in both cases, it worked: Each helped guide their team to a 10-win season, a year after the Sooners and Utes finished with losing records.

They were hardly unique. Bo Nix transferred to Oregon to reunite with offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham, who coached him for a year at Auburn. Caleb Williams followed Lincoln Riley to USC and won the Heisman Trophy. Cam Ward thrived after moving with Eric Morris from Incarnate Word to Washington State. Dillon Gabriel reunited with Jeff Lebby, his former coordinator at UCF, when he transferred to Oklahoma.

When a player moves with a coach, it simplifies the evaluation. Michael Penix Jr. transferred to Washington to reunite with Kalen DeBoer, who had coached him as the offensive coordinator at Indiana. Ryan Grubb, UW’s then-offensive coordinator and the current OC at Alabama, said because Penix already spoke the language, the transition was easy.

“Michael was in our system in Indiana. You saw him running our stuff and it was like, ‘Oh wow he’s not only going to be able to come in and do the things that we believe he can do, but being able to understand the system — this is how we call this, this is going to go pretty quick,'” Grubb said.

It becomes harder to evaluate, Grubb said, if a quarterback had been operating in a completely different style of offense.

“If a player was running Tennessee’s offense and then trying to come in and run ours — and Tennessee’s a really good offense. But it’s like if they’re trying to run our system, is that going to translate?” he said. “Just two really, really different systems, where I don’t know if this guy’s already been there for a couple years and he’s entrenched, it’s going to take a little bit of time.

“And if you’re saying this guy’s coming here to be your starter, you better be pretty certain that he has the capabilities mentally to run your system.”

Penix’s familiarity translated directly to production. At Washington, Penix threw for 4,641 yards and 31 touchdowns in 2022, then followed it with 4,903 yards and 36 touchdowns in 2023, turning the Huskies into a national contender almost overnight. Over two seasons, Washington went 25-3, reached the College Football Playoff National Championship game, and Penix finished as a Heisman Trophy finalist before being selected No. 8 in the 2024 NFL draft. Since the portal opened, multiple teams are following a similar path.

Rocco Becht has said he plans to reunite with Matt Campbell after Campbell’s move from Iowa State to Penn State. Drew Mestemaker announced he would follow Eric Morris from North Texas to Oklahoma State. And AJ Hill committed to Arkansas, following new Razorbacks coach Ryan Silverfield from Memphis. The logic is the same: minimize uncertainty and shorten the time between arrival and impact.

Texas hasn’t used that model, but offensive coordinator Kyle Flood sees the logic.

“I think if you asked any college coach, they would tell you, in a perfect world, you would love to recruit your own players, retain them and develop them over three, four, five years, whatever that looks like,” Flood said. “But kind of like what I said before, that is not college football anymore. It is not.

“I think the art of recruiting is really the art of evaluation. It is not evaluating if he is a good player or not. That is not really the evaluation. The evaluation is does he have the traits to really excel at a high level in your system.

“Meeting them now, when they are in the portal, is not like meeting them in high school. It is really like your NFL top-30 visits where you say, ‘Hey, I have to get this guy in a room and I have to find out does this guy want to be coached, does he believe in the things that we believe in, how great does this player really, really want to be.'”

DESPITE SAGAPOLUTELE’S CONSTANT refrain throughout the season that he wanted to remain in Berkeley, there is only so much trust that can be placed in that sort of talk.

After all, Sagapolutele had committed to Cal, flipped to Oregon, enrolled, spent time on campus in Eugene and then reversed course again to land in Berkeley. That’s all to say, circumstances change.

As the season wore on, the skepticism about his future never fully disappeared, and when coach Justin Wilcox was fired, it was again front and center.

As general manager Ron Rivera began Cal’s coaching search, the quarterback position was part of the discussion from the start. Rivera relayed to candidates he felt strongly they would be able to retain Sagapolutele and laid out the plan to do so. There were no guarantees offered. Rivera described a process that mirrored free agency as much as recruiting.

The pitch wasn’t just about retaining one player.

“With a guy like that, people are going to want to come play for him and play with him, be a receiver, be a tight end, be a running back, be an offensive lineman,” Rivera said. “Why? Because not only are the scouts going to come watch him, but they’re going to see the other people around him.”

After Tosh Lupoi was hired, the urgency turned concrete. One of Lupoi’s first moves was to board a commercial flight to Hawai’i, where Sagapolutele was home on a brief visit. Lupoi met him face-to-face and quickly secured his commitment to stay.

Keeping Sagapolutele in place had a cascading effect. Retention became easier. Recruiting did, too. Receivers and skill players want to know who’s throwing the ball. Stability at quarterback, even if temporary, creates momentum.

But nothing about it is permanent. These are battles won a year at a time now. If Sagapolutele takes the expected step forward next season, the speculation will return just as quickly. That isn’t a judgment on him or on Cal. It’s simply the reality of modern college football.