NIL
Unlimited transfers, NIL have given college QBs the ability to fill the pocket while also escaping it. Is that a good thing?
Remember when the term “quarterback mobility” applied to a player’s ability to escape defenders threatening the pocket?
Now, of course, it’s about finding a market, leveling talent to value, moving up-down-sideways to a better situation, and cashing in on what could be life-changing income.
By different projections, somewhere between 60 and 70% of starting college quarterbacks for the 2025 season are transfers, or at least first-year starters filling in for a player who has transferred out or been deposed.
The concept of identifying, recruiting and grooming a long-term quarterback is now rendered antiquated in an age of unlimited transfers and name-image-likeness money without a salary cap.
Washington State, Idaho and Eastern Washington all have new quarterbacks this season.
WSU, in particular, has become a study of national prominence, having lost eventual No. 1 NFL draft pick, Cam Ward, to a multi-million-dollar NIL deal. But his defection to Miami opened the revolving door for a successful year by John Mateer, who then left for Oklahoma, along with his offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle.
Eastern’s starter, Kekoa Visperas transferred to Tennessee Tech, while Idaho’s Jack Layne followed his head coach, Jason Eck, to New Mexico.
I sampled a collection of prominent former quarterbacks from the region for opinions on the new landscape that college quarterbacks now occupy, where they can earn six-figure salaries and upward.
Most agree: Players deserved pay for their efforts, and coaches have never faced more challenges trying to build and retain rosters. That’s fair, too, they suggest, since coaches have been able to abruptly move on to the highest bidder forever.
Some findings:
• • •
It was time for players to start getting their share of income. And some degree of free-agency was fair. But the absence of rules and guard rails have allowed the situation to get out of hand.
After some of the quarterbacks polled used colorful language to describe it, for the record, they settled on comments such as “interesting,” and “unique.”
“The whole college landscape is just wild, but for quarterbacks, in particular,” said Luke Falk (WSU, 2014-2017, 119 TD passes) “But that’s the reality of it, right?”
Connor Halliday (Ferris High, WSU 2010-2014, 90 TD passes): “I’ll just say ‘interesting.’ From 18 to 21 years old, every kid’s mindset is very short term, you know, who can pay me the most money? Where can I get the most eyeballs on me? You know, me, me, me. I understand, everyone has a dream, I had a dream, and I would have done anything to make it happen.”
Money? Sure. Players would be foolish to ignore the potential windfall.
“I loved my experience, but it was a struggle. I didn’t have much money, and used a student credit card to get by,” said Matt Nichols, record-setting QB at EWU and two-time Big Sky offensive MVP (2007-2009). “If that had been an option for me, it would have been incredible. What some of those kids are getting offered would have been life-changing money for me.”
Hugh Millen, former Washington quarterback and eight-year NFL player, has two college-quarterback sons (who have each transferred twice), believes the chance for players to make money was too late in coming.
“There’s a lot of nostalgia about the old ways, but they were denying the opportunity of players in a free-market system,” Millen said. “The more outraged you are about how things have changed, the more it’s a testament to how much the old system was unfair.”
• • •
All quarterbacks sympathized with the situation coaches now face, sometimes even facing the defection of a quarterback during the season.
But it’s the system they face now, and they better get on-board or get left behind.
“The ones who are still winning are the ones who have done the best job of adapting,” said Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon, who played in the NFL until he was 44, after being Rose Bowl MVP at UW. “It’s not just quarterbacks, Washington brought in 40-some new guys last year, and two quarterbacks. I don’t know how coaches do it now.”
“I think coaches who accept it and adapt are the ones who succeed,” Falk said. “Adapt or die, right?”
How to adapt?
“Coaches have to accept what they can’t change,” Falk said. “If you’re not honest with the situation, it’s going to drive you nuts. I think it will help recruiting if you’re honest with the kids and genuinely mean it. We want you to come in here, play well, and we want you to move on.”
It’s an approach former WSU coach Jake Dickert used with Cam Ward.
“I talked to coach Dickert a lot, and he was very, very open about it (with Ward),” Halliday said. “It will be interesting to see how coach (Jimmy Rogers, at WSU) deals with it. I think he was a great hire; I think that guy can coach the heck out of a football team. It will be interesting to see how he does with the dynamic he’s walking into.”
Moon thought that coaches can ease these transitions by catering the offense to suit the background of the new quarterback or by targeting a new quarterback who is familiar with the system.
Millen downplayed the impact of changing teams, since so many college offenses run similar plays, which then becomes more of a function of translating the language of play calls.
Falk thought the Air Raid system run by former coach Mike Leach was “very quarterback friendly,” in which quarterbacks with basic ability to read defenses “can really thrive.”
• • •
Quarterbacks parachuting in for immediate play can face a tricky situation. Trust has to be earned. Leadership isn’t automatically bestowed.
“I liken it to when I came into the NFL from Canada,” Moon said. “I had to convince that locker room that I’m good enough to take those guys where they wanted to go. Now, that has to happen every year in colleges.”
Learning their teammates is first, Moon said. “They’re going to be looking at you, and you’re going to be going into battle with them every week. You have to instill confidence in those guys very quickly.”
Millen called it a “Goldilocks” balance of being assertive but not arrogant.
“I think if you come in and have a humility about you, where you’re not making a lot of big waves,” Falk said. “If you do your job and get to know your teammates on a personal level, trust is built on that.”
It can go badly, and it can happen quickly.
“Nobody wants to hear a guy standing up talking to the team if he hasn’t done anything on the field,” Halliday said. “If you get a transfer quarterback in there and you start the year 1-4, that team can quit pretty quickly if there’s no leadership.”
Halliday and Falk both pointed to Gardner Minshew (WSU, 2018), who came in from East Carolina, which ran an offense similar to Leach’s, as the perfect pop-in, plug-and-play transfer.
“Gardner had only a summer before played,” Halliday said. “That showed the power of the system coach Leach had created. And then, Gardner’s a phenomenal player, as well.”
Minshew led the Cougars to an 11-2 record and finished fifth in the Heisman Trophy voting.
• • •
What’s lost in this process?
Surely the depth of the connection of the player to the fans, as all quarterbacks polled believed that three- and four-year starters at one school is likely a thing of the past.
Although, Minshew, in just one season, is still held in high reverence as a Cougar.
Falk, a walk-on, wondered if there will even be a place for walk-ons anymore.
“I don’t know if Washington State’s going to have three- or four-year starters ever again,” Falk said. “Because if they play good enough, they’ll probably move on, and if they’re not playing at that level, then we probably are trying to replace them.”
The relationship between players and coaches won’t have the chance to ripen, either.
“When (Leach) first came in, our relationship was so rocky,” Halliday said. “I mean, I wanted to strangle that guy. And he hated me just as much. I mean, we hated each other. But by the end of my junior year, we were like best friends. I wanted to spend every second with that guy. We had gotten really, really close.”
Nichols started four years at Eastern. “I loved my experience, but it was a struggle sometimes,” he said. “ But playing in college, for me, was about growing up and becoming an adult and learning to live on my own.”
While a short-term payday would have helped, “going through this with the same group of people, and finishing with them” was important, Nichols said. “Some of those things are going away, now.”
• • •
Nichols brought up an element of the new rules that he envies. A longer competition window.
Several quarterbacks have played in seven seasons, some still taking college snaps at age 25. Oregon’s Dillon Gabriel played 64 games at three colleges.
“Besides the first game (as a freshman) at Oregon State, I started every other game I was eligible for, 47 straight games,” Nichols said. “I see people with 61 starts – that’s another full season for me. I could have thrown for 20,000 yards in college.”
The financial incentive to move on can be staggering and has to be the most compelling part of a player’s decision.
Cam Ward reportedly cashed in $2 million in NIL deals to play last season at Miami.
He stayed at WSU two seasons, and earned his degree, before moving on. Will he be held in the same esteem as other long-time Cougars? Probably not. But is esteem bankable?
Reports hold that WSU financial backers rallied hard to try to keep Mateer another season.
“(Mateer) worked his butt off, sat behind Cam Ward, and was ready for his opportunity when it came up,” Halliday said. “I was in very close contact with (former Coug QB and key fund-raiser) Jack Thompson during (Mateer’s) recruitment to stay at Washington State. In the beginning, they did an amazing job of raising money and were close to Oklahoma’s initial offer. But then they offered him $4 million and we had no chance.”
• • •
Looking back, now, would these quarterbacks have taken the money and moved on if it had been an option in their day?
Yes, they admit.
Nichols actually had an offer, but it was before NIL money was involved.
“I did have a scenario come up when I did have a chance to go to Washington State for my senior year,” Nichols said. “At the time, it was a little more taboo to transfer, and I wanted to finish with my guys.”
But …?
“If that happened today, getting offered a million dollars to transfer? That’s probably a no-brainer.”
Nichols said he loves college football, regardless, but thinks a solution is actually pretty easy. “A salary cap and one free transfer, with going back to a penalty (sitting out a year) for a transfer after that,” he said.
Good concept. Might be hard to get consensus at this point, though.
Moon: “I know me, I probably would have stayed … but I also would have liked the money.”
Halliday: “That’s a really interesting question because it would have taken an amazing offer to get me to leave coach Leach. As a 32-year-old man, I’d say, there’s no way I’d leave. But that 21-year-old knucklehead that I was, if someone flashed a couple million dollars in front of me, I can’t say that I would have turned that down.”
A college football champion will be crowned on Jan. 19 after the No. 10-seed Miami Hurricanes and No. 1-seed Indiana Hoosiers face off at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami.
As many fans have noticed and have thoroughly enjoyed pointing out online, the SEC does not have a representative in the title game for the third consecutive year. Many in the sport have attributed this to NIL and the transfer portal, which allow non-traditional programs like Texas Tech or Indiana to contend, while programs like Georgia or Alabama no longer have significant talent advantages.
When it comes to the Bulldogs, Fox’s Joel Klatt revealed on a recent episode of “The Next Round” that Georgia can’t even say they have the best coach in college football anymore, going as far as to say that Indiana’s Curt Cignetti has surpassed him.
“It leads into this idea of Kirby (Smart) is the best coach in college football,” Klatt said in reference to the SEC being the best conference narrative. “Well no he’s not. He hasn’t even played in the final four in the last three years with good teams by the way. And in some cases based on the composite, the most talented team.
“So Curt Cignetti is doing more with less than anybody,” Klatt said. “And he’s doing it on a stage and at a pace right now that is fairly unprecedented. He did it at Indiana. Guys Indiana is likely to win the national championship. That blows my mind. It just does.”
While it seemed extremely brash or arrogant at the time when Cignetti told college football fans to Google him at his introductory press conference, that appears to have been a legitimate warning that no one was really ready for.
In his four years as an FBS head coach, which include his final two seasons at James Madison, Cignetti has compiled a 45-6 record. At Indiana alone, he has put together a record of 26-2, leading the Hoosiers to the program’s first outright Big Ten title since 1945, the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff and also helped Fernando Mendoza have a breakout year that saw him win the Heisman trophy.
Arguably the most interesting part about Cignetti’s success outside of his one-liners and otherworldly confidence is the fact that he isn’t chasing someone else’s legacy at another program, he is working to build his own.
Despite being the hottest coach on the market this coaching cycle, Cignetti inked an 8-year extension worth around $93 million that will keep him in Bloomington.
So, for those college football traditionalists who are struggling to accept the new reality of what this sport has become, it appears that accepting Indiana as a powerhouse is another thing they’ll have to add to the list.
Pat McAfee remains one of the more polarizing voices in the college football media landscape, and it appears the College GameDay personality is losing some of his base of support among fans, according to a new survey.
McAfee’s approval ratings among college football fans have fallen to an all-time low coming out of the 2025 season, according to a poll taken by The Athletic this week.
How do you feel about Pat McAfee?
Fans were asked a simple question: “How do you feel about Pat McAfee on College GameDay?” And the answers definitely tilted one way.
Nearly half of those who answered the question said they “Don’t like it,” with 49.5 percent of fans who took part saying they didn’t approve of McAfee’s contribution to the weekly College GameDay program.
That contribution has been noteworthy from the beginning, capped off by his bombastic (and often shirtless) game predictions that helped give the program a transition from Lee Corso’s famous headgear picks as a method of closing out each show on Saturday.
The field-goal kicking contest that McAfee hosts on GameDay, which includes him paying out serious money to the winners, is also highly-regarded among fans who watch.
Those who do like what McAfee brings to the table? That number is down to 31.6 percent of those who were surveyed by The Athletic.
Just under 20 percent of those asked, 18.9 percent, said they had no opinion of him.
Previous polls agree on McAfee
This marked the third year that The Athletic polled fans on McAfee, but this edition of the vote saw the highest mark among those who answered negatively about him.
Last year, 42.5 percent of respondents said they didn’t like McAfee, and in 2023, that number swelled to 48.9 percent.
Two seasons ago, the negative conversation around McAfee’s performance on College GameDay even resulted in viral speculation that he considered leaving the program.
Last offseason, it was revealed that McAfee did not have a contract to appear on College GameDay that fall and it was an open question for a time whether or not he would return.
Those rumors were put to bed about a month later, when McAfee revealed that he signed a new deal with ESPN to appear on the show that season.
College GameDay is still very popular
Whatever fans may think of McAfee, they are very clear on the College GameDay program overall: they love it.
The overwhelming majority of those fans polled, 83.6 percent of them, said they prefer College GameDay to the Fox pre-game program Big Noon Kickoff.
That confidence was expressed in the TV ratings this season, as College GameDay established viewership records in the 2025 season averaging 2.7 million viewers per show, up 22 percent from last year.
(Athletic)
Read more from College Football HQ
Is this the new normal? The new Bloomington? The new Big Ten?
Good afternoon, and happy Monday. Three-quarters of the MNW household are struggling with some form or residuals of the flu, and the other one is me. That, of course, has led to no resentment of the fact that I am healthy other than a little cough, no sir.
Indiana feels inevitable at this point, do they not? The Hoosiers have, through Curt Cignetti’s shrewd use of the transfer portal and quality coaching, turned college football completely on its ear.
Well, a deep-pocketed donor by any other name is…a deep-pocketed donor, still. Add to that Mark Cuban’s money for 2026? We might be dealing with the Hoosiers until Curt Cignetti gets bored.
Of course, there have been flashes in the pan before: the wisconsin Rose Bowls, the Peak Weather Machine years of Michigan State, that one time Minnesota won ten games or whatever—but it’s undeniable that none of those programs ever made a national championship and that none of them did it in the style that Indiana is doing it right now.
Watching Indiana do it—or, indeed, the entire SEC going belly-up in the postseason—is certainly cathartic. It’s better than the usual suspects doing it over and over again, and it’s at least more above-board than the standard SEC model of used car dealers buying themselves a championship. I take little solace in knowing that there’s less program-building, less connection to a campus, less-anything that feels “authentically” college football, but it’s incredibly possible that my feelings of “authenticity” always relied on a lie—the lie that it was possible to square “belonging” or “identity” of a college campus with athletes being fairly treated.
Congratulations, of course, to Indiana on their seemingly inevitable championship. It is truly exciting for the Hoosiers and their fans, as well as those coming back to football to join the thousand or so of their long-suffering brethren. Glad you’ve finally left the tailgate lots and headed in. Enjoy Miami.
Of course, you might have questions or comments about completely different things—basketball, wrestling, the best episode of Magic School Bus, the worst way to cook cod. We in the OTE Hive were recently discussing our careers as Quiz Bowl contestants (MNW, AlmaOtter, LPW), speech wannabes (LPW, Kind of…, Dead Read), or speech titans (BRT, Jesse, et al). Ask us what you’d like, and we’ll answer how we’d like.
This is a Mailbag call, and I hope you’ll treat it as such.
Elite running back Hollywood Smothers flipped from Alabama to Texas in the 2026 college football transfer portal on Sunday, signaling deeper issues within the Crimson Tide program.
On the field, Alabama has fallen short of sustaining the elite standard set by Nick Saban, losing as many games in two seasons under Kalen DeBoer (eight) as it did across the previous five seasons under the seven-time national championship-winning coach.
Coaching deserves its fair share of blame for Alabama’s slight fall from grace, but deeper issues may lie within the Crimson Tide’s NIL operation, which has lagged behind many of its peers this cycle.
Alabama has lost six players ranked inside Cooper Petagna‘s top 100 of the college football transfer portal rankings this offseason, while adding just one: defensive lineman Devan Thompkins.
National college football and transfer portal analyst Chris Hummer went inside Alabama’s NIL struggles, offering insights into what’s gone wrong in Tuscaloosa and what the future may hold for one of college football’s most storied programs.
“A decade ago, Alabama could land everyone they wanted,” Hummer said on CBS Sports HQ. “They could be like a dragon sitting on a chest of gold. There’s nothing you could do about it.
NIL
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Rutgers football legend Leonte Carroo is suing Rutgers University over the use of his Name, Image, and Likeness from when he was playing in college, according to an article written by Brian Fonseca of Nj.com/NJAdvancedMedia. Carroo’s lawsuit claims that he is entitled to back payments for the money he generated for the university throughout his college career. The lawsuit values those figures between 2.8 and 3 million dollars.
Carroo and his team originally filed the lawsuit in October. In December, Rutgers countered and tried to have the lawsuit dismissed, arguing that the statute of limitations had long passed and that several courts from around the country had already unanimously denied the type of NIL claim that Carroo’s team is making. On January 9th, Carroo’s legal team filed a brief meant to argue that the university’s dismissal should be denied.
According to the article by Fonseca, Carroo’s team gave Rutgers a formal demand letter in June seeking compensation for the unauthorized use of his NIL. The university did not provide such compensation, which led to the lawsuit.
The House vs. NCAA settlement granted back payment to college athletes who were in school between June 2016 and 2024. Carroo’s playing at Rutgers career falls just outside that, as he played from 2012-2015. Carroo’s legal team is arguing that just because he falls outside the period given, it does not take away from the fact that Rutgers unjustly profited from his time as a player.
Carroo was one of the most well-known players at Rutgers while he was playing. He currently holds the receiving touchdowns record in school history by a wide margin, and he was one of the faces of the team when they first entered the Big Ten. Carroo and his legal team argue that some sort of compensation is in order for his level of stardom.
If the courts side with Carroo in this case, it has the potential to open up a whole can of worms across college athletics. It would lay the groundwork and encourage other former athletes from other schools to sue their own school for the same reason. Similar cases to this, including players from other college programs, have been dismissed or denied already across the board. It remains to be seen what will come of this lawsuit in particular.
A link to the original article by Fonseca can be found here.
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