Ahead of the Indiana Hoosiers and Miami Hurricanes’ clash in the 2026 College Football Playoff National Championship Game on Monday, January 19, the SEC’s absence from a third-straight title game has many thinking the conference’s demise is here.

USA Today’s Matt Hayes is one of those people. Hayes called out the Alabama Crimson Tide, Georgia Bulldogs, LSU Tigers, Florida Gators, and Texas A&M Aggies by name for failing their sky-high expectations in the NIL/rev-share era.

As Hayes pointed out, Texas Tech Red Raiders superbooster and Fort Worth oilman Cody Campbell has built a program with rev-share payouts that used to resemble the schools that “didn’t pay” their players before student athletes started cashing sanctioned paychecks.

“There are millionaires and billionaires who love their universities and are obsessive about winning. Throw open the doors to NIL and free player movement — and legalized big booster involvement — and watch how quickly the SEC looks like the ACC,” Hayes wrote.

“Watch how quickly Alabama comes back to the pack, and Georgia can’t get out of the quarterfinals in the CFP. How quickly LSU and Florida and Texas A&M spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fire coaches and start over. 

“More to the point, watch how quickly the deep-pocket Cody Campbells of the world begin to simply play by the rules laid out by the SEC and Big Ten ― and build teams that look and play like SEC teams of the past.”

What Campbell is doing in the open, with public information on all salaries available at a state school per an information request, is more honorable than the bagmen of years past, who gave the “It Just Means More” tagline a devilish undertone. Obligatory mention of the cars Crimson Tide players were driving during their dominant 2010s era.

It’s just sad to see this change, since societies in the south were built on winning football.

Auburn’s fall in the rev-share/NIL era is understated, but it’s still a thing

Going from a College Football world that once saw Alabama win every other year, Georgia doing the same at the very end, and schools like LSU and Florida formerly dominated before, or right when Nick Saban arrived in Tuscaloosa, is more dramatic than going to a world where the Auburn Tigers went from an 8-10-win team to a perennial loser.

That doesn’t mean Auburn’s fall hasn’t happened. It has, and it’s been stark. It’s the same world, and it’s the one we’re living in.

As the Plains sees new, modern structures being erected everywhere, there is a lack of the same character from when the team was winning games, and the Auburn Creed meant something. From the sounds of it, the Creed’s principles were absent under the last two full-time head football coaches’ regimes.

Just like the perennial contenders in the conference, the Tigers need to figure out how to restore glory and make “It Just Means More” hit like it used to. Easier said than done, but all sports are cyclical, and the current CFB landscape will always favor the SEC and Big Ten.

So it should happen sometime in the future. Especially with a different personality like Alex Golesh in tow.

Only time will tell, though.

Tennessee safety Boo Carter has committed to Colorado out of the NCAA transfer portal, On3 has learned. Carter had a bit of a rocky relationship with the Volunteers, ultimately departing the program before the 2025 campaign had finished.

In two seasons at Tennessee, Carter recorded 63 tackles. He also notched two sacks, three forced fumbles, an interception and three passes defended.

Carter earned numerous SEC-related honors stemming from the 2024 season. He was a 2024 SEC All-Freshman team selection. He was also a 2025 preseason All-SEC third-team selection by the league’s coaches.

Boo Carter was arguably his most productive in terms of getting his hands on the ball in 2025. He logged 25 tackles, a sack, three forced fumbles and three passes defended this season.

But Carter didn’t stick around for the full season at Tennessee. He did not play in the team’s 42-9 win over New Mexico State in November. That absence was conspicuous.

Coach Josh Heupel expressed some disappointment in Boo Carter after the game. He shed a little light on the situation.

“At the end of the day, there’s a standard you’ve gotta meet to be in that locker room,” Heupel said. “So he was not out on the field with us. That will be my last response to anything related to that for right now.”

Boo Carter also missed several days with the team in July and went into call camp with questions about his availability. But he was able to work his way back into the good graces of the staff.

Ultimately, things didn’t end up working out at Tennessee. Shortly after that New Mexico State game, it was reported that Carter was splitting with the program.

“No, not regretful,” Heupel said. “At the end of the day, it’s our job as coaches to try to mold these guys, and that’s a part of the commitment that you make, you know, in the recruiting process and when they decide to come. You know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And, you know, at the end of the day, we’re moving forward.”

Prior to enrolling at Tennessee, Boo Carter was ranked as a four-star prospect and the No. 111 overall recruit in the nation, according to the Rivals Industry Rankings. He also checked in as the No. 3 athlete in the class and the No. 3 overall player from the state of Tennessee, hailing from Chattanooga (TN) Bradley Central.

Indiana football is everything right now, representing at once the enhancement of the college football product on the field and the unsustainable reality off it.

No, Indiana didn’t do anything wrong — that we know of, anyway, though I’m sure other coaches would like to investigate Curt Cignetti and his players for spyware or cyborg blood or something. But as we wrap up a week that had the absolute best and worst of the sport clawing at each other for top billing, the Hoosiers should know they’ve made it so much harder for so many people.

Not that they should care. Go destroy Miami after people spend the week talking themselves back into why you can’t really be this good, then celebrate a national championship that would represent one of the most unforeseen, inexplicable, glorious stories in American sports history.

Indiana, even while making Friday night more boring than we wanted with a 56-22 semifinal thrashing of Oregon, is the prevailing example of why college football is in a great place as a product.

Transfer portal. Contracts. No loyalty. Whatever. Inject this stuff into MY VEINS!!!!!

— Dari Nowkhah (@ESPNDari) January 9, 2026

Never has there been more hope for so many. Membership in the exclusive club of heritage and built-in advantages is no longer required. A tallying of the recruiting stars next to names on a roster no longer produces a long and accurate list of programs with no shot of winning it all.

The landscape is always changing, never boring. Vanderbilt, Texas Tech, Ole Miss and Arizona State are among Indiana’s party-crashing undercards. The College Football Playoff is compelling. The games aren’t all thrillers, but enough of them are.

I would, though, like us to get through one of those good games without half of college sports media crowing on some app: “OH THAT’S WEIRD, I THOUGHT COLLEGE FOOTBALL WAS BROKEN.”

Because we all know darn well that, in ways, it is. Or maybe fractured sounds less dramatic. Chaotic. Problematic? Whatever makes you feel less bad. In the same week we’re enjoying the CFP semifinals, including an Ole Miss-Miami classic, we’ve got the former coach of Ole Miss keeping assistant coaches from attending the ball like he’s Cinderella’s stepmother.

We’ve got that same coach, LSU’s Lane Kiffin, courting one quarterback (Arizona State transfer Sam Leavitt) at a basketball game while another (Washington’s Demond Williams Jr.) announces he’s in the portal, apparently with the idea of joining Kiffin, except he had already signed to stay on with Washington. Except we have contracts in college sports that seek to sort of bind, while being careful not to make the person being paid sound as if he or she is being paid to play. Even though that’s exactly what’s happening.

So it’s the latest but far from the last “contract dispute,” this one finishing with Williams deciding to return to Washington. And hey, look, here comes the College Sports Commission promising to start cracking down on these predictable workarounds to pay enough to land top players in a market that is rising.

Which, at best, means an example made of a program or two, and in no way means any chance for the CSC to get its arms around things. Men and women with gavels and long, black robes will continue seeing to that. Lawmakers aren’t changing it.

Collective bargaining, in some form, is the only answer, and more and more people in the industry are coming around on that. The painful, inevitable journey continues. Hopefully, the past week serves as a bit of a jolt. I talked to an administrator who has been in that camp for a while and believes the athletic director and president levels are getting there.

But that will have unintended consequences, too. Go back and read what a lot of us were writing about name, image and likeness rights 10 or 15 years ago. I don’t recall anyone coming close to predicting all that has come with it.

And I must wonder how, with a cap of some sort in place while athletes get a bigger chunk of the revenue overall, the boosters at Ohio State, Alabama and Georgia are going to feel about officially being like everyone else, about parity as league design — about the caddies getting full-time access to the pool and golf course.

Which brings us to the thing I hear the most from folks in college sports in terms of long-term concerns. And this is where Indiana re-enters the discussion, in three words: return on investment. Indiana AD Scott Dolson has made what must be considered, two years later, one of the great hires in modern college football history. As hyperbolic as that may sound.

And for as much as this should be seen as an outlier that will spawn books and documentaries, it only serves to intensify the pressure elsewhere. All your resources, all that time, and you couldn’t figure this out, Penn State? Steve Sarkisian and Arch Manning can’t match this James Madison dude and Fernando Mendoza? Wasn’t USC the program with the great quarterback developer and offensive designer?

Those programs are at least having some success. All of them are begging the millionaires and billionaires who have helped build a facility or throw some nice cars at recruits of the past to sustain competitive payrolls. The TV money is good, but check the expenses. Colleague Seth Emerson wrote about “donor fatigue” in 2024 and, spoiler alert: No one has gotten any rest.

The wealthy folks who pay NFL players are called owners, and their investments are being multiplied many times over. The wealthy folks who pay college players get names on buildings, seats on the team plane and games of catch between the star quarterback and their grandkids. NFL owners lose, fire people, draft high and continue to profit; college boosters increasingly feel like they’re setting large piles of money on fire.

Which is why private equity looks as inevitable as collective bargaining. This is more than just a slight hairline fracture that will heal on its own.

I hope you can enjoy the college football right now. The product is soaring. Also, I hope anyone who cares about it understands that it can plummet without improved leadership that values common sense, the greater good of the industry and all of its employees.

If you’re an Indiana fan, soak in these experiences that are Cignetti-driven but still possible only because of NIL and the transfer portal. And plan to stay for a while. Cignetti never looks like he’s satisfied, and Mark Cuban is looking awfully happy right now.

I for sure have been concerned about all the players abandoning the ship, but what if they were talked to about not doing their jobs. What if they were given the option of either putting in the work or finding a new home. Could we have been wrong in some cases thinking the player was looking for more $ rather than putting the work in. Some players, as you know, don’t live up to their billing. OSU is one of the premier colleges for education and sports. I think when the players were recruited out of HS, they jumped at the chance to be a Buckeye. Now, the players see how difficult it is to live up to the expectations that is required to be a Buckeye. This is just a different take on what we have witnessed so far with the transfer portal. I what to find out how 11W members feel about this.

OK, time’s up. After 30 or so years, it’s time to end the Idiots’ Picnic, time to go home, time to remove the rehearsed-then-parroted nonsense from sports telecasts. 

First one that must go is transfer portal. That’s a crock. Those are, in fact, mostly NIL price-tagged signings of college athletes without academic credentials. They are free agents, too many without the ability to read or write functional English. 

In 2012, Ohio State QB Cardale Jones presaged the NIL scene when he tweeted, “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.” 

That sad, shameful and nationally ridiculed message is now the daily reality!