Despite being two months out from opening the 2025 college football season against Alabama, Florida State’s quarterback, Tommy Castellanos, has already called out the Crimson Tide.

“I’m excited, man,” Castellanos said in an interview with On3. “People, I don’t know if they know, but you go back and watch every first game that I played in, we always start fast. I dreamed of moments like this. I dreamed of playing against Alabama. They don’t have Nick Saban to save them. I just don’t see them stopping me.”

It’s a bold statement from a player who hasn’t had the most decorated college football career to this point and has yet to play a snap for his new team. But, there’s no questioning Castellanos’s confidence. 

He transferred to Florida State ahead of his senior season. It’s his third ACC school after spending two years at Boston College and one at Central Florida, and Castellanos is trying to make a name for himself off the field to drum up the anticipation for the game on the field. 

In 2023, he completed 57.3% of his pass attempts for 2,248 yards, 15 touchdowns and 14 interceptions as a sophomore. He then took a step up in his junior season, improving his accuracy to 61.5%, while throwing 18 touchdowns and five interceptions through the first eight games of the season. But, midway through the season, Boston College lost three consecutive games, and then Castellanos got hurt against Syracuse, and his backup, Grayson James, replaced him and helped the Eagles break their losing streak. 

James’ performance pushed him ahead of Castellanos on the depth chart and, to deal with that decision to change quarterbacks, Castellanos took some time away from the team, while James finished out the season as the starter and led the Eagles to a Bowl Game.

That Syracuse game ended up being Castellanos’ last for Boston College. Now, he’s got a fresh start at Florida State, where he’s trying to make some waves, and introduce himself to the Seminoles’ biggest opponent well before the season even starts.  

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Click here to view Trev Alberts’ Monday press conference.

Trev Alberts’ job title is Texas A&M’s Director of Athletics. In some ways, tailor maybe should be added.

That’s a reaction to how Alberts described the task he and A&M face in navigating the changing future of college athletics.

“(It’s) how to thread the needle between tradition and modernization,” Alberts said in a Monday meeting with local reporters inside a third-floor conference room at Kyle Field.

Maintaining traditions at A&M won’t be a problem. Successfully modernizing A&M’s athletic department to excel in the new era of Name, Imagine & Likeness (NIL) and revenue sharing projects to be much more challenging.

Reacting to the recent House v. NCAA settlement, which allows NCAA member schools to directly pay student-athletes, Alberts announced that A&M will distribute $18 million to football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball.

A popular national template suggests directing 75 percent of funds to football, 15 percent to basketball, five percent to baseball and five percent to women’s sports.

“Some institutions have chosen to use that (75-15-5-5 model) as a template for their institution,” Alberts said. “Our percentages don’t reflect that. We’ve chosen to make market-based decisions based on revenue.”

The distribution could cause derision within athletic programs. Coaches in different programs could be competing against each other to get more funding.

Alberts said that hasn’t been a problem at A&M, but he has heard that has been an issue for other colleagues.

Alberts declined to reveal the percentages to be shared with A&M’s athletes for competitive reasons. But football is the only revenue-producing sport at Texas A&M, so it stands to reason that the majority of A&M’s shared revenue will go to football players.

“I’m not going to run out and tell you exactly what the numbers are and what the percentages are because there’s a competitive piece to that, right?” he said. “But I think you’re going to start to figure out where the numbers lie.”

He said in a year there may be more data available that provides at least guidelines how players perhaps should be compensated not only by sport, but by position.

Alberts acknowledged that some programs could be at a disadvantage to conference opponents.

For example, Kentucky, which puts great emphasis on basketball, figures to share a greater percentage of revenue with its basketball players than many other SEC programs.

“You’re not going to knowingly put any of your programs at a competitive disadvantage,” Alberts said. “But I think it’s absolutely true you could find yourselves in a situation — based on the priorities of the investments — that some of your programs will have less rev share than some of their competitors.”

Some of the differences, at least, could potentially be offset by greater NIL opportunities.

Alberts said if a program, like football, has players earning substantial money though fair-market NIL deals then some funds could be redirected to other sports.

To enhance those NIL possibilities, Alberts said a new position is being created to help locate NIL opportunities and ensure they meet the standard “fair market value” as determined by Deloitte, which will act as a third-party clearinghouse for NIL deals.

“We’re not ready to announce a name, but we are hiring a new position that will be an associate AD reporting directly to me that is an attorney,” Alberts said. “It’s basically, what is our strategy and how do we leverage every one of our assets?

“If we’re able to get fair market value NIL deals at a certain level, we may not need as much rev share there. We can put the rev share over at this sport because they’re not as successful. So, that’s why I think that fair market value NIL strategy is going to be really important to our future.”

Alberts later added: “We have to be better than our peers. To me, that’s the differentiator in the game. That’s why we’re going to throw a lot of energy and effort in making sure we have a good strategy there (NIL).”

Alberts is hopeful that a sound, effective strategy could launch A&M to great competitive success.

“This is our time,” he said. “If we have the courage to make tough decisions and act and modernize in some areas, I think Texas A&M can separate and do things we’ve never done here before.

“That’s why we’re all here. The opportunities are here at Texas A&M to do things that most people can’t do because of scale, because of resources and other things.”

MOSCOW, Idaho – The Spokane Hoopfest tournament is nearly here, and tens of thousands of competitors will take the court in the largest 3-on-3 competition in the world.

Before this, however, some of the best in basketball’s history will be immortalized at the fourth-annual Hooptown Hall of Fame ceremony on Wednesday. Among the nominees for this prestigious society will be the 1981-82 Idaho Basketball team, alongside their head coach, Don Monson.

Widely considered one of the greatest seasons in school history, the 81-82 Vandals took the Big Sky Conference, and all of DI Basketball, by storm as they marched out to a 27-3 record, still the best all-time. The black and gold would be denied by very few as they went 13-1 in Big Sky play and achieved noteworthy non-conference wins over Oregon, Oregon State, Gonzaga, Washington, and Washington State to start the season 12-0. 

Sporting one of the most tenacious defenses in college basketball, Idaho allowed just 57.5 PPG as a team across 30 games, a top-20 mark in the country by the end of the year. This culminated in the #1 seed in the Big Sky Tournament, which the Vandals had earned the right to host due to securing the top spot. Inside the Kibbie Dome-turned-Cowan Spectrum, the top-seeded black and gold knocked off Weber State in the Semifinals and took down Nevada in the championship to earn the berth to the NCAA Tournament. 

As the #3 seed in the west, the Vandals matched up with the #16 Iowa Hawkeyes in what was effectively a home game in Washington State’s Beasley Coliseum. UI(daho) forward Phil Hopson led the scoring with a game-high 21 points, and four of five Vandal starters finished in double figures to win an overtime thriller, 69-67. The win was cemented by Brian Kellerman’s 18-foot buzzer-beater to end the extra period and send Idaho to the Sweet 16. 

The 81-82 squad was led by one of the most well-known faces in the history of Vandal Hoops. Don Monson was entering his fourth year at the helm of the program and had led his team to what was, at the time, the best season in school history. The Vandals finished with a program best 25-4 record in the 80-81 season and had reached the NCAA Tournament for the first time ever. They topped both of those notables with the 27-win season and Sweet 16 appearance the following year as Monson established himself as one of the best coaches in Idaho history. To date, he is one of only two coaches to lead the Vandals to the Tournament and the only coach in school history with a win under his belt.

In five years coaching in Moscow, Monson would finish with a 100-41 career record, the third most wins for an Idaho head coach to date. In those five years, his teams finished with ten losses or less in four of them and captured two Big Sky regular season titles and two conference tournament titles.  

The induction ceremony will take place on Wednesday, June 25th, at the Hooptown Courts.

While one DeBoer was coaching at Alabama this past year, another DeBoer was still succeeding at Washington.

The former was Kalen DeBoer, the Crimson Tide football coach who left the Huskies to replace Nick Saban. The latter was his daughter Alexis DeBoer, the softball infielder who stayed in Washington and became an instant success.

Alexis DeBoer put together a year in which she won Big Ten freshman of the year honors while leading the Huskies to the NCAA Tournament.

“I’m super proud of her, what she accomplished,” Kalen DeBoer told AL.com in June. “There’s a lot of eyes on her, just because of the nature of what I do. For her to be able to continue on her path and make a name for herself is something as a parent, I couldn’t be more proud of.”

Kalen DeBoer discussed his daughter’s success as part of the latest episode of “Beat Everyone” an AL.com Alabama football podcast. The full show will be released Monday night, accessible on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alexis DeBoer finished the year with a batting average of .358 and 21 home runs to go with 55 RBIs. Each statistics led the Washington roster.

“She had a great season,” Kalen DeBoer said. “The cool thing is, I just feel like there’s a hunger. That’s that competitiveness that you want to where there’s more even being done now to make sure it continues in that direction.”

As an Auburn fan, I remember the Cam Newton saga all too well.

The 2010 Auburn football team, led in many ways by the one-man-team of Newton, would go on to post a perfect 14-0 record and pick up many awards accolated to the greatest players in the sport. Newton had one of the best seasons in college football history and made his team one of the most fun to watch in recent memory.

Still, Auburn and Newton were painted as the sport’s supervillains in 2010 – due to unproven allegations of Auburn paying Newton less than $200,000.

In today’s climate, a player of Newton’s caliber would command seven figures to play quarterback in college, and whichever college team paid him would be lauded for their ability to out pay everyone else. Times have changed.

College athletes deserved some of the compensation, with the athletic conferences signing deals in the $100s of millions for television contracts and top tier coaches making north of $5 million per year, but the lack of rules around paying players for their Name Image Likeness (NIL) has made the top-tier of college athletics the wild west of sports.

Due to a powerful booster signing on, Brigham Young University (BYU) was able to secure the commitment of the No. 1 high school basketball player in AJ Dybsanta – a player who had no connections to the Utah based school before he heard the reportedly $7 million offer.

Pay for play instances can be good for parity, but it also lets traditional powerhouses gobble up commitments. Without rules, things were bound to spiral out of control.

Now, through the results of several court cases levied against the NCAA, new rules are on the horizon. And through revenue sharing, clearing house protocol, and public endorsements deals, fair market values for NIL are close to being established and monitored.

If things go well with revenue sharing and the clearing house models, teams will have similar cap spaces for contract spending and any given athlete will have the same price tag at any school they choose. If a team tries to overpay, in theory, the clearing house could deny the deal.

The gist of the new revenue sharing model is that any school can share up to $20.5 million of its revenue throughout its athletic department. In an example from the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Texas Tech University plans to split all of its $20.5 million, with its football team earning 74 percent, its men’s basketball team earning about 18 percent, and the remaining four percent split among other sports.

While the splits don’t seem completely fair out of context, the football team demands more than 80 players and the price tags for football and men’s basketball far exceed other sports.

With revenue sharing, the rich will stay rich – but it won’t allow the richest of the rich to run wild with pay-for-play contracts. It’ll also give the smaller schools more resources to draw from for their own contracts, as NIL deals were required to come from boosters and outside resources in the past. Now, the schools can pay some of that money.

This is a move to make college sports more legitimate in a world where NIL rules. These rules will help college sports keep the passion that comes from being an “amateur” while athletes rake in some of the perks that come with being a famous athlete.

With the College World Series now over after LSU won the title on Sunday, two Razorbacks found themselves on the All-Tournament Team.

Arkansas outfielder Justin Thomas Jr. and right-handed pitcher Gage Wood were named to the All-Tournament Team. Thomas was one of three outfielders to be named to the team and joined LSU’s Derek Curiel and Louisville’s Eddie King Jr.

Wood was joined by LSU’s Kade Anderson as the two pitchers who were selected, and Anderson was named Most Outstanding Player.

Thomas went 8-for-14 at the plate during the College World Series and collected three RBI across four games. Two of those came in the top of the ninth inning in the elimination game that gave the Hogs a 5-3 lead over LSU before the Tigers came back in the bottom of the frame.

Wood had just one outing in the College World Series, but it was easily the best outing of the entire tournament. He threw a no-hitter in the Hogs’ second game in Omaha against Murray State and came just one hit batter away from a perfect game.

The Batesville native’s no-hitter was the third in Men’s College World Series history and was the first since Jim Wixson of Oklahoma State did so in 1960.

CHECK OUT: Arkansas Baseball 2025 Offseason Roster Tracker

Now that the season is over, there will be some roster movement as head coach Dave Van Horn retools his roster ahead of the 2026 season. Wood is almost a lock to leave for the MLB Draft, as he’s being mocked as high as the middle of the first round.

Thomas could have a stay-or-go decision, as he still has a year of leverage to negotiate should an MLB team draft him.

Be sure to stay tuned to HawgBeat for the latest news surrounding Arkansas baseball.