In talking to sources, JMI, in conjunction with the UK basketball staff, is requiring prospective student-athletes to sign away NIL rights that would normally be untouched at any other school. A highly structured brand partnership agreement is something uncommon at other schools, but it is something Kentucky has pursued in accordance with JMI, making this arrangement unique to the current landscape of college basketball recruiting.

“I will say that Kentucky is the only school I’ve dealt with that even has anything remotely like this in their contracts,” one anonymous source said

LAS VEGAS — Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark publicly backed his ACC counterpart Tuesday after Notre Dame’s athletics director tore into the league over the Irish being left out of the College Football Playoff.

Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua has openly questioned the ACC’s support after Miami — an ACC member — jumped the Irish for the final at-large CFP berth. Bevacqua told “The Dan Patrick Show” on Monday that Notre Dame’s relationship with the ACC sustained “permanent damage.”

His decision to go after the league so forcefully, and so publicly, didn’t sit well with Yormark.

“Pete’s behavior has been egregious,” Yormark said Tuesday during a panel at the Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in Las Vegas. “It’s been egregious going after [ACC commissioner] Jim Phillips when they saved Notre Dame during COVID. We all knew, and it was very transparent — [CFP committee chairman] Hunter [Yurachek] was very transparent about it, that as Notre Dame and Miami got closer together, head-to-head would be a factor.”

Notre Dame AD says ACC did ‘permanent damage’ to relationship with push for Miami over Irish

Robby Kalland

In 2020, Notre Dame was granted temporary ACC membership to play a full football schedule during the shortened season.

“I think [Bevacqua] is totally out of balance in his approach, and if he were in the room, I’d tell him the same thing,” Yormark said Tuesday.

In the penultimate CFP rankings, BYU sat between Notre Dame and Miami but fell to Texas Tech in the Big 12 Championship Game, giving the committee room to take a hard look at the Hurricanes and Irish. Miami’s season-opening win over Notre Dame became the decisive wedge that pushed the Hurricanes into the field.

Bevacqua argued the ACC “singled out” two-loss Notre Dame as it worked to elevate Miami.

“We were mystified by the actions of the conference to attack their biggest business partner in football and a member of their conference in 24 of our other sports,” Bevacqua said Monday. 

Phillips rejected that assertion.

“The University of Notre Dame is an incredibly valued member of the ACC, and there is tremendous respect and appreciation for the entire institution,” Phillips said in a statement Monday. “With that said, when it comes to football, we have a responsibility to support and advocate for all 17 of our football-playing member institutions, and I stand behind our conference efforts to do just that leading up to the College Football Playoff Committee selections on Sunday.

“At no time was it suggested by the ACC that Notre Dame was not a worthy candidate for inclusion in the field. We are thrilled for the University of Miami while also understanding and appreciating the significant disappointment of the Notre Dame players, coaches and program.”

Notre Dame declined a bowl invitation after the school was left out of the playoff.

Yormark was a proponent for BYU’s inclusion in the playoff, but said he understood why the Cougars were not included in the field after suffering a second loss to Texas Tech.

“I think overall, they did the right job,” Yormark said. “It’s progress over perfection. The selection process will never be perfect. And our goal as commissioners and the management committee is how do we improve upon it?”

In this day and age, college football programs are generally inclined to accept massive donors from virtually any stripe of life. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that a story bounced around about a South American cartel funding NIL for one school. That story wasn’t true, but a recent story could make for bedfellows nearly as strange as that one.

The G5 Playoff Teams

Tulane and James Madison have dealt with a period of massive disbelief following each school earning a College Football Playoff berth. While one Group of Five team is all but certain to gain a CFP spot, a second team was a surprise. Because 8-5 Duke snuck into the ACC title, James Madison jumped the Blue Devils in the CFP pecking order and claimed a second G5 spot. Many have argued that neither Tulane nor James Madison belong in the Playoff.

Pavia’s wager

But Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia took his dig and turned it in an interesting direction. The Vanderbilt passer, who has an NIL valuation of $2.5 million per On3, made a particularly bold offer. Pavia’s team at 10-2 finished just outside the CFP picture, had a different reaction to the CFP selection controversy. Specifically, Pavia offered to put his money where his mouth is.

It’s a 12-team Playoff. Put every team that is good… This G5 team, if a G5 team wins it, I would donate whatever I got in NIL back to that team. I would do that if a G5 team ever wins it.

Diego Pavia

A tough road for Tulane and James Madison

Admittedly, Pavia’s cash is probably safe. Tulane is currently a 17.5 point underdog to Ole Miss in its first round game, and James Madison is a 21.5 point underdog against Oregon. ESPN’s FPI gives the Green Wave about a 1 in 6 shot to win their game and the Dukes a just under 1 in 8 shot to win. Even then, a winning G5 team would have to plow through two more games, with the first coming against a top four foe– Texas Tech in the case of James Madison and Georgia in the case of Tulane.

Differing Vanderbilt Messages

Pavia’s consternation runs contrary to his own coach’s comments. In a refreshing recent turn, Clark Lea told reporters that Vandy missing the Playoff was “no one’s fault except our own.” It’s safe to say that Pavia felt a bit differently, and in fact made his multi-million dollar wager against the relevance of the Group of Five teams. Considering that Pavia himself came from a Group of Five team at New Mexico State, he of all people should have realized that in the new era of college football, anything can (and probably will) happen.

Following the release of the 2025 College Football Playoff bracket along with the end of the sport’s regular season, it’s now the month for debate. In the aftermath of a more controversial CFP field than the first 12-team version a year ago, athletic directors, head coaches, conference commissioners and Paul Finebaum are all lobbing grenades at one another.

The drama has focused in South Bend ever since the relase of Sunday’s Playoff bracket, which had Miami, not Notre Dame, sneaking in as the final at-large bid. Of course, the Hurricanes ultimately made the last-second leapfrog of ND thanks to a second bad BYU loss to Texas Tech in the Big 12 title game while Miami’s head-to-head win was the final difference-maker.

To say the Irish are upset would be describing the situation with extreme grace. Shortly after the field was set, Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua dressed his wagon and made quite the media tour, stopping by Dan Patrick to take shots at the ACC while, overall, sharing several messages to the public about how poor and unfair he felt Notre Dame was treated during this year’s selection process.

While watching some of those clips and discussing the Notre Dame fallout from their missed CFP bid on Wednesday morning’s episode of First Take, ESPN college football analyst and SEC Network host Paul Finebaum dumped criticism on the way Bevacqua and Notre Dame have handled this saga.

“Pete Bevacqua has said a lot of things; he hasn’t backed up anything,” Finebaum said. “I mean, he just threw a bunch of rocks at the street. But he didn’t touch anything. If he wanted to make a statement, say, ‘Hey, we’re getting out of the ACC, whatever it costs, whatever the legalities.’ But he didn’t do that. He just made a bunch of empty threats.”

Finebaum makes the point that if Bevacqua is going to attack the ACC and the CFP committee and its chair, who’s an SEC athletic director — all these various important parties in college football — then he better have a reason. For now, though, he sees all this uproar from Bevacqua as pretty much shouting into the wind if it isn’t followed up by any serious action.

“And I think, as a result, Notre Dame has lost all credibility in this matter,” Finebaum added of the Irish. Sure, did Notre Dame have legit complaints about the whiplash nature of their ranking vs. Miami over the final weeks? Perhaps. But ultimately, the Fighting Irish lost to both of the CFP opponents who they played, and beat only one team in the final top-25 rankings.

As Finebaum and others would say, Notre Dame had their chances. A path to the national title game isn’t some birthright. Even with an expanded field, the Irish should have to earn their way in if they aren’t going to win a conference, and in 2025, they unfortunately came up just short.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio – The Bellagio Resort & Casino played host to an all-star cast of history’s greatest football legends and the sport’s most promising student-athletes during Tuesday night’s 67th National Football Foundation (NFF) Annual Awards Dinner Presented by Las Vegas.
 
More than 1,800 people attended, and countless more watched on ESPN+ as the star-studded 2025 NFF College Football Hall of Fame Class received college football’s ultimate honor. The NFF also honored 16 of the game’s top student-athletes, who collected postgraduate scholarships as members of the 2025 NFF National Scholar-Athlete Class Presented by Fidelity Investments. More than 50 previous NFF Hall of Fame inductees returned, and 125 colleges and universities sent representatives to attend the fabled affair.

Urban Meyer, the third-winningest coach in Division I history who led Ohio State to a national championship, three Big Ten Conference titles and seven wins over Michigan during a seven-year tenure as head coach, was among the class of 22 inductees: 18 first-team All-America players and four standout coaches.

Meyer coached the final game of a coaching career that places him alongside legends on Jan. 1, 2019 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. His Buckeyes defeated Pac 12 champion Washington, 28-23, to cap a 13-1 campaign.

Meyer’s Ohio State Buckeyes were, for seven seasons, on top of the college football world. The team won the inaugural College Football Playoff national championship in 2014 and won Big Ten Conference titles in 2014, 2017 and 2018. His teams never finished worse than first in the Big Ten’s divisional standings, and his Buckeyes were dominant in Big Ten games with a best-ever 7-0 record vs. Michigan and a 54-4 overall record in Big Ten games, including an NCAA record 30 consecutive conference victories.

His Buckeye teams were 83-9 overall, including the sixth unbeaten/untied season in school history in 2012 (12-0), a record-tying 14 wins in 2014 and the two longest win streaks in school history: 24 and 23 games.

Meyer’s 17 seasons as a head coach featured a record of 187-32 that positions him with the third-highest winning percentage in college football history at .853, trailing only Hall of Fame coaches Knute Rockne and Frank Leahy.  

Off the field, Meyer’s development of players included “Real Life Wednesdays,” a series of speakers – CEOs, money managers, pro athletes, etc. – who addressed the team in life experiences and pursuits to ensure they were prepared for life after football.

Beyond football, Meyer has made a lasting impact through civic service, serving on the boards of the Veterans Golfers Association, Folds of Honor, and the Tim Tebow Foundation. He and his wife established the Urban and Shelley Meyer Fund for Cancer Research at Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Meyer earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Cincinnati (1986), lettering one season (1984) with the Bearcats as a defensive back. While launching his coaching career as a graduate assistant with the Buckeyes, he earned his master’s degree in sports administration from Ohio State in 1988. Meyer’s coaching career also includes assistant positions at Illinois State, Colorado State and Notre Dame. He was the head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2021.

He is a member of the Utah Athletics Crimson Club Hall of Fame, the Greater Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame, and the Ashtabula County Football Hall of Fame. He currently serves as a host and analyst on FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff.

Ohio State Head Coaches in the College Football Hall of Fame (8)

Name – Years at Ohio State   Inducted

Urban Meyer – 2012-18        2025

Jim Tressel – 2001-10           2015

John Cooper – 1988-2000      2008

Earle Bruce – 1979-87           2002

Woody Hayes – 1951-78       1983

Francis Schmidt – 1934-40    1971

John Wilce – 1913-28           1954

Howard Jones – 1910            1951

Notre Dame has seen its College Football Playoff hopes dismantled, has declined its bowl game, and watched its relationship with the ACC deteriorate, all in the last few days.

And now, the man in charge of Notre Dame athletics has revealed he had a conversation with the commissioner of the SEC.

“The only commissioner I’ve spoken to, and I’ve had a couple of great conversations with him, is Greg Sankey,” Bevacqua said of the SEC commissioner.

He added: “Greg and I talk all the time. I can’t tell you how much I admire Greg and his leadership.”

What Notre Dame is interested in

Before you start thinking that Notre Dame is about to join a conference, think again.

Bevacqua said his conversation with Sankey had nothing to do with the Irish finally forsaking its independence, but about the structure and format of the College Football Playoff in the years to come.

Being left out of the playoff tends to inspire teams to re-think what the playoff should look like.

“Gave him my viewpoint on the process. He shared some thoughts that he had with me that, obviously, are between Greg and me,” Bevacqua said.

“Format? Greg knows. They all know how I feel about the format. Put the process aside. The format, being, you know, four teams, twelve teams, fourteen teams, sixteen teams, a thousand teams?”

What should the playoff look like

Okay, maybe not a thousand. How about sixteen? That seems to be the new sweet spot from Notre Dame’s perspective. And it could be for others, too. 

“It should be sixteen teams, in my opinion, with five automatic qualifiers and eleven at-larges,” he said. 

“Think about this year. If we had four teams, it would have been perfect. I don’t think anybody would argue that those aren’t the right four teams that are one through four, right, the way they’re playing. Texas Tech, Ohio State, Indiana, and Georgia… Sixteen would have been perfect. Notre Dame, Texas, Vanderbilt, you know, who else is in there.”

Expansion would cover all the problems

Bevacqua said that the particular metrics the playoff selectors use will necessarily change as each season brings its own unique situations.

The answer to compensating for those year-by-year situations is to simply expand the format and allow for more teams to have a chance.

“You know, year by year, you’re never going to have the same data points each year. It’s never going to work out perfectly, whether you have four teams, twelve, fourteen, or sixteen,” he said. 

“What I like about sixteen is it does create more opportunity, it does create more narratives around more schools and yet preserves the integrity and importance of the regular season, and I think that’s one of the greatest things college football has going for it.”

What about the regular season?

Notre Dame’s head man doesn’t think expanding the playoff will have a negative impact on the regular season.

“The regular season is more important in college football than it is in any other sport by a mile…College football? I mean, hey we see it,” he said. 

“We saw it last year. We saw it this year. We knew last year, when we lost to NIU? We had no wiggle room. Every game was a bowl game. Every game was a CFP game. This year, after we lost in the last second to A&M? Zero room for error. 

“Turns out, we didn’t even have zero room for error. But, I think sixteen teams, with that five and eleven breakdown, is the way to go. And I think a vast, vast majority of people in the CFP management room feel the same way.”

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