Article is about Phillip Bells High School experience and being shopped to different schools and 7 x 7 teams. Really sad situation.

A few quotes:

“Bell’s mother, who abused drugs, shopped him from school to school, demanding up to $72,000 a year, according to court filings, public records and interviews with relatives and others who knew the family. He also joined a club team that paid thousands of dollars a weekend.’

On his visit to OSU: “The hotel room where Bell’s mother and stepfather were staying was “trashed,” leaving an OSU coach with a bill for broken furniture, his high-school coach later told relatives. A Buckeyes coach subsequently informed Bell’s mother that the team wanted her son, but the “entourage” wasn’t welcome in Columbus, the high-school coach said.

OSU declined to comment.

Before they left Ohio, Barnes’ blood sugar spiked to life-threatening levels, she suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized for several days, according to public records.”

Hoping that with support from OSU that he can break the cycle and achieve great things!

This link is behind a paywall: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/football-high-school-nil-phillip-bell-81270bdf?mod=hp_lead_pos7

Definitely worth a read – there is definitely a downside to the money flowing to these athletes. Kinda makes me wonder about the Legend Bey situation.

Georgia is attempting to get edge rusher Damon Wilson to pony up after his transfer to Missouri.

The school’s athletic association has filed a lawsuit against Wilson saying he owes $390,000 from the NIL contract he signed with the school’s collective in December 2024 ahead of Georgia’s College Football Playoff loss to Notre Dame. Wilson transferred after the 2024 season to Missouri and received one payment of $30,000.

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Wilson, a junior, led Missouri with nine sacks and 9.5 tackles for loss this season. He had three sacks and 5.5 tackles for loss as a sophomore for the Bulldogs in 2024.

Georgia is claiming Wilson owes the balance of the base pay the contract stipulated he’d be paid via a liquidated damages claim. According to ESPN, Wilson’s deal with Classic City Collective was for $500,000 spread out over 14 monthly payments with two post-transfer portal bonuses of $40,000 and that he’d owe what was still set to be paid out to him if he left the team.

From ESPN:

“When the University of Georgia Athletic Association enters binding agreements with student-athletes, we honor our commitments and expect student-athletes to do the same,” athletics spokesperson Steven Drummond said in a statement to ESPN.

Georgia is not the first school to file a suit over NIL payments to a player who transferred. But the hard-line tactic is noteworthy, and may ultimately not work out in Georgia’s favor.

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Schools typically do not ask coaches to pay out the balance of their contracts when leaving for another job. For example, Lane Kiffin did not have to pay Ole Miss what the school was scheduled to pay him over the rest of his deal with the school when he left for LSU. Instead, LSU paid Ole Miss $3 million for Kiffin to get out of his contract.

That situation happens all the time when coaches leave for new jobs. Their buyouts to get out of their contracts are far smaller than the buyouts schools owe when a coach is fired without cause.

And coaches are employees. Schools have long resisted that players be classified as employees and continue to do so even as the revenue-sharing era begins. The NCAA and its member schools have long clung to amateurism and that antiquated idea is why it took so long for players to get paid in the first place.

Georgia athletics is taking Missouri football defensive end Damon Wilson II to court in a novel, nearly first-of-its-kind case over an NIL contract dispute. 

The news was first reported by ESPN’s Dan Wilson on Friday, Dec. 5. The Tribune confirmed the news through a university source and court documents filed in Georgia by the Bulldogs.

UGA is attempting to take Wilson into arbitration and is seeking $390,000 in liquidated damages from the star edge rusher, who transferred to the Tigers in January 2025, over what the university views as an unfulfilled contract in Athens. The lawsuit is not against the University of Missouri, only Wilson.

According to the ESPN report, Georgia is arguing that Wilson signed a contract — a common practice in the NIL era — with what was then UGA’s main NIL and marketing arm, Classic City Collective, in December 2024.

Fired Auburn football coach Hugh Freeze isn’t going out quietly.

Freeze was outspoken in the weeks before his dismissal, saying he and his staff were still the right fit to lead Auburn into the future, despite going 15-19 over two-plus losing seasons. Auburn athletic director John Cohen disagreed, firing Freeze on Nov. 2, taking on his $15.8 million buyout, and hiring South Florida head coach Alex Golesh last week.

Despite that nice payday on his way out, Freeze is still venting about his dismissal and blames quarterback Jackson Arnold for why he’s no longer Auburn’s head coach.

During an interview this week with AuburnSports’ Justin Hokanson, Freeze said, “Certainly, it didn’t work out to the level that he or I both expected for him and our team. And that’s why I’m sitting here.”

Freeze recruited Arnold out of the transfer portal from Oklahoma, where he passed for 1,421 yards, 12 touchdowns and three interceptions and rushed for 444 yards and three TDs as the Sooners’ starter in 2024. It seemed to be a mutual parting of the ways between Arnold and Oklahoma, which brought in the highly coveted Washington State transfer, John Mateer, at quarterback.

Arnold, who was a five-star prospect and the No. 4-ranked QB recruit in the 2023 class by 247Sports, looked for a fresh start as a junior at Auburn, but it was more of the same for him this fall as he passed for just 1,309 yards, 6 TDs and 2 INTs with 311 rushing yards and 8 TDs before being benched Oct. 25 vs. Arkansas after throwing an interception that was returned 89 yards for a touchdown.

Ashton Daniels, a senior and transfer from Stanford, took over and led Auburn back from an 11-point halftime deficit to a 33-24 win over the Razorbacks and finished the season as the starter.

Freeze tempered his comments on Arnold a bit, saying, “Let’s be clear, this is not a beat-up Jackson deal. It’s never always the quarterback. There are other factors. I mean, he missed a touchdown throw here at Oklahoma to a wide-open Cam Coleman.

“Those plays you’ve got to make to win games. And he would say that too. And there’s also the Missouri game, where we have what, eight drops? Then there’s moments in the Georgia second half where he misses open guys, or the protection is not great, so it’s a combination of all those things.”

Maybe it’s also partly the coaching. Freeze was given a six-year, $49-million contract at Auburn after having previous success at Ole Miss (on the field, at least) and Liberty, but he went 6-7 and 5-7 in his first two seasons before starting 4-5 this year and getting fired. He was 6-16 in SEC play during his tenure.

That’s going to buy one hell of a roster in East Lansing!

PublishedDecember 5, 2025 4:30 PM EST•UpdatedDecember 5, 2025 4:30 PM EST

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The arms race in college football continues to heat up.

With the relatively new advent of paying players now considered above board, athletic departments are falling all over themselves to secure funding to help maintain a competitive roster in a Power 4 conference.

You’ve been seeing more and more “non-traditional powers” throwing their hats in the ring to try and fund their way to national relevance, most famously out in Lubbock, where the Texas Tech Red Raiders are on the precipice of a Big 12 championship and a College Football Playoff berth.

Our latest participant in the college football arms race hails from East Lansing, Michigan.

The Spartans of Michigan State are trying their damnedest to get back to where they were in the early to mid 2010s, when head coach Mark Dantonio had the team competing for the Big Ten title year in and year out.

And one of the school’s mega boosters may have just dropped the biggest bomb in the war yet.

Yes, you read that right, some generous fellow donated more than $400 MILLION to the athletic department at Michigan State.

Greg Williams, a Michigan State booster and CEO of Acrisure, along with his wife, Dawn, gifted their hundreds of millions earlier on Friday through the university’s “Uncommon Will, Far Better World” campaign.

Now, to be sure, not all of this money will be going to the football program.

It’s earmarked for the athletic department at MSU, which involves all of their sports programs as well as facilities upgrades. But make no mistake about it, you can rest assured the bulk of this money will go towards funding the NIL apparatus for the Spartans’ football team.

Seeing how the football program at any Power 4 institution is more than likely the clear breadwinner, this would make sense.

Naturally, there were plenty of nerds on X who took exception to this donation and its intended purpose.

Cry me a river!

Trust me, if the football team at a Big Ten or SEC school is rolling, everyone at the university eats.

Just look at how much Alabama has grown since its football program took off after Nick Saban’s arrival.

In the meantime, if you start seeing Michigan State randomly signing top-five recruiting classes and bringing in a bunch of five-stars in the transfer portal, you’ll know why.