A quarterback reportedly reneging on a lucrative deal to hit the transfer portal, only to return to his original school. Another starting QB, this one in the College Football Playoff, awaiting approval from the NCAA to play next season, an expensive NIL deal apparently hanging in the balance. A defensive star, sued by his former school after transferring, filing a lawsuit of his own.

It is easy to see why many observers say things are a mess in college football even amid a highly compelling postseason.

“It gets crazier and crazier. It really, really does,” said Sam Ehrlich, a Boise State legal studies professor who tracks litigation against the NCAA. He said he might have to add a new section for litigation against the NCAA stemming just from transfer portal issues.

“I think a guy signing a contract and then immediately deciding he wants to go to another school, that’s a kind of a new thing,” he said. “Not new kind of historically when you think about all the contract jumping that was going on in the ’60s and ’70s with the NBA. But it’s a new thing for college sports, that’s for sure.”

Washington quarterback Demond Williams Jr. said late Thursday he will return to school for the 2026 season rather than enter the transfer portal, avoiding a potentially messy dispute amid reports the Huskies were prepared to pursue legal options to enforce Williams’ name, image and likeness contract.

Edge rusher Damon Wilson is looking to transfer after one season at Missouri, having been sued for damages by Georgia over his decision to leave the Bulldogs. He has countersued.

Then there is Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss, who reportedly had a new NIL deal waiting while he asked the NCAA for approval to play another season after leading the Rebels to Thursday night’s Collge Football Playoff semifinal against Miami. The NCAA a day after Miami’s win denied his request.

On that Miami roster? Defensive back Xavier Lucas, whose transfer from Wisconsin led to a lawsuit from the Badgers, claiming he was improperly lured to Miami by NIL money. Lucas has played all season for the Hurricanes and now gets a chance at a national championship. The case is pending.

What to do?

Court rulings have favored athletes of late, winning them not just millions in compensation but the ability to play immediately after transferring rather than have to sit out a year as once was the case. They can also discuss specific NIL compensation with schools and boosters before enrolling. Current court battles include players seeking to play longer, without lower-college seasons counting against their eligibility, and earning NIL money while doing it.

Ehrlich compared the situation to the labor upheaval professional leagues went through before finally settling on collective bargaining, which has been looked at as a potential solution by some in college sports over the past year. Athletes.org, a players association for college athletes, recently offered a 38-page proposal of what a labor deal could look like.

“I think NCAA is concerned, and rightfully so, that anything they try to do to tamp down this on their end is going to get shut down,” Ehrlich said. “Which is why really the only two solutions at this point are an act of Congress, which feels like an act of God at this point, or potentially collective bargaining, which has its own major, major challenges and roadblocks.”

The NCAA has been lobbying for years for limited antitrust protection to keep some kind of control over the new landscape — and to avoid more crippling lawsuits — but bills have gone nowhere in Congress.

Universities have long balked at the idea that their athletes are employees in some way. Schools would become responsible for paying wages, benefits, and workers’ compensation. And while private institutions fall under the National Labor Relations Board, public universities must follow labor laws that vary from state to state; virtually every state in the South has “right to work” laws that present challenges for unions.

Ehrlich noted the short careers for college athletes and wondered whether a union for collective bargaining is even possible.

A harder look at contracts

To sports attorney Mit Winter, employment contracts may be the simplest solution.

“This isn’t something that’s novel to college sports,” said Winter, a former college basketball player who is now a sports attorney with Kennyhertz Perry. “Employment contracts are a huge part of college sports, it’s just novel for the athletes.”

Employment contracts for players could be written like those for coaches, he suggested, which would offer buyouts and prevent players from using the portal as a revolving door.

“The contracts that schools are entering into with athletes now, they can be enforced, but they cannot keep an athlete out of school because they’re not signing employment contracts where the school is getting the right to have the athlete play football for their school or basketball or whatever sport it is,” Winter said. “They’re just acquiring the right to be able to use the athlete’s NIL rights in various ways. So, a NIL agreement is not going to stop an athlete from transferring or going to play whatever sport it is that he or she plays at another school.”

There are challenges here, too, of course: Should all college athletes be treated as employees or just those in revenue-producing sports? Can all injured athletes seek workers’ compensation and insurance protection? Could states start taxing athlete NIL earnings?

Winter noted a pending federal case against the NCAA could allow for athletes to be treated as employees more than they currently are.

“What’s going on in college athletics now is trying to create this new novel system where the athletes are basically treated like employees, look like employees, but we don’t want to call them employees,” Winter said. “We want to call them something else and say they’re not being paid for athletic services. They’re being paid for use of their NIL. So, then it creates new legal issues that have to be hashed out and addressed, which results in a bumpy and chaotic system when you’re trying to kind of create it from scratch.”

Employment contracts would not necessarily allow for uniform rules with an athlete able to go to transfer when terms have been met. Collective bargaining could include those guidelines.

“If the goal is to keep someone at a school for a certain defined period of time, it’s got to be employment contracts,” Winter said.

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If Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss decides to take the NCAA to court over its decision to deny him a waiver to play one more season of college football, the strategy likely will differ from the one employed by most college athletes who have mounted legal challenges.

The key difference lies in one sentence in the statement released Friday by attorney Tom Mars, who is representing Chambliss. Here’s that statement:

I’m disappointed, but not surprised. The last time I checked, however, the only score that matters is the one at the end of the fourth quarter.

I understand that Ole Miss will file an appeal with the NCAA.  However, there’s now an opportunity to move this case to a level playing field where Trinidad’s rights will be determined by the Mississippi judiciary instead of some bureaucrats in Indianapolis who couldn’t care less about the law or doing the right thing. Whether to pursue that course of action is a decision only Trinidad and his parents can make. 

“Determined by a Mississippi judiciary” is the key phrase. 

If Chambliss challenges the ruling in court, it likely will be in a state court rather than a federal court, where most other athletes seeking more eligibility have gone. And the case wouldn’t necessarily directly challenge the NCAA’s eligibility rules. It could be argued that the NCAA interfered with a valid contract. The contract was agreed upon this past week between Chambliss and Ole Miss, and it promised him millions if he could play for the Rebels in 2026.

Why the different strategy? Probably because eligibility cases are the only ones the NCAA is successfully defending in federal court. 

In matters involving athletes getting paid — or how much they can get paid — the NCAA has gotten its clock cleaned in the federal courts. It started with a loss in O’Bannon v. NCAA in 2014, which was followed in 2021 by a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Alston in favor of the class of athletes suing the governing body. 

Since then, the NCAA’s ability to enforce any rules regarding athlete compensation has been defanged. When the organization tried in 2024 to investigate quarterback Nico Iamaleava’s deal with the collective attached to Tennessee, the state of Tennessee’s attorney general teamed with the AG in Virginia to sue the NCAA. The initial injunction in the case was all it took to effectively invalidate the NCAA’s NIL rules.

Conferences have since tried to make new rules based on the settlement terms of the House v. NCAA settlement, but those aren’t guaranteed to survive an antitrust challenge either.

The reason athletes win these cases is because in the past, the schools have acted as a cartel, unilaterally imposing rules that cap that particular labor market’s earning capacity. Courts determined that the NCAA violated the Sherman Antitrust Act in part because it could not prove there was a pro-competitive justification for the rules. In other words, the NCAA couldn’t argue that fans would stop watching and attending if athletes got paid. (Spoiler alert: Fans haven’t stopped.)

But in some of the eligibility cases, federal judges have proven sympathetic to the NCAA’s rules that limit athletes to having five years to play four. 

Now-former Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia won an extra year of eligibility last season, but that was because the NCAA was treating players who spent 2020 in junior college differently than it treated players who spent 2020 at NCAA schools. The players at NCAA schools were not docked a year of eligibility for the COVID year, effectively giving them all a free year.

In cases more like the one involving Chambliss — who was in the air traveling back from the Fiesta Bowl with the Ole Miss team Friday afternoon when the ruling came down — the NCAA has had better luck. Chambliss redshirted as a freshman at Ferris State in 2021. He then was on the active roster at the Division II school in 2022, 2023 and 2024, though he didn’t appear in any games in 2022. He transferred ahead of his redshirt senior season. He spent that year starring at Ole Miss, which finished its season Thursday with a loss to Miami in the Fiesta Bowl in the semifinals of the College Football Playoff.

Chambliss doesn’t have the COVID year or the JUCO distinction to use as an argument. His case is more similar to that of former Tennessee basketball player Zakai Zeigler, who played four full seasons and then tried to sue for a fifth year of playing eligibility. In June, a federal judge denied Zeigler’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have allowed him to play this season.

Should Chambliss sue, the complaint likely would be filed in a Mississippi court and would argue that the NCAA intentionally interfered with a valid contract. 

It’s a fairly simple concept from a legal standpoint, but if you’re concerned about whether Chambliss gets to play in 2026, whether he ultimately prevails in the case is probably irrelevant. What will matter is whether a Mississippi judge is willing to grant an injunction that would keep the NCAA from enforcing its ruling while the case is being disputed. 

Get the injunction, and the glacial pace of the legal process would allow Chambliss to play this season. If he ultimately won the case later, that would be gravy.

Does the average fan want players to have indefinite eligibility? My guess is no. And if Chambliss does find a way to play in 2026, then everyone seeking an extra year will try this gambit.

But that’s an issue the schools will have to decide how to address if Chambliss sues and if Mars’ strategy works. Not to sound like a broken record, but a collective bargaining agreement with players would allow schools to create rules — eligibility, compensation and otherwise — that would be far more difficult to challenge legally.

Until then, billable hours will remain undefeated. And the attorneys who charge them will keep coming up with new ideas.

 No. 1 seed Indiana and No. 5 seed Oregon played earlier in the season and now meet in the Peach Bowl. The Hoosiers came out with a 30-20 victory Oct. 11 in Eugene, Ore. Since then, Indiana has reeled off eight straight wins, with six of those coming by 20 points or more. Quarterback Fernando Mendoza took home a Heisman then led his team to a CFP win over Alabama.

Oregon bounced back from that October loss by winning eight straight as well, seven by 12 or more points. Quarterback Dante Moore and the Ducks’ defense took down Texas Tech 23-0 after destroying James Madison in the first round.

The winner of the Peach Bowl will play Miami, which came back to dispatch Ole Miss, 31-27, at the Fiesta Bowl. Hurricanes quarterback Carson Beck ran for a touchdown with 18 seconds left and a last-play heave by Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss to the end zone fell incomplete.

The national championship game will be at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 19 in Miami.  Here is who experts picked to win Friday’s Indiana-Oregon rematch:

Indiana vs Oregon betting odds

One week into the college football transfer portal window, the College Sports Commission issued a reminder about its rules regarding third-party NIL deals. Specifically, the guidance mentioned deals with MMR and apparel partners.

The CSC said it received word of schools offering deals that go against terms of the House settlement through the first week of the transfer window. The organization expressed “serious concerns” about some terms of the deals in question and reiterated third-party NIL deals are subject to the NIL Go clearinghouse if they’re worth more than $600.

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Additionally, the CSC said investigations are progressing with regard to unreported third-party NIL deals. Some schools “should expect to hear from the CSC next week”, the commission said.

Such deals must be reported within five days of execution. Enrolling high school athletes and incoming D-I transfers have up to 14 days in some cases.

“Without prejudging any particular deal, the CSC has serious concerns about some of the deal terms being contemplated and the consequences of those deals for the parties involved,” the guidance reads. “Making promises of third-party NIL money now and figuring out how to honor those promises later leaves student-athletes vulnerable to deals not being cleared, promises not being able to be kept, and eligibility being placed at risk.”

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CSC says MMR deals must be reported

Friday’s guidance comes after Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported a $3.5 million offer that LSU made Cincinnati transfer quarterback Brendan Sorsby this week. Sorsby later committed to Texas Tech, where he’s set to receive a deal in the $5 million range, On3’s Pete Nakos reported.

The offer to Sorsby included a third-party marketing deal through LSU’s MMR partner, Playfly Sports Properties, Dellenger reported. LSU also planned to compensate Sorsby through rev-share, which would help make total compensation competitive to Texas Tech’s investment.

The College Sports Commission said deals in place with an MMR partner must be reported, even if the partner intends to find other sponsors to help activate the deal. In addition, deals with an MMR or other partner “must include direct activation of the student-athlete’s NIL rights,” the guidance read.

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“The label on the contract (e.g., ‘agency agreement,’ ‘services agreement’) does not change the analysis; if an entity is agreeing to pay a student-athlete for their NIL, the agreement must be reported to NIL Go within the reporting deadline,” the guidance reads.

Third-party NIL deals are viewed as the next “arms race” in college sports in the post-House settlement landscape. Tennessee and Penn State are both set have NIL components in their upcoming apparel deals with adidas, On3 previously reported. LSU was also the first school featured in Nike’s new Blue Ribbon Elite program, and that announcement came at the same time the Tigers announced an extension with The Swoosh.

The Athletic has live coverage of Oregon vs. Indiana in the 2025 College Football Playoff semifinals.

When David Pollack played linebacker at the University of Georgia from 2001-04, he was considered one of the best defenders in the country: a two-time consensus All-American and a two-time SEC Defensive Player of the Year.

But when he played the game in college, NIL (name, image and likeness) deals didn’t exist, and active players were not named in athletic video games. In the EA Sports College Football series, Pollack knew he was No. 47 for Georgia.

Pollack now sees the video game as more than entertainment or a fun way to pass the time. The game can also be a tool of instruction for coaches at all levels, particularly those coaching young children and adolescents. In addition to being a recognized college football analyst, Pollack is a defensive line coach at North Oconee High in Bogart, Ga.

Also on his resume: He’s one of the voices of EA Sports College Football 26 as an analyst.

Teaching players about schemes and how to react on the field has become reality for him as a coach with the help of video games such as EA Sports College Football 26 and Madden NFL 26. He’s a believer of the method and has seen the return on investment.

“I can’t tell you how many of my kids that I’ve coached (using video games) over these years,” Pollack said, “and they were really little, too — 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old.”

EA Sports College Football 26 includes more than 2,800 new plays and 45 new formations. Madden NFL 26 features a playbook expansion of more than 1,000 plays. Football video games have come a long way from the days of Tecmo Bowl, a 1980s-released game featuring only 12 pro teams and four offensive plays per team on the Nintendo 8-bit console.

Because of technology becoming so advanced, studying plays by way of video games can resemble studying in real life to football players of all ages. Coaches can talk football jargon with younger players who are familiar with it from the video games. Players are understanding what offensive schemes work best against certain defenses. Conversely, they are learning multiple defenses and what might be the best option to contain an offense.

“With Madden, with College Football, these kids learn what Cover 2 is, what Cover 3 is, what Cover 4 is,” Pollack said. “The games have gotten to be so detailed that it’s correct.”

David Pollack, now an assistant coach at North Oconee High in Georgia, was a star linebacker for the Georgia Bulldogs. On video games, he knew he was No. 47 for the Bulldogs. (Joshua L. Jones / USA Today)

Statistically, EA Sports College Football 26, released in July, is again among the best-selling games, ranking fifth and trailing only NBA 2K26 among sports games, according to GameStop. College football was brought back to video game consoles in July 2024 with EA Sports College Football 25, the first such game since 2013. EA Sports College Football 25 was the second-highest selling game of 2024, according to GameStop. There were 2.2 million unique players during early access in July 2024, per EA Sports.

Pollack said many young football players he’s worked with who have gravitated toward video games as an entry point to the sport show up with a deeper understanding of the game. And with the College Football Playoff now in full swing, there is a sample size of a fan base that learned about the significance of the tournament through gaming, despite having no connection to any of the 12 teams originally selected for competition. (Miami beat Ole Miss on Thursday to advance to the CFP Championship. The Hurricanes will face the winner of Friday’s semifinal between Indiana and Oregon.)

Young fans as gamers, however, are looking for realism down to the smallest detail. EA Sports creative director Scott O’Gallagher said a lot of the feedback the company receives from gamers goes beyond gameplay. With football video games, there are gamers who want to see players in the right helmet style, the right style of shoe, even the correct number of wristbands. That detail, O’Gallagher said, resonates particularly when young gamers are playing with the team that features certain athletes they admire.

Before becoming immersed in video games as a career, O’Gallagher was an NAIA basketball All-American at Warner Pacific University in Portland, Ore. He played professionally overseas in Europe and Australia. He learned as a professional athlete in Europe that passionate fans care about every aspect of their favorite team.

The details that go into making football video games as real as possible include keeping the playbook updated. EA Sports works throughout the season to add any wrinkles to the playbook that can be added to its games. A young player can follow a team they like and not only understand what plays are used, but also see the changes over the course of the season.

“We’re a live service, so if things are happening during the year, we’re definitely going out there and trying to add them,” O’Gallagher said. “I can talk to one of our playbook guys about what USC was doing and say, ‘Hey, did we get this? It’s a new wrinkle that Lincoln Riley’s put in. Let’s make sure we have it.’”

A more intricate game doesn’t just help Pollack’s young players, but also gives more for Pollack to discuss in his role as an in-game analyst. When recording for the game, it’s no longer about simply saying “first down.” Announcers will record game analysis in studios with tons of energy but without seeing an actual play. They will spend hours preparing to record for several scenarios.

“The technology’s getting so much better that we’re able to do so much more now and give layered concepts,” Pollack said. “It’s crazy how much they can learn about the game and are ahead of the curve on playing the real game.”

Football education by way of video games isn’t limited to a specific squad, either. Evan Dexter, EA Sports vice president of brand and marketing, said data shows football games make a strong connection with young fans who don’t have allegiance to a particular team.

“If you were to pull the analytics of (College Football) 25 and 26, I’m sure Colorado is being used far more than what you might think, based on the population of alumni or people geographically around the school,” Dexter said, referring to the popularity of Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter and quarterback Shedeur Sanders, who led Colorado during the 2024 season.

“It’s certainly true that younger sports fans will abandon allegiance in favor of some form of hero worship, some form of individual superstar,” Dexter said. “As the sport becomes a little more superstar driven, the Travis Hunters move through it, and the Arch Mannings (of Texas) and those narratives start to transcend the old-school rivalries.”

Whether rivalries are traditional or budding, the evolution of football video games will continue to be an introduction to the sport for young gamers who ultimately want to become football players. They’ll now have a lot more than four plays to choose from to learn the game.

“It’s definitely raising the football intelligence of kids all around the world by playing the game and understanding what’s going on,” Pollack said.

SEATTLE — In this edition of Inside the Arena, Niko is back from the Seahawks’ huge win in Santa Clara and sounding off on the sudden departure of UW QB Demond Williams and what it means for the future of NIL.

Plus, Chris introduces us to the RailSpur development in Pioneer Square, which has been boosted by bonus Mariners and now Seahawks games in advance of the 2026 World Cup.

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