The Texas Longhorns have been at the top of college football’s game in terms of recruiting in recent years. In fact, Texas’ 2024 recruiting class was ranked No. 6 overall, according to 247Sports Composite Rankings last year; and in 2023, No. 3 overall, according to 247Sports.

There’s room to improve, in other words.

Enter Texas football’s Lamborghini roster.

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Last weekend, Texas “showcased a fleet of Lamborghinis outside its football facilities as it hosted some of the nation’s top high school prospects for official visits. The luxury cars, parked in front of the Moncrief Athletics Center next to Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, were impossible to miss as blue-chip recruits arrived … . The spectacle is part of an ongoing trend for Texas, which first rolled out the exotic cars during last year’s recruiting cycle. This year’s event featured around 14 to 15 top targets from the Class of 2026, including five-star running back Ezavier Crowell and Lamar Brown, as well as four-star edge rusher Jamarion Carlton, cornerback Davon Benjamin and four-star quarterback Kavian Bryant.”

In this episode of Monday Night Therapy, host Minnie Hunt is joined by Pigskin PD (Peter Bartell) and law professor Adam Lamparello for an in-depth look at the NCAA House Settlement and its massive impact on the future of college football. The panel breaks down how the new system allows universities to pay up to $20.5 million annually to athletes, alongside NIL deals, and explores the legal, competitive, and Title IX ramifications. Adam explains why this structure may further widen the gap between powerhouse programs and smaller schools—sparking antitrust concerns and long legal battles.

The conversation also dives into Nebraska football’s identity, the importance of returning to its physical, trench-dominant style, and head coach Matt Rhule’s efforts to rebuild the program. The group reflects on Nebraska legends like Tommy Frazier and Lawrence Phillips while discussing NIL’s broader impact on player movement, recruiting, and competitive balance across college football.

If you’re passionate about Nebraska football history, college football NIL, or the changing landscape of the sport, this is an essential discussion. Plus, hear some fun memories about the 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game and Nebraska’s storied quarterback legacy.

#NebraskaFootball #CollegeFootballHistory #NIL #NCAASettlement #GoBigRed

The Texas Longhorns have been at the top of college football’s game in terms of recruiting in recent years. In fact, Texas’ 2024 recruiting class was ranked No. 6 overall, according to 247Sports Composite Rankings last year; and in 2023, No. 3 overall, according to 247Sports.

There’s room to improve, in other words.

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Enter Texas football’s Lamborghini roster.

More from USA Today:

Last weekend, Texas “showcased a fleet of Lamborghinis outside its football facilities as it hosted some of the nation’s top high school prospects for official visits. The luxury cars, parked in front of the Moncrief Athletics Center next to Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, were impossible to miss as blue-chip recruits arrived … . The spectacle is part of an ongoing trend for Texas, which first rolled out the exotic cars during last year’s recruiting cycle. This year’s event featured around 14 to 15 top targets from the Class of 2026, including five-star running back Ezavier Crowell and Lamar Brown, as well as four-star edge rusher Jamarion Carlton, cornerback Davon Benjamin and four-star quarterback Kavian Bryant.”

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PHILADELPHIA — For Philadelphia, whose only FBS football program is forever on life support, the biggest news from the House v. NCAA settlement appears to be that Big East member Villanova belongs to the conference whose men’s basketball programs are expected to have the most money at their disposal of any conference.

The settlement means schools now can disburse a floating pool of money, expected to be a maximum of $20.5 million in the upcoming school year and increasing annually. This is on top of whatever name, image and likeness money student-athletes negotiate for themselves, as long as the process of procuring that NIL money meets new guidelines.

In short, schools now will officially be paying their athletes salaries, and doing so in a sanctioned manner. Super. Good for the kids.

This will not, in any way, create any sort of equity, nor will it keep schools and boosters from cheating. It is lipsticking a pig that is irredeemably ugly and irretrievably unfair.

There are a mind-numbing number of other likely consequences, from the Power Four conferences continuing to splurge on their powerhouse football teams, to roster limits squeezing both recent college recruits and existing players off teams on which they planned to play or teams on which they’d already played, to kids getting grandfathered into schools but not on to the teams.

There’s a possibility the ruling is delayed by further legal wrangling, but when it goes forward, there will be tons of fallout and a few lawsuits, too: For example, when some Title IX audit at, say, Alabama reveals that the football team received $20.4 million while women’s soccer, tennis and swimming split 100 grand. Roll over, Tide.

And what would an NCAA resolution be without the creation of yet another layer of bureaucracy? Enter the College Sports Commission (CSC), a (supposedly) independent LLC tasked with enforcing the rather nebulous new rules, investigating alleged violations, and handing down punishments for those who run afoul of the nebulous new rules. This means that the bumbling NCAA, for decades a study in misadministration, no longer will selectively oversee or inconsistently adjudicate violations.

The CSC will rely on athletes self-reporting outside NIL deals. It also will be run by Bryan Seeley, whose last jobs involved running Major League Baseball’s often bizarre PED and domestic-violence investigations. He was hired by the commissioners of the Power Four conferences — the Southeastern Conference, Big Ten, Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conference.

So, an MLB guy hired by bigwigs to police those same bigwigs.

What could possibly go wrong?

At any rate, using a formula that Division I programs like those in the Big East are unencumbered by FBS football programs — Villanova’s team is in the FCS, formerly known as Division I-AA — they’ll have more cash available for their premier programs. This should give teams like Villanova more available revenue, approaching $6 million on average per school, according to numbers presented at a the Global NIL Summit and reported by ESPN.com’s Dan Wetzel, or about 23% more than schools from the next highest-spending conferences.

Of course, that’s just the money coming from the school. That does not include money from third-party NIL sources, like NIL collectives such as Villanova’s “Friends of Nova,” which reportedly this season delivered $1.7 million in NIL money to star forward Eric Dixon. That source of money will not be capped, though any amount exceeding $600 must be validated by the CSC. And that money must be self-reported by the athlete.

Despite an already healthy NIL pool, Villanova missed the NCAA tournament all three years after Jay Wright’s retirement and fired coach Kyle Neptune. The Wildcats hired Kevin Willard in March.

The main intent of the House class-action lawsuit was to pay current and former athletes in arrears of the next 10 years, and the NCAA and the group formerly known as the Power Five conferences (the Pac-12 used to be a power conference) will pay out nearly $2.8 billion to about 390,000 former and current athletes who played before 2021, when the current NIL rules were created, and it also resulted in the revenue-sharing model for the immediate future. Division I schools have until June 15 to opt in, and all of Philadelphia’s D-I schools either have or are expected to opt in. The Ivy League, which includes Penn, has said its schools will not opt in.

The adjudicators also sought to produce a path to contain NIL bidding wars that might make playing fields more even and oversee NIL income and expenditure.

For instance. Ohio State’s benefactors essentially bought a national title last season by spending a record $20 million on its team. However, assuming the Buckeyes and their ilk muster third-party NIL money, there’s no reason they can’t spend more than double that amount annually.

More locally, after the 2022-23 season, Penn lost Jordan Dingle, the Ivy League Player of the Year. He entered the transfer portal and landed at St. John’s, where he cashed in on NIL money in his final season of eligibility — NIL money that doesn’t exist in any large amounts at Ivy schools, since the league does not allow NIL collectives.

The Quakers went 9-5 in the Ivy League in both 2021-22 and 2022-23 with Dingle leading the way, but fell to 3-11 in 2023-24 without him. A 4-10 mark in 2024-25 led to the firing of coach Steve Donahue after nine seasons.

Donahue’s replacement, local high school and college legend and former Iowa coach Fran McCaffery, was hired in part because of his familiarity with NIL and the transfer portal.

How McCaffery navigates these new, uncharted waters will be fascinating to watch.

As for Villanova:

No more excuses.

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A few weeks ago, as the House settlement was dragging its feet through the final approval process, I was chatting with a power conference athletic director about whether it would actually work as intended.

Athletic departments throughout the country have been gearing up for the $20.5 million in annual revenue sharing, which is the most notable piece of the $2.8 billion agreement. But among coaches and administrators, there is particular interest in the settlement’s newly created enforcement arm intended to stamp out the pay-for-play deals that have dominated the name, image and likeness era of college sports.

It’s a critical piece of the settlement for the NCAA and power conferences, considering the NCAA’s inability to enforce its own NIL rules, yet there remains a deep skepticism among many in the industry that this new enforcement will be any more effective.

One reason? A familiar character in college sports could return to the forefront: the bag man.

The new enforcement terms under the House settlement instruct college athletes to declare any third-party NIL deals worth at least $600 into a clearinghouse database. The idea is that the clearinghouse, dubbed “NIL Go” and managed by the accounting firm Deloitte, will serve as a restrictor plate on NIL collectives and pay-for-play, flagging deals that do not reflect a valid business purpose or fall within a reasonable range of compensation. Yahoo Sports reported that at the recent ACC spring meetings, Deloitte officials shared that 70 percent of past deals from NIL collectives would be denied under the new clearinghouse.

But in candid conversations, coaches and recruiting staffers have serious doubts that athletes will declare those deals, or do so accurately. Some have suggested that players are being encouraged not to declare deals at all, but to simply take the money and keep quiet rather than risk the clearinghouse flagging it. And if that’s the case, where do we suspect that money might be coming from?

“I guess it would just be the same as the way things used to work,” lamented the athletic director, frustrated by those already angling to undermine the settlement. “We’d be right back where we started.”

Before NIL, “bag men” were the not-so-invisible hands of big-time college sports, boosters who secretly funneled cash to top players and recruits. It was cheating in the same way that driving over the speed limit is a crime: If it wasn’t flagrant or egregious, you probably weren’t getting caught.

“Though of course not every player at every level is paid for, this is the arrangement in high-stakes college football,” is how writer Steven Godfrey described it in his 2014 deep dive into the clandestine world of bag men. “Providing cash and benefits to players is not a scandal or a scheme, merely a function. And when you start listening to the stories, you understand the function can never be stopped.”

It’s true. The bag man didn’t disappear in the NIL era — he was legitimized. The emergence of NIL collectives expanded the pool of bag men (and bag women!) by allowing boosters and even everyday fans to fund their favorite team’s roster without fear of ignominy or recruiting violations. It was a modern-day Frank Abagnale story, the bag man coming out of the shadows, from delinquent to deputy.

Without guardrails or the threat of punishment, NIL spending mushroomed. Ohio State football won a national championship last season with a $20 million roster. Top players in football and basketball command seven-figure payments. And as the House settlement loomed, the richest collectives front-loaded their deals in recent months to pre-empt the clearinghouse, which is how you have reports of Texas football spending as much as $40 million on its 2025 roster, including forthcoming revenue sharing.

The settlement is designed to rein in that Wild West culture of NIL, with annual caps on revenue share and constraints on third-party NIL meant to instill some competitive balance. In theory. But $20.5 million won’t be enough for the schools at the top of the power conferences, especially when those funds are spread across an entire athletic department. We’ve already had $20 million rosters in football and $10 million in men’s basketball, and some in the industry believe $40 million-$50 million football rosters are inevitable.

The oversight and enforcement arm, named the College Sports Commission, is supposed to combat that, armed with more efficiency and punitive power than the NCAA currently wields. But history suggests that power-thirsty boosters paying athletes under the table is a tough thing to police — particularly after collectives spent the past few years streamlining the art of bag dropping.

Now, instead of an envelope of cash in a player’s locker, it’s a direct deposit into their bank account. (The IRS might complicate that process under the House settlement, but that’s what payment apps are for.)

“If some donor wants to wire a player $25,000 a month, who’s keeping track of that?” one power conference administrator said.

Money wires aside, the system of boosters paying players is much more sophisticated and far less frowned upon, and it’s going to be impossible to put that infrastructure back into the tube.

One of the main objectives of the House settlement for the NCAA and power conference defendants was to neutralize NIL collectives. But those collectives aren’t going away. Several states have NIL laws that contradict the settlement and could provide legal workarounds. And if not, collectives can just go back into the shadows, out of sight but still pulling the strings.

Maybe the enforcement piece of the settlement will work, or at least be a more effective deterrent than previously existed. Maybe the scrutiny and punishments will be unpleasant enough to curb bag dropping or strike fear in coaches beyond their plausible deniability. Maybe the clearinghouse, over time, will force collectives to wither and players to sign legitimate NIL deals that pass muster.

But for as long as college sports have existed, there have always been folks looking for an edge, a way to beat the system. And the best ones have always found it.

“Maybe you’re trying to do it the right way, but there are always going to be those schools and actors that are trying to do something else,” another power conference administrator said.

The House settlement is going to change the future of college sports. It might revive a bit of its past, too.

 (Photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)