College football’s version of the Final Four is here and there are no signs of Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, Michigan, LSU, Texas, Penn State, Notre Dame or Oklahoma. Instead, the last group still standing consists of Ole Miss, Indiana, Oregon and Miami and three of the four teams didn’t even qualify for their conference championship games.

What’s going on here?

As it turns out, NIL and the transfer portal, that some contend are destroying the game, have only created more contenders. There is more parity than ever before. Programs without much of a football history are on the brink of making some.

Indiana is a renowned basketball school, but with access to the transfer portal and the ability to invest in players, the Hoosiers are winning in football. No. 1 Indiana not only beat No. 2 Ohio State to win its first outright Big Ten championship since 1945, but they also routed No. 9 Alabama in the Rose Bowl for their first bowl victory in 34 years. Quarterback Fernando Mendoza also became the first Hoosier in history to win the Heisman Trophy.

When have you ever heard of a top football target saying ‘No’ to Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State and ‘Yes’ to Indiana? It’s happening right before our eyes.

Ole Miss is still without an SEC title since 1963, but empowered by today’s new rules, the Rebels amassed enough talent to eliminate league heavyweight Georgia from the playoffs — even while their former head coach Lane Kiffin watched from his new job at LSU.

Oregon, with its rich banker — Phil Knight, founder of Nike, has never won a football national championship. Miami has won five national titles, but none since 2001 and they haven’t won a conference championship since 2003.

With rosters constructed around NIL and the transfer portal, all four programs are not only playing for a shot to be No. 1 this month, but they are fortified to hang around for a while. The blue bloods no longer have a monopoly on the nation’s best players.

For other examples of how the rule changes have leveled the playing field, just look at No. 4 Texas Tech, No. 14 Vanderbilt and No. 12 BYU. The Red Raiders may have bought their way out of obscurity, but in short time and with an excellent head coach, Texas Tech is likely to finish the season ranked higher than No. 13 Texas and No. 7 Texas A&M and begin next year the same way.

Vanderbilt lost its bowl game to Iowa, but before that, the Commodores (10-2) went to Knoxville and blew out Tennessee 45-24. They beat the Vols with better players — something unseen around the Volunteer State before NIL and the transfer portal. It’s not just football. Vandy is the only program in the nation that is still undefeated in both men’s and women’s basketball.

BYU was playing as a football independent when both the transfer portal (2018) and NIL (2021) were approved by the NCAA. At the time, the fear was whether the Cougars could or would even try to survive.

Two major developments followed. First, BYU was invited to join the Big 12 beginning in the 2023 season. Second, school leaders and its fan base committed to do what was necessary to be competitive, and the Board of Trustees concurred so long as athletics remained self-funded and true to the university’s core values.

How is that working out?

Men’s basketball is currently 13-1, ranked No. 9 in the country and showcasing freshman AJ Dybantsa — the projected top pick in next year’s NBA draft. Last season, BYU reached the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2011. To keep it going, the Cougars quickly extended head coach Kevin Young’s contract.

Football is a combined 22-4 over the last two seasons with victories over ranked P4 opponents in both the Alamo Bowl and Pop-Tarts Bowl. More people watched the Cougars on television in those two games than any previous BYU broadcast in the modern era.

The Cougars extended head coach Kalani Sitake’s contract to 10 years and the following day, Sitake signed the program’s highest-rated recruiting class in history.

Truth be told, NIL and the transfer portal aren’t stumbling blocks for BYU at all. In fact, they are just the opposite — more like fertilizer for what the Cougars are growing. The ability to attract talent to the embedded culture, with the resources to support them, gives every team on campus a chance to succeed.

BYU doesn’t get or keep every player or coach, but they get enough and their all-important investor — Cougar Nation is all-in. Wherever BYU goes, the loyal crowds follow.

NIL and the transfer portal don’t function perfectly and still need some national oversight, but when it comes to the Cougars, they are tailor-made to keep them competitive just as they have helped Indiana, Miami, Oregon and Ole Miss, who are about to give college football a refreshingly new national champion.

Dave McCann is a sportswriter and columnist for the Deseret News and is a play-by-play announcer and show host for BYUtv/ESPN+. He co-hosts “Y’s Guys” at ysguys.com and is the author of the children’s book “C is for Cougar,” available at deseretbook.com

As the transfer portal and NIL continue to lead the way in daily college football news and fan conversation, I will raise the unpopular opinion that both have elevated the game we love to a new level. There is a certain excitement every day since the portal officially opened, with big names jumping into the portal and finding new opportunities.

The days of only non-starters jumping to other schools are a thing of the past, and the financial opportunities offered by schools have given star players reason to leave schools they normally never would have ever left. You see, starting quarterbacks finding new opportunities when they clearly would be the starter at the school they left had they stayed.

We are way past the days of boosters handing out bags of cash to possible recruits or transfers under the table, and it has made the game better for all. I am still not sure why players making legal money is looked upon in a worse light by so many than players getting cash in brown paper sacks that could lead to long bowl bans.

For those who say players getting paid and being able to transfer freely has ruined the game, I will just point to the final four teams left in the college football playoff. Three of the four teams left are looking to win their first national championship in school history, and the fourth is becoming relevant again for the first time in nearly two decades.

The transfer portal and money being able to be spent on a more even basis have allowed the rise of Indiana and Ole Miss. It allowed Texas Tech to win its first conference championship in school history and a bye in this year’s playoff. Honestly, without the new systems in place, none of these schools would realistically have a chance to sniff a football national championship.

The Hurricanes have started making noise again on the gridiron after falling on hard times, and their return to being within two games of their sixth national championship is due to NIL and the portal. And honestly, even Oregon has been a contender for a while; they are in a better position than they ever have been.

Yes, there are some issues that need to be looked at, especially with the portal dates or maybe how many times a player can transfer, but right now, college football seems to have gained more of a national appeal. As teams that have never been good before, like the Hoosiers, it gives more programs hope if they can get some financial backing. Sure, the normal blue bloods will still have a leg up, like Alabama or Ohio State, but the gap between them and others has decreased greatly.

NIL and the portal have made it harder for blue-blood programs to stockpile players for multiple seasons before they see the field. Today’s players seem to care less about the name on the jersey and pick schools more based on possible financial gain and playing immediately. Also, certain star players being able to make big money in college, like Cam Ward last year or his successor Carson Beck, have the ability to stay in college for another year instead of for sure going to the NFL before being out of eligibility. It is a much different world compared to when many of us became college football fans, but the sport is in a good place, no matter what some will say.

Ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun.

PublishedJanuary 8, 2026 10:50 AM EST•UpdatedJanuary 8, 2026 10:48 AM EST

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Mark the date down on your calendars, ladies and gentlemen: January 8, 2026. Also known as the day Hell froze over.

No, it has nothing to do with the Rapture or dogs and cats living together. It’s actually something far more unlikely.

It seems that Texas Longhorns fans (yes, THOSE Texas Longhorns) are not down with the NIL “pay for play” era of college football.

READ: Washington, Demond Williams Saga Set To Get Ugly

And honestly, in a vacuum, I would say I can’t blame them.

I haven’t exactly minced words when it comes to how I feel about the modern era of my favorite sport, but the fact that Texas fans are now NIL haters is laughable.

Oh, man! It ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun now, is it?

Of all the schools in this great country and this great sport, Texas being the one to cry poor and want a change to the rules is hysterical.

This is the same program that started the season number one in the AP Poll and had one of the most expensive rosters in the country… and bragged about it, too.

This is the same team that just a few years ago was flexing its armada of Lamborghinis on recruiting trips, basically thumbing their nose at anyone who didn’t have six-figure sports cars sitting in their stadiums for high school prospects to sit in.

You can’t hide money, that’s for sure.

Oil money is a different kind of rich, as many college fans are learning thanks to Texas Tech’s recent run of dominance on the field and in the transfer portal.

Hell, even Houston is starting to make a run at some high-priced prospects in the portal.

Texas has unlimited funds, so they shouldn’t be hating the game nor the player.

As one of the Texas fans posted on X, this might be a GM or even a Sarkisian problem.

I don’t think the money at The University of Texas all of a sudden dried up. This definitely reeks of something different.

Whatever the problem is, the Longhorns better get it figured out fast, because they are getting lapped by teams in their conference and in their state.

And no amount of changes to the current landscape of college football will help with whatever they have going on in Austin.

It’s easy to take shots at the leaders of college athletics for letting their industry spiral to the point of all-consuming dysfunction, but give them credit for one thing.

They have managed to come up with arguably the worst business model on earth.

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Here’s how it works:

• Have an open bidding system for coaches and athletes, regulated by no one, that allows them to change jobs at will regardless of the length of their contracts and in fact encourages them to exert their leverage to obtain better deals every year.

• Do not pay the players for their ability to play football because that would make them employees. Rather, pay for their “marketing rights,” which avoids the employment conversation but complicates legal recourse in contractual disputes and ultimately leaves schools more vulnerable to chicanery and broken promises.

• Create a system that supposedly regulates payroll costs and ensures competitive balance by requiring a third-party clearinghouse to approve deals that don’t conform to their rules, only to then instruct said clearinghouse to ignore most of the rules they wrote because they’d probably lose a lawsuit.

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• Ask your most successful and loyal customers, the donors, to continue shoveling money at those players for no real benefit other than the fleeting enjoyment of watching them play, not knowing if they’ll be worth watching play in the first place. Then, after those players decide to play the leverage game again, ask your richest fans to deliver an even bigger pile of money for a new set of players who will be gone in a year.

Take a bow, college sports. This is true brilliance at work.

While the College Football Playoff and March Madness always provide compelling theater, including a highly anticipated set of semifinals Thursday and Friday, the inner workings of college sports have never looked more unpleasant, disorganized and utterly doomed to be an anvil of failure hanging around the neck of those in charge.

We have roughly one-third of college football players in the transfer portal.

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We have quarterbacks commanding $4 million and $5 million deals — essentially the equivalent of an NFL rookie salary for the No. 11 overall pick — that aren’t even guaranteed stars.

We have schools who begged for rules and guardrails to bring sanity and structure to the ecosystem using marketing companies to create financial packages for players, allowing them to exceed the revenue-share cap they negotiated just last year in the House v. NCAA settlement.

We have a situation at Washington where quarterback Demond Williams signed a revenue-sharing agreement to stay at the school, then turned around and announced he wanted to go into the transfer portal because he likely got a whiff of even bigger money somewhere else (cough, LSU, cough). Stay tuned to see how that one gets sorted out!

We have a college basketball product that is wide open for players who were professional athletes playing in the NBA G League or Europe, including former NBA draft picks. Good luck to the NCAA’s attorneys when someone who has signed an NBA contract in the past inevitably wants to come back to college for a big payday and gets denied eligibility because that’s an arbitrary bridge too far.

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We have the NCAA throwing its hands up in the air on most of this stuff, waiting for Congress to pass legislation that gives it legal protection to enforce its rules. Given that the congressional lobbying effort hasn’t borne fruit since former NCAA president Mark Emmert started it more than six years ago, good luck getting that to the finish line now that we’re in another midterm election year and there are various domestic and international crises that will likely command most of their time.

Oh, and as bad as it looks based on stuff that’s public, the environment is so much more chaotic and distrustful behind the scenes.

Here’s an example.

A power conference administrator passed along a document signed on Dec. 3 — national signing day for high school recruits — that looked like an NIL deal between Tennessee’s Volunteer Club and a recruit that had flipped to the Vols that day.

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But the reason the contract had been floating around among outraged administrative types was that the contract offering $85,000 worth of stipends, a paid apartment in Knoxville and $25,000 to pay the agent’s fees — while requiring nothing in return — was allegedly signed by the athlete’s grandmother.

Tennessee’s competitors felt it was a blatant attempt to circumvent the revenue-sharing cap. The document was sent to the NCAA, the SEC and the College Sports Commission, which is now the responsible party for policing this stuff. Nobody knew quite what to make of it.

Sources connected to the deal told Yahoo Sports the document was written in error by an inexperienced agent who didn’t know if a minor was allowed to sign a contract in that state and terminated it later in the day. Yahoo Sports has reviewed copies of the termination letter and a more standard NIL agreement with the player dated Dec. 5.

The point here is not that anybody did anything wrong. But it does provide a look into the inner workings of a business that is so unregulated that it would allow for such a mistake to happen in the first place while at the same time being such a believable story of potential cheating that other schools were actively trying to sic the CSC enforcement staff on Tennessee.

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And, again, it’s worth emphasizing that the entire point of the House settlement and the creation of the CSC was to put entities like the Volunteer Club out of business and prevent these kinds of deals, or at the very least, construct a solid wall between recruiting activity and money flowing through booster-funded collectives.

After millions in legal fees, the power conferences couldn’t even get that part right once the lawyers started pushing back and accusing them of colluding to restrict earnings.

So what do you have now? A system of talent procurement where some people are abiding by the rules, some are finding loopholes to do what they believe they can defend in court and others are completely ignoring the rules while daring a weakened NCAA/CSC to come get them.

And because it’s so vague who’s paying players through revenue share and who’s promising payments through third parties that may or may not entirely be within the rules, coaches and administrators at a lot of schools feel that their only choices are to use the flimsiness of the system to their advantage or be taken advantage of.

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Nobody should want this.

But it is the product of many choices over many years made by university presidents, athletic administrators and NCAA leadership to avoid confronting the reality that they need to tear the amateurism model down to its studs and start over.

It’s now clear they would rather have this chaos than the thorny work of building a system that pays players fairly, treats them as professionals and makes everyone accountable to the contracts they sign through collective bargaining.

It’s just one more choice, and both paths are hard. There would be real challenges trying to build that system for college sports, but as we can plainly see now, there are no magic solutions as things stand.

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Every time they try to fix a leak, six more spring up from the bottom of the boat. So each year they just accept sinking a little deeper into the abyss, hoping for a bottom that never seems within sight.

Before the Rose Bowl, Indiana coach Curt Cignetti was asked about preparing his players to face Alabama and its considerable “mystique.”

“Our guys just know what they see on tape,” Cignetti said.

Translation: This Alabama team just isn’t that good.

Indiana would go on to dominate the Tide 38-3. The win not only propelled the Hoosiers to the national semifinals to play Oregon but also left college football to wonder what had happened not merely to the once-mighty Crimson Tide but to the SEC as a whole.

After decades of clearly establishing itself as the nation’s best conference, both the top-end excellence and the depth of the league have fallen. The SEC’s hopes now rest with Ole Miss, which is still going through coaching shake-ups and distractions heading into its semifinal matchup with Miami.

It’s not that the SEC isn’t still “good” or even capable of winning a national championship — Ole Miss might very well do it. Top to bottom, it might still be the best league, with the majority of schools all-in on football.

That said, the days of complete domination, all-SEC national title games or deep, juggernaut teams are clearly gone, perhaps forever. This isn’t the same.

The SEC ruled the old era of college football, when rosters were built through high school recruiting that favored proximity first, followed by opulent facilities and rabid fan bases.

It was perfect for the SEC since the Southeast was rich with talent and league schools invested heavily in infrastructure while playing in front of massive crowds (some of whom might have been willing to offer some under-the-table sweeteners).

The new era of direct revenue sharing, the transfer portal and NIL possibilities, has caused talent to disperse, weakening depth as athletes seek playing time, opportunity and out-in-the-open money.

Suddenly the great teams aren’t as great, and the rest of the teams are better.

“This is the most fun I’ve ever had in coaching because you know you’re on a more equal playing field,” Illinois coach Bret Bielema told ESPN on Tuesday. “The introduction of the portal, NIL and revenue sharing, is the most game-changing development in my 32 years of coaching.”

Bielema took over at Illinois in 2021 after previous stops at Arkansas (2013-17) in the SEC and Wisconsin (2006-12) in the Big Ten. He has won 19 games during the past two seasons.

“It’s hard when you would do what you have to do as long as you possibly could and in the end, sometimes it just didn’t matter,” Bielema said of trying to recruit back in the day. “Now you just come to work every day knowing that blue blood, red blood, orange blood, whatever, everybody’s got a chance, man.”

That’s why Bielema says that while he understands why so much focus is on the SEC stepping back of late, this really applies to everyone.

He notes that he just signed the best recruiting class of his entire career, including when he led Wisconsin to three league titles. He even flipped a running back away from Alabama on signing day. “I’ve never been able to do that,” he said.

Where power programs — and the SEC had more than any other league — could once hoard talent, both improving their roster and starving others, now the gap is smaller. Almost anyone can pick off a high school recruit or two. Then the transfer portal steps in. The days of Alabama having four eventual first-round wide receivers, as it did in 2019, are over. Kirby Smart and Georgia can’t have a two-deep defense full of future NFL stars like the one during the Bulldogs’ back-to-back titles.

“The second[-string] guard at a university doesn’t want to be the No. 2 anymore,” Bielema said. “He wants to be a starter, so he’ll leave. That is unprecedented.”

During the BCS era (1998-2013), the SEC won nine of the 16 championships, including seven in a row 2006-12. In the 10 years of the four-team playoff, the SEC went 16-6, with two of those losses coming in SEC vs. SEC title games. Alabama, Georgia and LSU combined to win six championships.

The past two national champions (Michigan and Ohio State), however, hail from the Big Ten. With Oregon and Indiana matching up in one semifinal, that league is guaranteed a spot in a third consecutive title game. Penn State, meanwhile, reached the semis last season.

The SEC is just 4-9 this postseason (other bowls included) and just 2-7 against teams from other conferences. The Big Ten is 9-4. The ACC is 8-4. While bowl results carry only so much meaning these days, the starkness of the numbers is notable.

After all, the SEC has built much of its brand on being superior to all others — commissioner Greg Sankey was lobbying for seven SEC schools to appear in this year’s playoff (five got in). Postseason losses suggest perception wasn’t reality — middle-of-the-pack SEC teams such as Vanderbilt, Missouri and Tennessee all went down.

The SEC has benefited from circular reasoning (when top SEC teams win league games, it’s a sign of strength at the top; when they lose league games, it is a sign of the conference’s unmatched depth). But the most undervalued segment of the sport might have been the middle of the Big Ten and ACC, notably Big Ten teams Iowa (which defeated Vanderbilt) and Illinois (which beat Tennessee).

No one would dare suggest that the SEC is doomed. If anything, it is just doubling down, even in unlikely places.

Former also-ran Vanderbilt is fully committed to winning now, for example. Kentucky, which once saw football as a way to pass the time before basketball, just spent $37 million to fire its coach and is investing heavily in the portal, including flipping Notre Dame quarterback Kenny Minchey from Nebraska.

The SEC remains the most popular league and the most watched on television. The passion is there. The investment is there.

It’s just that the new rules provide more opportunity at more places. Competition is fiercer, inside the league and out, which means the days of domination are likely over.

“Anybody can beat anybody these days,” Bielema said.

Even the SEC.

LUBBOCK, Texas – Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire was named one of eight finalists Wednesday for the Paul “Bear” Bryant Coach of the Year Award after leading the Red Raiders to their first Big 12 Conference title and an appearance in the College Football Playoff.

The award, now in its 40th year, is given annually to the college football coach for contributions that make the sport better for athletes and fans alike by demonstrating grit, integrity and a winning approach to coaching and life – both on and off the field. McGuire was joined as a finalist by Indiana’s Curt Cignetti, James Madison’s Bob Chesney, Miami’s Mario Cristobal, Texas A&M’s Mike Elko, Virginia’s Tony Elliott, Oregon’s Dan Lanning and Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea.

The Bear Bryant Award is the only college football coaching honor given after the National Champion has been determined. It will be presented Jan. 21 during an awards ceremony hosted at the Post Oak Hotel in Houston. The event will be broadcast by CBS Sports Network on a tape-delayed basis beginning at 12:30 a.m. on Jan. 22.

In addition to being named a finalist for the Bear Bryant National Coach of the Year Award, McGuire was also named Wednesday the Big 12 Conference Coach of the Year by the organization. The finalists and Coach of the Year recipient are voted on by members of the National Sports Media Association, the Bryant Awards’ executive leadership team and the Bryant family.

This is the fourth national coaching award to name McGuire as a finalist this season as he was previously one of the final candidates for the George Munger College Coach of the Year Award, the Eddie Robinson Award and the Dodd Trophy. It is the first time in his career McGuire has been a finalist for any of the national coaching awards.

The Red Raiders reached new heights this past season under McGuire, who pushed Texas Tech to a school-record 12 wins and its first Big 12 title. McGuire led the Red Raiders to their first College Football Playoff appearance at the Capital One Orange Bowl after downing BYU, 34-7, in the Edward Jones Big 12 Championship, securing Texas Tech’s first outright conference crown since 1955.

Texas Tech proved to be one of the most-dominant teams in recent history on its way to a 12-2 record, with all 12 wins coming by at least 20 points. The Red Raiders are joined by Alabama in 2018 as the only teams in the Associated Press era (since 1936) to record 12 or more wins by 20-plus points prior to a bowl game. Texas Tech is just the fifth FBS team with 12 wins by 20-plus points in a season period during that span.

Despite a loss to No. 5 Oregon in the Orange Bowl, Texas Tech will likely end its season ranked in the top 10 of both the Associated Press and USA Today Coaches’ polls for the first time in history behind one of the most-balanced rosters in college football. Texas Tech currently ranks in the top-11 of several statistical categories, namely rushing defense (1st), scoring defense (3rd), total defense (4th), scoring offense (7th) and total offense (11th).

The Red Raiders have been the winningest Big 12 program under McGuire as Texas Tech has won 25 conference games in his four seasons, the most for any league school during that span. The Red Raiders are 35-18 overall under McGuire, which is the most wins by a Texas Tech head coach through 53 games since Jim Carlen was 35-17-1 midway through his final season of his five-year tenure from 1970-74.