NIL

Money Matters, Part II

Published

6 months ago

June 27, 2025

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Intercollegiate athletics have entered a historic new era after judge Claudia Wilken recently granted final approval to the $2.8 billion settlement of the class-action antitrust lawsuit House v. NCAA. Over three Fridays, we are examining the immediate and future implications of the House Settlement and what it means for WVU athletics. This is the second installment.MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Throughout its long and storied history, West Virginia University athletics has encountered critical pivot points in its existence.In the early 1920s, Athletic Director Harry Stansbury’s willingness to invest in a new football stadium put Mountaineer football on a much larger stage, and then a few years later, he was able to successfully fight off state superintendent of schools George Ford’s desire to make WVU a part of the state college system under one governing board, which would have placed West Virginia’s flagship university on par with its much smaller peers.Stansbury rightfully argued that by doing so, and with WVU joining the West Virginia Athletic Conference in the process, it would be catastrophic to the prestige of the University. Forward thinking alums and state officials agreed.In the late 1960s, upon the urging of football coach Jim Carlen, West Virginia University left the Southern Conference and committed to a big-time Eastern independent schedule that also included intersectional games against California, Stanford, Illinois, SMU, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona State.When Carlen would talk to his athletic director Red Brown about this, he framed it in a way that made it clear that the University’s status was on the line.”Mr. Brown, I know you are a basketball man and everything, but we’re in a different world now,” Carlen told him. “These people here need something to grab hold of. You’ve got to help me here a little bit now. “We have to get out of the Southern Conference because we’re better than that. I want to play Kentucky and Tennessee; I want to play schools people want to see us play, and I want to go to bowl games every year,” he said.Brown, too, had big aspirations and after years of asking, he eventually convinced the state to fund a new basketball arena in 1967.Forward-thinking West Virginians were on board with those things, as they were in the mid-1970s when the athletic department reached another pivot point after it became clear that aging Mountaineer Field needed replaced.Many wanted the old stadium remodeled with a 10,000-seat deck constructed on one side to increase its capacity to 45,000. Coach Frank Cignetti was part of a group favoring to build a new stadium in another part of town, arguing the viability of Mountaineer athletics was at stake.Forward-thinking people in the state capitol demanded that a new stadium be built in a different part of town.”What this thing finally came down to was a group in Charleston that really wanted to build a new stadium, and that sort of put an end to renovating the old stadium,” the late Cignetti recalled in 2020, two years before his death. “There were a lot of people at the time questioning if West Virginia could really make it big time in football, but if you look at the success Don Nehlen had there and the coaches after him, they wouldn’t have achieved that without that stadium.”Again, the courageous forward thinkers were on the right side of history, as was the case in 2010 when President Jim Clements and Athletic Director Oliver Luck steered West Virginia University out of the Big East and into the Big 12 Conference.The move kept WVU at the big table during the last decade when conference realignment turned college sports upside down, and then more recently, with the realignment that followed after the departures of Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12 to the SEC.Today, the recent House Settlement is requiring another seismic landscape change for West Virginia University.Director of Athletics Wren Baker was hired in late November 2022, in part, to help guide Mountaineer athletics through a new era of uncertainty in collegiate sports fueled by existential legal challenges regarding student-athlete compensation and name, image and likeness (NIL) rights.

The recent settlement approved by Judge Claudia Wilken stipulates that colleges and universities can directly pay athletes approximately $20.5 million per year beginning in 2025, increasing by 4% annually over the next 10 years.

For West Virginia University, that means roughly 20% of its entire yearly athletic budget will now go toward student-athlete compensation.

That’s a significant chunk of money!

Consequently, Baker’s choices basically came down to either fully funding the revenue share or not fully funding it and relegating Mountaineer athletics to second-class status, which was not really an option. So, by choosing to fully fund it, his next major decision was how to do it. He could either cut staff and programs to make up the difference or explore additional ways to increase revenue.

Some schools have chosen to cut staff and sports, a course Baker considered, but had he done so, it would have been like cutting off an appendage because the overall size of WVU’s athletics department is much, much smaller compared to its power conference peers.

“We have less people than any other school in the Big 12 in terms of full-time employees, and generally, our people are not as well-paid as a lot of our colleagues around the country, so we are not in a position where we can cut 100 people like some schools have,” Baker said recently. “That would be about half our workforce.

“We don’t really have that option.”

To chart the appropriate course, Baker did his research and conducted a thorough analysis of WVU’s athletics operations, taking a robust look at the entire department.

In addition to the department increasing athletic revenue by 5 to 6% annually during the three cycles that Baker has been here, his research concluded that relative to what WVU athletics currently generates in terms of parking, ticketing, media rights and fundraising, its performance has been on par or ahead of many of its power conference peers.

One critical aspect that hurts the department, as Baker has indicated on many occasions, is a lack of premium seating at Milan Puskar Stadium and the WVU Coliseum.

“That is something we have to fix if we want to grow,” he admits.

Baker noted other aggressive initiatives are now underway to increase the department’s budget.

“When people see us do things like restructuring men’s basketball seating or looking at our parking allotments, we had a lot of people over the years been given grace on way more parking passes than they are actually allotted,” Baker mentioned.

“Well, the problem with that is a lot of those parking passes have a donation requirement, so everybody who is getting X amount, when we did an audit, it amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars (in lost revenue),” he explained.

“I know this upsets people who feel like, ‘Hey, I’ve been with you, and I’ve been loyal’ but the reality is, we are not in a position to make decisions to forgo revenue anymore. And in the past, we’ve done that for the sake of trying to keep everyone happy.”

Baker said it is now imperative that Mountaineer athletics get market value for everything that can be offered.

“We can’t do that with freebies and handshakes,” he said. “If you look at our budget overall, relative to our conference, it remains in the bottom quartile, so we run a leaner ship.”

The most striking aspect of Baker’s findings was related to campus investment. It was significantly lower than most of West Virginia’s Big 12 peers and many of its power conference and regional peers as well.

As one University official once told me, “Mountaineer athletics has been West Virginia University’s best customer for years.”

Going back to the 1980s, when Don Nehlen’s football program was enjoying unprecedented success, the popular catchphrase within the department was “self-sustaining.”

Naturally, it was a source of great pride. But this unique designation came with a significant cost to athletics, in real dollars and potential investments toward the future.

About five years prior to West Virginia playing Notre Dame in the 1989 Fiesta Bowl for the national championship, athletics began paying the University for its tuition waivers. Through the years, the cost for those tuition waivers has ballooned to more than $10 million per year. Ed Pastilong, WVU’s athletic director at the time, had no other choice but to fundraise to pay for the scholarships awarded to student-athletes, diverting potential revenue for capital improvements to general operating costs.

Averaged out over decades, those tuition waivers amount to hundreds of millions in real dollars Mountaineer athletics has transferred to the University’s general budget.

Additionally, a decision was made sometime in the late 1980s that a portion of West Virginia University’s bowl revenue was to be allocated to the University, which became a factor in 1994 when the department was considering adding premium seating underneath the press box at Mountaineer Field after playing Florida in the Sugar Bowl.

Instead of constructing suites from one end of the stadium to the other, the decision was made to build only 12 at a cost of $2.5 million. The stated goal of the new stadium suites at the time was to create additional income to offset scholarship expenses for Mountaineer athletics. Had there been 36 suites constructed instead of 12, that would equate to a minimum of at least three times more revenue through the years, not to mention the financing for them was to be paid off by 2003.

Funding the construction of additional premium seating at the stadium and new premium seating at the WVU Coliseum today is going to be a massive undertaking.

According to published reports, the Group of 5 programs that were recently added to the Big 12 are being subsidized by as much as $40 million per year, and if that amount continues, combining that with their future Big 12 media rights distributions means their athletic budgets will easily surpass WVU’s.

In one extreme instance, former Big East member Rutgers was subsidized $70 million in 2024 to cover its athletic budget while competing in the Big Ten Conference, according to NJ.com. In the meantime, Rutgers has also invested hundreds of millions in capital improvements to the school’s basketball arena and football operations center.

It is clear Rutgers is willing to invest in its athletics program to maintain the prestige of being aligned with some of the most elite universities in the country in the Big Ten.

Baker admits he’s had some hard conversations with campus leadership about the unequal playing field Mountaineer athletics has been required to navigate through the years.

“We’re assuming we’re going to out-resource the (Group of 5 schools) coming into the league, but if their campus investment stays the same, and they begin getting full Big 12 revenue distribution, they are going to zoom right past us,” he explained. “We are going from being eighth or ninth out of 10 in a 10-member Big 12 to 14^th or 15^th in a 16-member Big 12.

“Now, we don’t have to have the biggest budget in the Big 12, but we do have to have a budget that’s somewhere in the median,” he added.

What the House Settlement is doing today is requiring those who support and love West Virginia University to make a choice – do they want to continue to have a first-rate athletics program funded on par with its peers?

The years of Mountaineer athletics punching above its weight class and being asked to do more with less are likely over if WVU supporters desire consistent success and remaining relevant in the college athletics landscape.

In 2017, when Shane Lyons was athletics director, he commissioned Tripp Umbach to do a study on the economic impact WVU athletics has on the state of West Virginia and Monongalia County.

Those numbers were eye opening.

The total economic impact for the state was $302.7 million in 2017, which adjusted for inflation, equates to nearly $400 million today. The economic impact to Monongalia County was $78.8 million, or about $103 million in 2025.

Clearly, a great deal is riding on the financial health and well-being of Mountaineer athletics. The state’s identity and branding are intertwined in the successes West Virginia University athletics enjoys today.

Baker, whose career in college sports has taken him and his young family to many different parts of the country, is keenly aware of this.

“I would sit here and espouse the value of successful athletics for any campus, but I think in this state, it’s more important than any other state in the entire country,” he explained. “I think people associate the brand and the success of our state with the success of WVU and WVU athletics, and I would throw WVU Medicine in there as well.

“For our state to be in a healthy economic position, it needs WVU, WVU Medicine and WVU athletics to also be in really good condition. What is that worth? It is going to require some kind of investment from everyone.”

Today, because of the House Settlement, Mountaineer athletics has reached another critical pivot point in its history.

When these moments have arrived in the past, the forward-thinkers have usually prevailed.

Next Friday, our final installment will explore the potential of the recently launched Gold & Blue Enterprises.

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President Donald Trump calls NIL ‘disaster,’ reiterates willingness to get involved

Published

2 hours ago

December 14, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Speaking from the Oval Office on Friday while honoring the “Miracle on Ice” 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team, President Donald Trump called NIL a “disaster” in college sports. He also further signaled his willingness to get involved.

Trump has been vocal about settling the landscape in college athletics. He signed an executive order earlier this year called “Save College Sports” to prohibit third-party, pay-for-play payments and directs the Secretary of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board to clarify that athletes are amateurs and not employees.

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But as dollars continue to fly through NIL and revenue-sharing, Trump called for a “strong salary cap” and said colleges are putting themselves in tough financial shape as a result. He stressed the need for action and reiterated he’d step in, if necessary.

“You’re going to have these colleges wipe themselves out, and something ought to be done,” Trump said. “And I’m willing to put the federal government behind it. But if it’s not done fast, you’re going to wipe out colleges. They’re going to get wiped out, including ones that do well in football.

“They can’t pay $12 million, $14 million, $10 million, $6 million for players. They won’t be able to stop. There’ll always be that one player, they only have that player, they’re going to win the national championship. And they’ll have 100 colleges thinking the same thing. Colleges cannot afford to play this game. It’s a very bad thing that’s happening.”

Donald Trump: Schools ‘putting too much money into football’

President Donald Trump’s assessment of college athletics centers around Olympics sports, which he has said multiple times are caught in the middle of the current landscape. He said Friday schools have been cutting those non-revenue sports, calling them “training grounds” for the Olympics. For example, UTEP dropped women’s tennis while Grand Canyon cut men’s volleyball ahead of the House settlement.

As things currently stand, Trump argued schools are starting to divert more dollars toward football. As a result, other sports could be impacted.

“I think that it’s a disaster for college sports,” Trump said of NIL. “I think it’s a disaster for the Olympics. We’re losing a lot of teams. Colleges are cutting their, they would call them, sort of the lesser sports. They’re losing them at numbers nobody can believe. And they were really training grounds, beautiful training grounds. Hard-working, wonderful young people. They were training grounds for the Olympics, and a lot of these sports that were training so well would win gold medals because of it. Those sports don’t exist because they’re putting all that money into football.

“And, by the way, they’re putting too much money into football because colleges don’t make – even the most successful universities don’t make that much money. … I think the NIL is a disaster for sports. It’s horrible for the Olympics. I think it’s actually horrible for the players. And you’re losing all of these great sports. They’re not college football.”

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Bowl games are under stress. Thank goodness for BYU, Utah and Utah State – Deseret News

Published

3 hours ago

December 14, 2025

Your Sports Nation

At least in Utah, going to bowl games remains a very big deal.

The college football bowl season is undergoing an assault, with plenty of teams opting out of invitations to play in the postseason. The reasons vary, but the movement is tracking and threatening the bowl business.

But locally, the bowl train is heading down the track. The bowl thoughts are positive, and events remain as anticipated fun, a reward and an opportunity to shine.

It’s carnival time. Break out the travel plans.

Utah, BYU, and Utah State are locked in. It’s game time, show time, a rally point in December.

The 10-2 Utes can’t get enough of this season after the 2024 funk. The offense is rolling, Kyle Whittingham must be celebrated and this is his final game in Uteville.

For the Crimson faithful, this is a season that needs milking. Las Vegas is just a few Maverick and 7-Eleven stops away, and Dec. 31 is plenty of time to plan. Plus, Utah will kick Nebraska from Allegiant Stadium back to the corn fields.

In Logan, Bronco Mendenhall has the Aggies playing in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in Boise Dec. 22. This is a celebration of Mendenhall’s remarkable, gutsy entry back into Utah and a team that made impressive strides.

How can players, coaches and fans not want to see their Aggies take on future Pac-12 opponent and 6-6 Washington State and give this season one more run?

In Provo, Kalani Sitake got his contract extended. This means more support for his assistants, continuity for returning players and a time to salute their “player’s coach.”

It’s also a chance to get 12 wins and shoulder that chip after the College Football Playoff snub. They see this as Alamo Bowl and Colorado Part 2.

The biggest opt-out is Notre Dame. Shunned by the CFP committee, the Fighting Irish made a very public statement by refusing to play BYU in the Pop-Tarts Bowl in Orlando. It was a shot at ESPN, essentially telling the network “We’re not letting you make money (an estimated $50 million) off our brand when you snubbed our royal keisters.”

Big 12 brothers Iowa State (8-4) and Kansas State (7-5) are eligible for bowls, but declined. ISU lost head coach Matt Campbell to Penn State and players voted for health and safe practice reasons to decline. Similarly, K-State just had head coach Chris Klieman retire and uncertainty with staff, recruiting and health led the program to decline.

Both teams will be fined $500,000 for this decision.

Teams with 5-7 records were approached to go bowling, but many declined, including Baylor, UCF and Kansas.

That makes five Big 12 teams that turned away bowl invitations.

This places a cloud over the entire bowl industry when teams refuse to come and party in your cities, accept your gifts and use the event as a positive experience for the team and fans.

It’s a commentary more on the possible gloom settling around many teams in December because of the transfer portal, players bound for the NFL opting out and NIL money simply making the risk of injury or bad performance not worth it.

Players have their coin. They don’t need another PlayStation or Xbox.

NIL hasn’t caused a complete collapse (the delayed 2026 portal window helped stabilize many rosters), but it amplifies devaluation in the expanded CFP era.

Non-playoff bowls are increasingly seen as optional, with opt-outs rising from individual players to entire teams. If unchecked, this threatens the bowl system’s long-term viability, especially for mid-tier games.

In the future, we may see many NIL/revenue share deals that include contracts requiring bowl participation. Bowl organizers have discussed NIL incentives including direct payments to players to boost appeal, but most lower-tier bowls lack the budget to do that.

Critics argue NIL erodes tradition, turning bowls into “glorified scrimmages,” while supporters say it empowers players in a monetized sport.

Locally, Whittingham, Sitake and Mendenhall have all spoken in the past how important the extra practices for a bowl are for a team. They provide an extra period of time to develop players and foster competition.

Bowls also provide an event that many seniors deserve because some, if not most, will never play football again. It is also a chance to win another game and add to the momentum gained during the season as programs head into offseason workouts, the weight room and recruiting.

It would seem defections to the portal loom as a legitimate threat for many teams as they see their rosters depleted and their priority is loading up not with players directly out of high school but seasoned Division I athletes who have been through training programs and the next level and can step in and fill the gaps.

This, sadly, is the state of college football today. Bowl games, outside the CFP, are becoming endangered events.

Big 12 participating bowl teams (Texas Tech will play either Oregon or James Madison in the Orange Bowl on January 1 as part of the CFP):

Dec. 27 — Pop Tarts Bowl, BYU vs. Georgia Tech

Dec. 27 — Texas Bowl, Houston vs. LSU

Dec. 30 — Alamo Bowl, TCU vs. USC

Dec. 31 — Sun Bowl, Arizona State vs. Duke

Dec. 31 — Las Vegas Bowl, Utah vs. Nebraska

Jan. 2 — Holiday Bowl, Arizona vs. SMU

Jan. 2 — Liberty Bowl, Cincinnati vs. Navy

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UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart talks NIL resources

Published

3 hours ago

December 14, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart speaks to members of the media following a press conference to announce Will Stein as the new UK football coach at Nutter Field House in Lexington, Ky., on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. Ryan C. Hermens rhermens@herald-leader.com

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Nick Saban sounds alarm with 2-word condemnation of college football

Published

4 hours ago

December 14, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Nick Saban might be done patrolling a sideline, but he isn’t done challenging the sport he helped define.

Now an analyst on ESPN’s College GameDay, the seven-time national champion is pushing a simple, sweeping idea: college football needs a real boss. Not a committee, not a loose alliance of conferences—a single commissioner with authority over the entire sport, backed by a competition committee that can standardize how the game is run.

‘We don’t have that right now’

In Saban’s view, the mix of NIL money, constant transfers and conference realignment has pushed college football into a gray area where everyone has power and no one has control. He argues that without a centralized voice setting rules and expectations, the sport drifts.

Saban contrasted the current setup with an earlier era in which scholarship agreements spelled out academic standards, transfer expectations and long-term commitments between players and schools. Those guardrails, he believes, have been eroded to the point that the sport is flirting with chaos. If you’re not backing stronger structure, Saban suggested, you’re effectively siding with “a little bit of anarchy.”

The focus and money surrounding the College Football Playoff, in his mind, have only masked deeper structural problems.

Is Saban the obvious choice?

Saban isn’t alone in calling for a commissioner. Last year, James Franklin—then at Penn State and now at Virginia Tech—publicly argued for exactly that role and even floated Saban as the ideal candidate, saying college football needs someone who wakes up and goes to bed thinking only about what’s best for the sport.

Whether the job ever exists, and whether Saban would actually want it, remains an open question. But his message is blunt: college football is at a crossroads. For the former Alabama coach, the next era can’t just be about bigger TV deals and a larger playoff. It has to start with someone finally grabbing the wheel.

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Sunday Morning Quarterback: The gauntlet, the gold and the Aggie uprising

Published

5 hours ago

December 14, 2025

Your Sports Nation

The College Football Playoffs begin this week, and Dr. Pick’ Em–my favorite pigskin prognosticator, whose 83% success rate is as frightening as it is accurate–sent a postcard from the Caribbean to mark the occasion. On the front, a pristine beach. On the back, his verdict on the real winners scrawled in black Sharpie: “The Rich and Powerful.”

The bracket reveal is engineered to feel like the season’s crescendo, a pure celebration of merit. But Dr. Pick ‘Em, whose analytical precision is matched only by a cynicism grand enough to fill a stadium, sees the final rankings for what they are: the financial scaffolding of a system designed to protect two conferences, six high-rent bowls, and the owner’s box–the broadcast networks.

In the age of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) and the open transfer portal, college football finally has the ingredients for its own version of a magical tournament. Any ambitious program is now one phenomenal class of transfers away from being a true Cinderella, much like the teams that make March Madness so captivating. The overnight success of teams like Tulane, Vanderbilt, and Indiana demonstrates that NIL brings us closer to NFL parity, where a year-to-year talent infusion can spark a rapid ascent.

Yet, the CFP selection committee does its level best to discourage these potential Cinderellas. Instead of rewarding the magic, we have a system that awards a county fair’s blue ribbon based on the pig’s grandfather’s pedigree rather than the quality of its bacon. The committee favors the brand over the product, the résumé over the reality on the field.

The bowls, the networks, and the established power conferences act as the evil stepmother, using their structural power–television slots, scheduling prestige, and the subjective final vote–to ensure their favorites get the spotlight. The CFP, as currently constructed, discourages the glass slipper moment.

The transfer market and the conference shield

The inclusion of Indiana as a top seed is the perfect, living example of an NIL-fueled Cinderella story, but it comes with a massive asterisk that the committee ignores.

For decades, Indiana was the quintessential “potato cellar” program. When Coach Curt Cignetti was hired, he utilized the one-year blitz. He built a gritty foundation with over 30 transfers in his first season, then proved the model sustainable by reloading in year two with difference-makers like quarterback Fernando Mendoza. He and defensive anchors Mikail Kamara and Aiden Fisher transformed a perennial Big Ten bottom-feeder into a powerhouse.

But let’s be honest: Indiana’s Cinderella story only has a happy ending because of the logo on its jersey.

If this same scrappy, transfer-fueled squad were in the SEC – take Vanderbilt as a prime example – it would have faced Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and LSU. Instead of a pristine record and a No. 1 seed, the Hoosiers would be sitting at 8-4 or 9-3, likely watching the playoffs from home. A mid-major with the same talent would be fighting for the single “Group of Five” crumb left on the table. Indiana got the invite not just because it is good, but because the Big Ten provided a path protected by brand bias.

The Big Ten’s mirage vs. the SEC meat grinder

This year’s bracket has reignited the sport’s oldest feud, with arguments echoing from Columbus barbershops to Tuscaloosa BBQ joints. Big Ten fans point to the top of the board: their conference secured two of the top four seeds. It looks like dominance. But the illusion shatters upon inspection. The Big Ten placed only one other team, Penn State, in the 12-team field – a stark lack of depth.

Contrast that with the SEC, which placed five teams in the bracket but saw three more top-25 teams excluded. This isn’t about conference pride; it’s about the brutal physics of the schedule. Metrics like SP+, which measure dominance, show the SEC’s top tier dwarfing the Big Ten’s. For an SEC contender, a “break” means facing a Kentucky team full of future NFL draft picks. The bruises are cumulative.

The committee, in a rare nod to reality, tacitly admitted that surviving the SEC gauntlet with two losses is a more impressive feat than navigating a top-heavy Big Ten schedule unscathed, ranking a 10-2 Texas A&M ahead of an 11-1 champion from a weaker conference.

The Aggie anomaly: earning the slipper

Which brings us to the Texas A&M Aggies (11-1, No. 7 seed), the team Dr. Pick ‘Em believes is currently playing the best football in America. By any measure, the Aggies are surging. Their defense is suffocating, and their offense has found a ruthless rhythm. Their body of work was forged in the SEC’s fiercest fires.

Their single blemish came not in a sleepy September game, but in the final week against a desperate Texas Longhorns squad fighting for its playoff life. In the cold calculus of evaluation, A&M was penalized for the difficulty of its environment and denied a first-round bye, a classic case of the system favoring the “clean” résumé over the “hard” one.

Meanwhile, contenders like Notre Dame built cases on “Soft Landings.” The Irish touted a win over a dysfunctional Arkansas as proof of grit, while padding their schedule with scheduled convalescences against the likes of Stanford and Virginia. By excluding the Irish, the committee sent a powerful message: a glossy win total built on cupcakes is a liability.

Cathedrals, chapels, and a ray of hope

The current two-tiered ecosystem is patently unfair. The big winners are the Cathedrals of Revenue – the major bowls and networks. The dozens of other bowl games became Sidelined Chapels.

However, there is a sliver of hope. An expanded playoff system might actually rescue the very bowl ecosystem it appears to be decimating. By moving the first four CFP games to campus sites, the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds are now exclusively hosted by the New Year’s Six bowls. That guarantees those premier games remain significant and hugely profitable.

If the CFP were to expand again to 16 teams, more bowls would be absorbed into the playoff structure, providing guaranteed relevance and financial survival for more of the postseason. In this way, the CFP’s growth could offer a lifeline to the institutions it previously left floundering.

For now, though, the system implicitly tells fans of “Chapel” schools that their passion is secondary. Notre Dame’s reaction–a public sulk with players sprinting for the portal–taught us that for many, only the Cathedral matters.

Prediction: the gauntlet’s payoff

Despite the bias, Dr. Pick ‘Em is betting on the one asset the system can’t purchase: Momentum. He sees this bracket breaking for the battle-tested.

First Round: Oklahoma survives a slugfest against Alabama, while Texas A&M smothers Miami in College Station.

The Run: A&M’s physicality breaks the will of Texas Tech’s high-flying offense, followed by a defensive masterpiece against Georgia.

The Championship: The moneyed favorite, Ohio State, against the fire-forged Texas A&M.

Final Prediction: Texas A&M 31, Ohio State 27

The rich usually get richer in this sport. But this January, Dr. Pick ‘Em is wagering that a team forged in fire will prove that a champion can still be crowned by the scoreboard, not by pedigree.

But don’t hold your breath for a total revolution. The system makes sure the stepsisters get to the dance while the Cinderellas stay home.

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Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza, Indiana football emerges as superpower

Published

6 hours ago

December 14, 2025

Your Sports Nation

Updated Dec. 13, 2025, 8:16 p.m. ET

Fernando Mendoza balked at entertaining the Heisman Trophy ceremony as an assured outcome Friday, even as he arrived in New York a comfortable betting favorite to win the award.

As of an afternoon press session, Mendoza hadn’t even finished his speech.

Yet even as he artfully sidestepped suggestions the award was already won, Mendoza did have a firm answer for where the 45-pound bronze trophy should live, if he is selected as its winner Saturday night.

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