
NIL
NCAA transfer portal has been boon for UWGB women, coach Kayla Karius
AI-assisted summaryUWGB women’s basketball coach Kayla Karius rebuilt her roster primarily through the transfer portal after losing seven players to graduation.The Phoenix added several key players, including local standouts Carley Duffney and Gracie Grzesk, as well as Horizon League star Maddy Skorupski.UWGB is one of only five women’s programs in the nation without a player […]

AI-assisted summaryUWGB women’s basketball coach Kayla Karius rebuilt her roster primarily through the transfer portal after losing seven players to graduation.The Phoenix added several key players, including local standouts Carley Duffney and Gracie Grzesk, as well as Horizon League star Maddy Skorupski.UWGB is one of only five women’s programs in the nation without a player entering the transfer portal in the past two years.Karius expressed some reservations about the transfer portal’s impact on player development, despite her success using it.Expectations remain high for the Phoenix in the upcoming season, with the team likely to be favored to win the Horizon League.University of Wisconsin-Green Bay women’s basketball coach Kayla Karius and her staff didn’t have much time to relax after the season ended in March with a loss to Alabama in the NCAA Tournament.
UWGB was set to lose seven players to graduation, including all five starters.
The game plan was simple.
“We just knew we needed a lot of people,” said Karius, who led her team to a 29-6 record in her first season at UWGB. “And it covered really every position. I guess the focus really was on guards. We lost (senior forward) Jas (Kondrakiewicz), but we have (senior forward-center) Jenna (Guyer) and (sophomore forward-center) Meghan Schultz who are really excited to fill in behind her. So, more of an emphasis on guards and the fact that we have got to turn around and find people who are going to fill up the scoring and the minutes part of it.
“We certainly want to aim high. We talked about that early. But we also want to stick to our philosophy of trying to find the best local kids.”
The roster is all but complete after a flurry of signings the past couple of months, with just one scholarship remaining but no guarantee it will be used.
UWGB aimed high. It aimed for the best local players.
It appears to have won on both fronts.
It started with South Dakota senior forward and former Green Bay Preble standout Carley Duffney and continued with University of Wisconsin sophomore forward and former Green Bay Notre Dame star Gracie Grzesk.
That would have been a good offseason for some Horizon League teams.
UWGB followed by adding one of the best players in the Horizon in senior guard Maddy Skorupski from Oakland, landed Iowa State senior guard and former Appleton East star Lily Hansford and capped it with the UW-Milwaukee and former Hortonville sister duo of senior guard Kamy Peppler and sophomore guard Kallie Peppler.
The only local talent the Phoenix missed out on was former De Pere guard Jordan Meulemans, who entered the transfer portal after two seasons at Butler and signed with Marquette.
Karius didn’t waste time going after players the team was interested in.
Grzesk said her new coach called just minutes after her name hit the portal. UWGB was the first school to reach out to Kamy Peppler. Duffney already knew Karius well considering she played for her at South Dakota for two seasons before Karius was hired at UWGB.
Karius started using a software program after she arrived in Green Bay that helps filter through more than a thousand names in the portal.
It was a huge improvement from the past, when a person on staff would hit the refresh button over and over to see if a new name was entered.
It was, to say the least, not efficient.
She and her staff now just plug in whatever filters they desire. Perhaps all players from Wisconsin or anybody who averaged more than 4 assists per game.You name it, they can find it. Fast. “As soon as we see names that are in the local area, I do want to be their first call,” Karius said. “Sometimes, I don’t know what direction we are going to go with them yet. Sometimes, it’s a conversation of, ‘What are you looking for?’ We really want people who want to be here. There were kids I felt like I was twisting their arm a little bit to come here.“A lot of them were outside the region. They didn’t have a background of this place. That gets really difficult, because you are like, you don’t know how special this place is. But the majority of kids from the state have been to camp, have been to games. We have always done a really good job of getting young kids in the door.”UWGB has a winning tradition to sell. It has 48 consecutive winning seasons — the second-longest streak in the nation behind only Tennessee — and has been to the NCAA Tournament 20 times.But could it really have expected this type of offseason, filled with so many notable local names and all-conference talent?“I had no idea what to expect,” Karius said, laughing. “You feel this pressure is a privilege feel. You don’t want this to end on your watch. Certainly, we didn’t have to refill a lot of players last year when we got here.“Now, being really the first big amount of kids that our staff is responsible to bring in, it was difficult at times. You are moving really quickly and working really long hours and trying your best to fill this roster with kids that are the right fit. There is some pressure with that. Same we always deal with, but you want to keep this going with the right people. There are 1,500, I think, names in the women’s portal. There is a ton of talent out there. That doesn’t mean that talent fits here at Green Bay. That doesn’t mean that talent fits in our culture of team-first basketball.”Transfer portal has been good to UWGBThe Phoenix has not lost many key contributors the way other programs have since the portal opened in October 2018.Former forward Karly Murphy transferred to Colorado State in 2020 after three seasons with the Phoenix.
Former guard-forward Lyndsey Robson transferred to the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2021 after starting 48 games during her career for UWGB.
But the Phoenix has been on the other side far more often, from getting Sydney Levy from UWM to Natalie McNeal from St. Louis.
Not one player has entered the portal since Karius was hired in April 2024, even when it would have made sense for a few to leave after former coach Kevin Borseth announced his retirement.
UWGB is one of only five women’s programs in the nation not to have a player enter the portal the last two years, joining Harvard, Army, Air Force and Kent State.
Perhaps even more impressive is that of the six returning players from 2024-25, only Guyer played significant minutes, although reserve guard Maren Westin was averaging 14.5 minutes the first 11 games before tearing an anterior cruciate ligament in a knee.
It would have been easy for others to look elsewhere, but none did.
Not even guard Ellie Buzzelle, who was a full-time starter at Eastern Illinois as a sophomore and played 155 minutes her first season at UWGB.
Karius speaks individually to each player at the end of the year to see if they were happy with their role and the season. She wants to know if they will be OK if transfers arrive and play over them.She believes in being honest. Players appreciate that more than anything.“I think that is even more a sense of pride,” Karius said. “That those players found that they were valued. We celebrated them. We showed their bench celebrations and highlighted that in front of everybody. Just make sure everybody is given the attention and the value that they deserve.“My staff, we all are really intentional about checking in on our players and taking care of them. In turn, they stay. They tell us point blank, ‘I love it here.’”It would seem Karius should love the portal, although it’s not the goal to find six or seven players every season but instead just a few to plug holes.But despite having success adding and not losing players both at UWGB and South Dakota, there is a part of the portal process that doesn’t sit well.“I don’t love the lesson that it teaches kids,” said Karius, who played at UWGB from 2007 to 2011 and is one of the program’s all-time greats. “I would really rather see kids stick it out. I had a tough freshman year. I played, but it was tough for a lot of reasons. But at the time, you had to sit out a year (if you transferred). And then where are you going to go? There was definitely a stigma around it, like, you don’t do that.“Now, the whole perception has changed. I don’t love that lesson, like you don’t have to stick it out anymore. There is a free out that we are teaching kids for the rest of life. It doesn’t just work like that. There is a beauty in fighting through adversity and maybe not getting what you want right now but knowing a year from now if you keep working hard, you are going to get that.”She can’t say what the younger version of herself would have done after her freshman season if it was easier to leave.Karius does know she’s incredibly grateful she didn’t, that instead a veteran teammate like Lavesa Glover spent time with her and encouraged her to keep working hard and that she’d be fine.“I’m just really glad that I stayed,” Karius said.UWGB has high expectationsDespite the loss of so many veterans, UWGB’s offseason has kept expectations high for 2025-26.When the preseason poll is released in October, it’s a decent bet the Phoenix will be the favorite to win the 11-team league after being picked to finish second last season.While UWGB had no losses to the portal, Cleveland State watched star guard Destiny Leo transfer to UNLV. Oakland must replace Skorupski and UWM the Peppler sisters.Other Horizon teams such as IU-Indy, Northern Kentucky and Robert Morris had at least four players enter the portal.UWGB simply reloaded.Men’s update: UWGB coach Doug Gottlieb lands three recruits in final days of April
“We have a lot of really good pieces in place,” Karius said. “You see we are able to bring in the local talent, so they love this place. But let’s talk about them as players. You have three players coming in that have already had success in our league. Then you’ve had a couple players playing up at the higher level, didn’t play that much this year, but practiced against a high level every day and are capable of being really good here. Then you have Carley, who was a double-digit scorer in a comparable league.
“Then you’ve got returners. You’ve got Marty (Westin) who is getting healthy. You’ve got Jenna who had a breakout year, and then Meghan is right behind her. There are a couple shining stars that are waiting their turn. If you just look at all the pieces, we are all really, really excited.”
NIL
Why this former BYU player doesn’t like what’s happening to high school athletes – Deseret News
What’s happening to high school and junior college recruiting in the wake of the transfer portal and NIL in college sports is a travesty. So says a former Dixie Junior College star who played with Heisman winner Ty Detmer at BYU and sent a son, Jaren Hall, to the NFL via BYU. Kalin Hall is […]
What’s happening to high school and junior college recruiting in the wake of the transfer portal and NIL in college sports is a travesty.
So says a former Dixie Junior College star who played with Heisman winner Ty Detmer at BYU and sent a son, Jaren Hall, to the NFL via BYU.
Kalin Hall is taking his love for coaching young men from Maple Mountain High to Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, where Badgers head coach Zac Erekson will deploy him as director of football operations and running backs coach.

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Hall has been an energetic, beloved high school coach at Maple Mountain High and had a community rally behind him this past year when he was released, rehired, and then declined to return.
Hall hates what modern major college sports has done to kids.
“Shame on the NCAA for doing what they did. Shame on athletic directors around the country for collectively making the financial decisions they’ve made,” said Hall, decrying the reduction of roster spots, dismissing walk-on programs, and robbing high school players of opportunities to play and prove themselves.
Hall was referring to changes to scholarship caps in college sports, which are laid out in the landmark House settlement. Although the settlement has not yet been approved, many schools have already adjusted their programs to fit its conditions, including by making cuts.
“It’s not only the transfer portal that’s hurt, but the 105 because within that, those additional 20 kids, those who would have been preferred walk-ons, do not have a chance to mature because schools are no longer handcuffed,” said Hall.
Of course, what started all of this were the lawsuits by athletes to get paid when schools used them to produce truckloads of money through ticket sales and TV contracts.
It’s today’s college sports and it’s been force-fed to everyone.
Hall said today’s climate has put college coaches in a hopeless position. They have to win now. Should they put their job on the line and risk it all for a kid you can develop over time by signing a high school player, or do they make a more informed choice and take a transfer from the portal?
“I feel so bad for the high school kids,” Hall said.
Earlier this spring he spoke to University of Utah running back coach Mark Atuaia about a prospect. He told Hall the kid was someone they’d normally have taken a shot on at the P4 level and brought him in as a preferred walk-on. Then, in a year or two, he’d have become a player. “But we can’t do that anymore. We don’t have the time,” the coach told Hall.
Now Hall will see the same challenges for kids at Snow, a national juco football powerhouse.
He’s excited to teach and help young men, just like he did at Maple Mountain. His real job, however, is working with former BYU tight end Gabe Reid at PureEnviro Management as vice president. The company manages issues with government departments in Utah, nationally, and does work in the South Pacific.
Erekson has tried to get Hall to work with him at Snow for years.
“Zac is like my little brother,” said Hall. “I’ve known Zac since he was 7 years old and we’ve been close family friends for years.”
Hall said his boss, Reid, told him he should go to Ephraim and give his time — it isn’t a financial decision at all — but one of love.
“He said to go and share some of my ancient wisdom.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time working with kids at BYU, Utah and Utah State, a lot of local kids, but this will be a little different. As a former JC kid myself, playing more than 30 years ago at Dixie, I understand the dynamics.
“But millennials are different today and young people are different. I was there at Snow for spring ball and it was fun. I’m the older guy out there, there is only one other guy that is older than me, the defensive coordinator, working with Zac.”
Hall said Snow expects to play high-quality football again this coming season.
What about his son Jaren, who was drafted out of BYU by the Vikings before going to Seattle?
Well, he just turned down an offer from the Jacksonville Jaguars, said the father.
“He’s just waiting for the right opportunity. Very few guys turn down opportunities, but he turned one down last week. He didn’t want to go to Jacksonville. He just didn’t think it was right for him. He was inspired religiously that it wasn’t the right move. So he’s a better man than I am, because I would have been in Florida.”
Hall praised Jaren for his maturity and faith in looking for an inspired move in his next landing.
“He’s a better dude that I am. As a dad, I had to back up and tell him that he was my idol and I’m sorry for trying to influence him to take the Jacksonville job when he was prompted spiritually to wait for something else in his life.”

NIL
College sports lurches forward, hoping to find a level playing field with fewer lawsuits
By EDDIE PELLS MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. (AP) — On the one hand, what this new version of cash-infused college sports needs are rules that everybody follows. On the other, they need to be able to enforce those rules without getting sued into oblivion. Enter the College Sports Commission, a newly created operation that will be […]

By EDDIE PELLS
MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. (AP) — On the one hand, what this new version of cash-infused college sports needs are rules that everybody follows.
On the other, they need to be able to enforce those rules without getting sued into oblivion.
Enter the College Sports Commission, a newly created operation that will be in charge of counting the money, deciding what a “fair market” deal for players looks like and, if things go well, helping everyone in the system avoid trips to court whenever a decision comes down that someone doesn’t like.
With name, image, likeness payments taking over in college, this group will essentially become what the NCAA committee on infractions used to be – the college sports police, only with the promise of being faster, maybe fairer and maybe more transparent.
In a signal of what the CSC’s most serious mission might be, the schools from the four biggest conferences are being asked to sign a document pledging not to rely on state laws – some of which are more permissive of payments to players — to work around the rules the commission is making.
“We need to get out of this situation where something happens, and we run to our attorney general and file suit,” said Trev Alberts of Texas A&M, one of 10 athletic directors who are part of another group, the Settlement Implementation Committee, that is helping oversee the transition. “That chaos isn’t sustainable. You’re looking for a durable system that actually has some stability and ultimate fairness.”
In this new landsacpe, two different companies will be in charge of two kinds of number crunching.
The first, and presumably more straightforward, is data being compiled by LBi Software, which will track how much schools are spending on every athlete, up to the $20.5 million cap each is allowed to distribute in the first year of the new arrangement expected to begin July 1.
This sounds easy but comes with the assumption that universities – which, for decades, have sought to eke out every edge they can, rulebook or no – will provide accurate data.
“Over history, boosters have looked for ways to give their schools an advantage,” said Gabe Feldman, a sports law professor at Tulane. “I think that will continue even with the settlement. It’s anyone’s guess as to how that manifests, and what the new competitive landscape looks like.”
Adding some level of transparency to the process, along with the CSC’s ability to deliver sanctions if it identifies cheaters, will be key to the new venture’s success.
“There’s legal risk that prohibits you from doing that,” Alberts said. “But we want to start as transparent as we can be, because we think it engenders trust.”
Good intentions aside, Alberts concedes, “I don’t think it’s illogical to think that, at first, it’s probably going to be a little wonky.”
Some of the wonkiest bookkeeping figures to come from the second category of number crunching, and that involves third-party NIL deals. The CSC hired Deloitte to run a so-called clearinghouse called “NIL Go,” which will be in charge of evaluating third-party deals worth $600 or more.
Because these deals aren’t allowed to pay players simply for playing – that’s still technically forbidden in college sports — but instead for some service they provide (an endorsement, a social media shoutout and so forth), every deal needs to be evaluated to show it is worth a fair price for what the player is doing.
In a sobering revelation, Deloitte shared with sports leaders earlier this month that around 70% of third-party deals given to players since NIL became allowable in 2021 would have been denied by the new clearinghouse.
All these valuations, of course, are subject to interpretation. It’s much easier to set the price of a stock, or a bicycle, than the value of an athlete’s endorsement deal. This is where things figure to get dicey. Though the committee has an appeals process, then an arbitration process, ultimately, some of these cases are destined to be challenged in court.
“You’re just waiting to see, what is a ‘valid business purpose’ (for an NIL deal), and what are the guidelines around that?” said Rob Lang, a business litigation partner at Thompson Coburn who deals with sports cases. “You can see all the lawyer fights coming out of that.”
In fact, elements of all this are ripe to be challenged in court, which might explain why the power conferences drafted the document pledging fealty to the new rules in the first place.
For instance, Feldman called a law recently enacted in Tennessee viewed by many as the most athlete-friendly statute in the country “the next step in the evolution” of state efforts to bar the NCAA from limiting NIL compensation for athletes with an eye on winning battles for recruits and retaining roster talent.
“What we’ve seen over the last few years is states trying to one-up each other to make their institutions more attractive places for people to go,” he said. “This is the next iteration of that. It may set up a showdown between the schools, the NCAA and the states.”
Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, said a league spanning 12 states cannot operate well if all those states have different rules about how and when it is legal to pay players.
The SEC has been drafting legislation for states to pass to unify the rules across the conference. Ultimately, Sankey and a lot of other people would love to see a national law passed by Congress that does that for all states and all conferences.
That will take months, if not years, which is why the new committee drafted the document for the schools to sign.
“We are all defendant schools and conferences and you inherently agree to this,” Alberts said of the document. “I sat in the room with all of our football coaches, ‘Do you want to be governed?’ The answer is ‘yes.’”
___
AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
NIL
How Models & Data Analytics Are Impacting College Baseball Roster Decisions
Image credit: (Photo by Robin Alam/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) If you wandered the trade show floor at the American Baseball Coaches Association convention in Washington, D.C. this past January, it was impossible to miss the shift. Technology booths sprawled across the space, packed wall-to-wall with screens, devices and demos. One stand measured batted-ball performance, […]

Image credit:
(Photo by Robin Alam/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
If you wandered the trade show floor at the American Baseball Coaches Association convention in Washington, D.C. this past January, it was impossible to miss the shift.
Technology booths sprawled across the space, packed wall-to-wall with screens, devices and demos. One stand measured batted-ball performance, another tracked arm force and fatigue. Around the corner, a startup promised real-time insights on UCL health thanks to a device that intricately measured grip strength. Across the aisle, another system proclaimed the ability to map a pitcher’s biomechanics down to the millisecond.
College baseball has fully entered its data age.
“I couldn’t imagine us really doing a full-on player development plan, executing our scouting reports and putting together our scouting reports without the data we have now,” said Jamie Tutko, LSU’s director of pitching development. “We’re literally using it every single day—games, practices, every single pitch.”
That level of integration wasn’t common even a few years ago.
As recently as 2017, when LSU was among the pilot programs to test TrackMan, even staffers weren’t sure what it was or how to use it.
“We were collecting all of the data not really knowing what it was about,” Tutko said. “And me being kind of an old-school type guy when I first got into working in baseball, I wasn’t totally against it, but I was like, ‘I don’t need this. I’ve got a radar gun. I can see with my own eyes.’”
But that skepticism didn’t last. Not for Tutko, and not for the vast majority of his peers.
By 2021, the shift was in full swing across the sport. The explosion of the NCAA transfer portal, the growth of private player development labs and the widening gap between resource-rich and resource-strapped programs accelerated the adoption of data-driven decision making.
“It really started to go wild,” Tutko said of LSU’s integration of data analytics. “We really started to be able to use it and understand it and use it correctly.”
The transition to analytics began around the same time at Wake Forest. Tom Walter, the long-time Demon Deacons coach, recalled the pivotal moment.
“We were one of the first schools to get TrackMan,” he said. “We had it for a year and didn’t use it very well or even understand what it meant, but I challenged our coaching staff. It was like, ‘Let’s become the experts at this.’”
For Wake, it wasn’t just about keeping pace. It was about finding an edge.
It used technology to dive into the pitching lab space, a way to develop arms in their own mold using fact-based feedback derived from an endless supply of numbers.
“I just feel like at Wake Forest, we’re never going to be able to line up and play the same game as some of these schools that have endless resources,” Walter said. “They have more scholarship dollars or better facilities or more resources in the NIL space. So we’ve got to find a competitive advantage.”
That edge evolved into a holistic system—analytics, biomechanics, pitch design, lineup optimization, defensive shifts, even recruiting models.
“We’ve built these systems for evaluating our current players, evaluating recruits, coming up with player development plans and everything in between,” Walter said.
Across the country, programs big and small have followed similar trajectories. At Arizona State, Jared Matheson, a 23-year-old pitching analytics coordinator, represents the sport’s new wave of young minds breaking in through data.
“The analytical side of baseball is on the up and coming,” Matheson said. “Some stuff you want to keep coach-facing, and some stuff you want to keep player-facing. Our guys are all in. They dove in head first and want to learn as much as possible.”
That duality—balancing deep data with digestible player insights—has become central to modern coaching. Where once scouting reports offered vague summaries—“this guy’s 86 to 88 with a slider”—they now detail pitch usage by count, movement profiles, hitter tendencies and much more.
“Now it’s like, ‘Hey, this guy throws 76% fastballs in this count and 36% in this count, and this is what his breaking ball looks like,’” Walter said. “There are no secrets anymore.”
The results are tangible: faster player improvement, more precise game-planning and more efficient recruiting.
But the revolution didn’t happen overnight. Most coaches trace its rapid acceleration to around 2018-19 as TrackMan’s data-sharing network grew. It got another boost a few years later as competitive pressures in the portal era mounted and player expectations evolved.
“There’s more teams in Division I baseball in the TrackMan sharing network than not,” Tutko said. “The amount of data that’s out there is crazy.”
The tools themselves are now ubiquitous—TrackMan, Edgertronic, K-Vest, Kinatrax, Hawkeye, Rapsodo, blast sensors, high-speed cameras and force plates. But as several coaches noted, simply owning the tools isn’t enough.
“It’s one thing to say that ‘Yeah, we have TrackMan’ … But it’s another thing to actually utilize it,” Tutko said. “And we feel like we’re utilizing it just as well as anybody else, if not better than anybody else in the country.”
For those who do, the gains are clear.
“The game is always evolving,” Matheson said. “If you can learn every aspect of data—whether it’s TrackMan or biomechanics—it kind of just puts another feather in your cap. It helps you build your resume and gives you an edge.”
– –
The first part of the equation is the ballpark’s dimensions: 314 feet down the line in right, 365 feet to right-center, 404 straightaway, 370 to left-center and 350 down the line in left.
Next comes the wind. On a neutral day in Athens, a ball struck just north of 90 mph at the proper launch angle will clear the right field wall. A firm line drive in the same direction is likely to find extra bases.
Left field is less forgiving. The prevailing wind blows in from that side, and with deeper dimensions, home runs that way or to center require real force and the right trajectory.
The final variables live inside each player. Air pull rates, average and peak exit velocities, swing planes—metrics that, through two years of refinement, Georgia’s staff has learned to weight and model against their park’s unique characteristics.
When Wes Johnson accepted the Bulldogs’ head coaching job, he understood the challenge in front of him. Georgia wasn’t a historical SEC power. It didn’t carry the built-in recruiting muscle as many of its conference foes.
If the Bulldogs were going to close that gap quickly, they had to be smarter.
“One of the things we worked a ton on, right when I got the job, I had worked really hard and put together a projection model that we used,” Johnson said. “You’ve got to trust the model. If you have enough data, you gotta trust it. That’s one of the things I learned in professional baseball.”
The park itself became a roadmap. Georgia’s staff began running extensive overlays—taking prospective hitters’ batted-ball profiles and mapping them into Foley Field’s layout under typical conditions. Who could play here, not just anywhere?
It was in that process that a name surfaced this past offseason: Robbie Burnett.
A lefthanded hitter out of UNC Asheville, Burnett wasn’t high on portal big boards. In fact, Johnson estimated only two or three schools showed any interest. And even those were lukewarm or came from a lower-major program.
But the Georgia model told a different story. Burnett’s pull tendencies, swing path and raw exit velocity suggested untapped power potential—especially to right field in Athens.
“When we put Robbie’s numbers in our ballpark, we’re like, ‘OK, Robbie can hit 20,’” Johnson said. “I told the staff Robbie will hit 20 for us.”
Burnett had the baseline metrics, and with adjustments, Johnson believed he could thrive.
“All I’ve got to teach this guy is to pull the ball a little more,” Johnson said. “And we’re gonna work on getting his exit velo as high as we can.”
It wasn’t a guess. It wasn’t a hunch. It was data refined into action.
“We’re moneyballing it, is what we’re doing,” Johnson said.
To say that it’s worked would be an understatement. In 53 games leading up to the NCAA Tournament, Burnett batted .318/.492/.732 with 20 home runs, 66 RBIs, 12 doubles and nearly as many walks (41) as strikeouts (48). Seventeen of his 20 homers have come in Athens.
“We knew exactly what we were getting,” Johnson said. “That’s how we’re building this — we want players who fit what this park gives us.”
Of course, such precision has limits. Building to your park means leaning into strengths at home, but it also requires adaptability on the road.
“When I tell people we recruit players to our ballpark, this is what I’m talking about,” Johnson said. “Now, it hurts when you go to Texas, and it’s a big ballpark, or Kentucky. Or the wind’s blowing in.”
That’s where versatility becomes currency. Positional flexibility—especially among hitters—has become a priority in Georgia’s model.
“When guys can play multiple positions, that moves the needle for us,” Johnson said.
What started as a workaround—an effort to compete with bigger brands—has quickly become identity.
“You gotta trust your model or you don’t,” Johnson said. “You’re playing the math.”
At Georgia, that math now drives swings, at-bats, and increasingly, roster decisions.
– –
For all the precision, for all the modeling, for all the numbers on screens and projections in staff meetings, one truth still holds: The game is played by human beings.
Wes Johnson will be the first to say it.
“You’ve got to trust your model,” he said. “But there’s still an art to it. You’ve got to have some gut in this game. You can’t just be a robot with it.”
That philosophy echoes across the programs now embracing data—not as a replacement for coaching instincts, but as a tool to sharpen them.
“You still have to recruit good baseball players,” said Tom Walter. “We can look at all the numbers we want, but there’s still an element of makeup, of toughness, of how a kid’s going to compete.”
At LSU, Jay Johnson sees it the same way.
“It’s a game being played by human beings,” he said. “There’s a character element to this. There’s a make-up element to this. There’s still an element of old-school scouting.”
What the best programs have learned is not to drown in the data. The right balance matters. The numbers can guide decisions—but they can’t play the game. They can’t recruit either, so teams are using the figures to identify talent but not to determine if each spreadsheet darling is truly the right fit.
“I’m never going to just blindly take a guy because his exit velocity is great,” Wes Johnson said. “If he can’t hit a breaking ball or if he can’t adjust, that doesn’t show up in one number.”
For players, too, there’s a learning curve. Some thrive on data-driven development, while others need simplicity. The staff’s job is knowing which is which.
“Our guys get all the information they need,” Walter said. “But we’re also careful about how much we give them. Sometimes less is more.”
That calibration—when to lean on data, when to trust the eyes, when to simplify—has become one of the modern coach’s most valuable skills.
“It validates a lot of things you’re saying for player improvement,” Jay Johnson said. “But it also gives them a pathway of how to get there. That’s where it really helps.”
At Georgia, that path is still being built. The program Wes Johnson inherited wasn’t one with a surplus of experienced arms or proven depth.
“I had three pitchers on the staff who had gone five innings in a college baseball game,” he said. “Only three.”
Data alone wasn’t going to solve that. It would take player development, culture and coaching—areas where Johnson has also invested considerable time, even if his model is fine tuned and producing.
“We can model it all day long,” he said, “but if we don’t make the players better, it doesn’t matter.”
At Wake Forest, even with one of the most advanced systems in college baseball, Walter still brings it back to the human element.
“We’re never going to have the finances to go out and get that high-end guy that everybody wants,” he said. “We’ve built our program on developing our guys. That’s what matters most.”
– –
For all the evolution still ahead, one consensus has already emerged: The data revolution isn’t slowing. If anything, it’s deepening—and changing the sport in ways that go far beyond pitch design and batted-ball profiles.
Wake Forest has even developed proprietary databases, housing pitch-level data across Power 4 baseball for the past seven years. Those insights don’t just shape who the Demon Deacons recruit. They inform how players are developed, how pitching plans are built, how games are managed—and increasingly, how coaching staffs operate.
“We’re looking for outliers,” Walter said. “Guys who do something unique. Then we take what makes them unique and build their plan around that.”
At LSU, the growth curve has been just as steep. Johnson likened the challenge to scouting in fast forward.
“There’s a profile you want,” he said. “There’s a blueprint of the player and the team. But it still comes back to: Can they take their talent and make it a usable skill at the highest level?”
For Johnson, the value of data lies in avoiding blind spots, especially as the recruiting landscape grows faster and more transactional.
“There’s a lot of safety in data and numbers,” he said. “It helps you predict the player better. You can still do your visual scouting. You can still trust what people you know are saying. But now you’re making even more informed decisions.”
Coaches still caution against leaning too far. The game, they remind, isn’t played on spreadsheets. But the tools will keep advancing. The models will get sharper.
And as those numbers keep climbing, one truth remains: In the game’s new data age, standing still is no longer an option.
“I think if you’re not doing it, you’re behind already,” Walter said. “And if you’re doing it and not evolving with it, you’ll be behind soon.”
NIL
Texas Tech softball hopes to ride NiJaree Canady’s million-dollar arm to a championship
Texas Tech’s softball team won their first game ever in the Women’s College World Series on Thursday, beating Ole Miss by a score of 1 to 0. As has often been the case this season, the Red Raiders’ win was powered by pitcher NiJaree Canady, a transfer from Stanford who made headlines for being the […]

Texas Tech’s softball team won their first game ever in the Women’s College World Series on Thursday, beating Ole Miss by a score of 1 to 0.
As has often been the case this season, the Red Raiders’ win was powered by pitcher NiJaree Canady, a transfer from Stanford who made headlines for being the first college softball player to earn $1 million in NIL deals.
Nathan Giese, sports reporter for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, spoke to the Texas Standard about what makes Canady such a unique talent.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Can you first just explain what makes NiJaree Canady such a special player?
Nathan Giese: Well, this year it’s different because she’s a very different player from what she was at Stanford. Whereas at Stanford they didn’t want her to hit, they wanted her to focus on pitching, and when she went to the transfer portal, that was one of the things she wanted to do. She wanted to find a place where she could hit.
And Gerry Glasco is a renowned hitting coach, and he took over as head coach at Texas Tech. He put his name in the hat and said, “Hey, I’m not only going to let you hit, I’ve going to turn you into a pretty dang good hitter.” And that’s exactly what she’s been.
She’s been just as good pitching 30 and 5 with a 0.89, I believe, ERA going into the Women’s College World Series right now. She also leads the team with 11 home runs. She’s got about 34 RBI, batting 300 on the year.
So what she’s really done is she’s evolved her game into figuring out ways to still be a dominant pitcher, even when she’s not striking out everybody.
And that really shows the tenacity and consistency that she has that she can figure out ways to get the job done, even with she’s not quite to her usual standard. But even then she’s still the best pitcher in the country.
I mean, is she getting some comparisons to the all-star on the LA Dodgers, being able to pitch and hit?
Yes, that was one of the things before the season, I talked to her management team at Prestige Management Group about what kind of went into generating this move and this deal that she received. And they said they wanted her to be the Shohei Ohtani of women’s college softball. And that’s kind of what she is now.
The numbers, hitting-wise, they’re not quite where they would want to be, because of [an] injury. But when she is healthy and batting, she is just as good as any hitter out there.
She’s got a lot of power. She’s able to go to the opposite field, driving out home runs, and she’s able to do both things so well that teams have to respect both aspects of that.
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Well, you’ve mentioned that she wanted to hit and couldn’t do that at Stanford, but I gotta ask – I mean, Tech wasn’t exactly known as a softball powerhouse. Is it reasonable to think that Canady might not have moved there if it hadn’t been for its ability to reach deep into its pockets to pay her as well?
I think that’s putting it a little too, that’s kind of the easy scapegoat thing. So the way I’ve been told about it is yes, the money was a factor of it, but it wasn’t the only factor.
Some teams that wanted to come in and try to get her, they didn’t want her to hit either. So then she took them out of the running completely. Or she did kind of want to go back to Stanford, but it did come down to, am I going to be able to hit? And the money factor, it’s not nothing, but it wasn’t everything.
But the reason why Tech got into the running was because they were able to kind of put up some money and say, “Hey, we’re willing to pay you to do this for us.” And it didn’t ultimately come down to the money because – I’ve reported this throughout the year – she got that offer in late June and she didn’t make a decision until late July, because she was still looking at every option possible.
So that was not the defining factor. Did it play a role? Absolutely. Nobody’s naive enough to say that it didn’t. But it wasn’t the be-all end-all in this case.
What kind of attention has she brought to this Texas Tech program?
Quite a bit. So as soon as they signed her, it was very much a, oh, this team could really go do something.
But then when they went through their fall scrimmages – and they were playing community colleges, so it’s hard to get people out there in the fall when it’s cold and you’re playing teams that have no shot against a player like Canady – the fan buzz wasn’t quite there in the fall.
And it took a little bit after basketball season because Tech men’s basketball had a great year, too; there was a lot of attention on that. So it was like right after basketball ending was when people started really catching on to, Oh, this team is really, really good. And she’s really, really good.
And then they started breaking attendance records left and right. They set the new standard for attendance. They had to put more bleachers. They had the add seats into the outfield that they never had before just to accommodate the fans there. And it’s still growing to this point, but it’s definitely changed how people view the softball program.
NIL
My biggest unanswered questions about EA Sports College Football 26
Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points. Quick reminder: I, along with the entire Extra Points team, will be headed to Orlando next weekend for NACDA. I’ll be in town from around 11 AM on Sunday the 8th until the evening of the 10th. If you’re in town, I’d love to […]

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.
Quick reminder: I, along with the entire Extra Points team, will be headed to Orlando next weekend for NACDA. I’ll be in town from around 11 AM on Sunday the 8th until the evening of the 10th.
If you’re in town, I’d love to chat! Our team is giving free demos of Extra Points Library to anybody interested, but I’m also trying to catch up with sources, do a little good ol’ fashioned professional development, and shoot the breeze. Drop me a line at [email protected] if you’re around!

In non-NACDA news, yesterday was the official Trailer Release Day for the follow-up to last year’s spectacularly success, EA Sports College Football 25….EA Sports College Football 26. If you’re the kind of person who is interested in this sort of thing and somehow missed it, I’ve got you.
I know that an awful lot of people read Extra Points last year to learn as much information as possible about the game’s development. I’m still working to get answers on some of the biggest questions, but if you are most interested in learning whether a particular song made this year’s game, or how the new physics-based tackling works, I would defer to my friends who have actually gotten their hands on the sticks at this point. I haven’t played the game.
But after watching, reading, and asking around the industry for the last few weeks, I still have a few unanswered questions about this year’s game…questions that are more big-picture in scope.
How will consumers, and the industry at large, react to college coaches finally being included in the game?
Last year was the first time that actual, current college athletes had their NIL included in a college football video game. It was a massive undertaking, as more than 11,000 real people had their likeness depicted. If there’s been another video game in history that included likenesses of so many real people, I haven’t heard of it, and neither has EA.
EA CFB25 had real players, real mascots, real stadiums, real logos…but did not include real coaches. EA CFB26 will be the first edition in the series to change that, as developers say more than 300 coaches will be included. So that’s not just most of the head coaches, but also most of the offensive and defensive coordinators.
As of right this second, I do not know exactly how EA pulled this off. I don’t know the licensing agent for the coaches, I don’t know what kind of contract they got, how much they earned (if anything? Lane Kiffin famously said he’d do it for free), if they get a royalty rate, etc. I hope to better understand this in the near future.
But beyond that, I’m very curious what this will mean for the game’s consumers, and how it might impact future non-athlete, non-university IP decisions.
Here’s the thing. The most commonly played game mode for any of the college football video games is the Dynasty mode, where the user takes over a college football program, recruits players, hires staff, and eventually tries to turn Louisiana Tech or Kent State or even Purdue into a five-star signing powerhouse.
In this mode, you’re the coach. Is the fantasy for the user to play as “themselves?”, or a fictionalized version of a coach, or are users actually clamoring for the chance to play a Joe Harasymiak simulator?

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NIL
Highest-rated Class of 2026 football recruits from Indiana | State
Highest-rated Class of 2026 football recruits from Indiana The recruiting race for the Class of 2026 is already heating up — not just on the field, but in the increasingly complex ecosystem of modern college football, where NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deals are reshaping how programs and players navigate early recruitment. For elite underclassmen, […]

Highest-rated Class of 2026 football recruits from Indiana
The recruiting race for the Class of 2026 is already heating up — not just on the field, but in the increasingly complex ecosystem of modern college football, where NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deals are reshaping how programs and players navigate early recruitment. For elite underclassmen, talent alone is no longer the only factor drawing attention; marketability, social media presence, and brand potential are now playing pivotal roles in how offers are extended and decisions are made. The top recruits in the 2026 cycle are not only physically advanced and highly skilled — they’re entering high school with endorsement potential and media savviness.
Stacker compiled a list of the highest rated Class of 2026 football recruits from Indiana using data from 247Sports. Here’s the players from Indiana set to dominate Saturdays (and potentially Sundays) for years to come.
#20. Tyler Klaner (TE)
– National rank: #1,332 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #65
– College: Northern Illinois
– Offers: Northern Illinois, Toledo
– High school: Boonville (Boonville, IN)
#19. Anthony Coellner (QB)
– National rank: #1,303 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #99
– College: not committed
– Offers: Bowling Green, Cincinnati, Indiana, Maryland, Miami (OH)
– High school: Carmel (Carmel, IN)
#18. Dominick Barry (TE)
– National rank: #1,300 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #63
– College: not committed
– Offers: Kansas, Wisconsin, Cincinnati, Duke, Indiana
– High school: Center Grove (Greenwood, IN)
#17. Deacon King (S)
– National rank: #1,235 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #110
– College: not committed
– Offers: Akron, Buffalo, Central Michigan, Illinois State, Kent State
– High school: Westfield (Westfield, IN)
#16. Brady Ballart (LB)
– National rank: #1,150 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #95
– College: Louisville
– Offers: Louisville, Air Force, Ball State, Eastern Kentucky, Eastern Michigan
– High school: South Dearborn (Aurora, IN)
#15. Brock Brownfield (IOL)
– National rank: #1,096 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #92
– College: Purdue
– Offers: Purdue, Ball State, Bowling Green, Indiana, Miami (OH)
– High school: New Palestine (New Palestine, IN)
#14. James Williams Jr. (IOL)
– National rank: #983 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #84
– College: Purdue
– Offers: Purdue, Appalachian State, Kent State, Miami (OH), Northern Illinois
– High school: Lawrence Central (Indianapolis, IN)
#13. Bo Polston (QB)
– National rank: #972 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #64
– College: Toledo
– Offers: Toledo, Akron, Appalachian State, Ball State, Central Michigan
– High school: Decatur Central (Indianapolis, IN)
#12. Malachi Mills (OT)
– National rank: #950 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #76
– College: Kansas
– Offers: Kansas, Akron, Colorado State, Eastern Michigan, Florida Atlantic
– High school: Westfield (Westfield, IN)
#11. Benjamin Novak (IOL)
– National rank: #928 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #83
– College: Wisconsin
– Offers: Wisconsin, Akron, Ball State, Bowling Green, Indiana
– High school: Andrean (Merrillville, IN)
#9 (tie). Blake Smythe (DL)
– National rank: #914 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #92
– College: Indiana
– Offers: Indiana, Ball State, Illinois, Kansas, Louisville
– High school: Franklin Community (Franklin, IN)
#9 (tie). Carsen Eloms (CB)
– National rank: #914 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #79
– College: Wisconsin
– Offers: Wisconsin, Purdue, Akron, Ball State, Central Michigan
– High school: Fishers (Fishers, IN)
#8. Trevor Gibbs (LB)
– National rank: #855 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #67
– College: Indiana
– Offers: Indiana, Purdue, Cincinnati, Iowa, Ball State
– High school: Crown Point (Crown Point, IN)
#7. Terry Walker III (QB)
– National rank: #817 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #47
– College: Duke
– Offers: Duke, Appalachian State, Ball State, Bowling Green, Coastal Carolina
– High school: Hamilton Southeastern (Fishers, IN)
#6. Tayshon Bardo (WR)
– National rank: #703 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #107
– College: Wisconsin
– Offers: Wisconsin, USF, Ball State, Bowling Green, Central Michigan
– High school: Penn (Mishawaka, IN)
#5. Jett Goldsberry (ATH)
– National rank: #682 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #44
– College: not committed
– Offers: North Carolina, Ole Miss, Rutgers, Purdue, Air Force
– High school: Heritage Hills (Lincoln City, IN)
#4. Kasmir Hicks (CB)
– National rank: #509 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #41
– College: Indiana
– Offers: Indiana, Cincinnati, Vanderbilt, Ball State, Central Michigan
– High school: Decatur Central (Indianapolis, IN)
#3. Tyler Ruxer (TE)
– National rank: #477 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #24
– College: not committed
– Offers: Minnesota, Purdue, Duke, Northwestern, Baylor
– High school: Heritage Hills (Lincoln City, IN)
#2. JJ Finch (DL)
– National rank: #443 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #50
– College: not committed
– Offers: Purdue, Tennessee, LSU, Alabama, Central Michigan
– High school: Warren Central (Indianapolis, IN)
#1. Jerquaden Guilford (WR)
– National rank: #430 (3 stars)
– Position rank: #67
– College: not committed
– Offers: Ohio State, Tennessee, Indiana, Arkansas, Georgia
– High school: Northrop (Fort Wayne, IN)
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