STARKVILLE – New Mississippi State head baseball coach Brian O’Connor has turned to a trusted and familiar voice as he builds his staff in Starkville.
 
O’Connor announced the hiring of longtime Virginia assistant Kevin McMullan as the Bulldogs’ associate head coach. Widely regarded as one of the premier assistant coaches and recruiters in college baseball, McMullan spent the past 22 seasons at Virginia, including the last 19 as associate head coach under O’Connor.
 
“Mac has set the standard in player development for as long as I’ve known him,” O’Connor said. “His record helping to make these young men better baseball players and better people is unmatched in college baseball. He is an elite recruiter, develops winners and brings a tireless work ethic to our program. I am very happy that Mac is coming to Mississippi State, and I am excited that it sends a powerful message about the vision we have for this program.”
 
A two-time National Assistant Coach of the Year (2009, 2024), McMullan helped guide Virginia to seven College World Series appearances and a national championship in 2015. The Cavaliers averaged 42 wins per season during his tenure, reaching the NCAA Tournament 18 times. 
 
He also oversaw one of the most productive offenses in the country over the last two decades, with Virginia leading the ACC in batting average over the past 15 years and hitting above .300 as a team in multiple seasons. In 2024, UVA ranked in the top five nationally in hits, runs, batting average, doubles, slugging percentage and on-base percentage, while belting a school-record 116 home runs.
 
Defensively, McMullan’s impact was equally strong. Virginia owns the highest fielding percentage in the ACC since his arrival (.973), with 10 of his teams finishing among the nation’s top 40 in that category. The Cavaliers eclipsed the .970 mark in fielding 16 times in his 22 years.
 
McMullan was voted by his peers as the nation’s top assistant coach in a Baseball America poll of Division I head coaches in 2012, 2017 and 2020.
 
Over the course of his 27-year college coaching career, more than 100 players under McMullan have signed professional contracts, including 52 Virginia position players drafted and 17 who reached the major leagues. That list includes Ryan Zimmerman (Washington), Mark Reynolds (Milwaukee), Joe Koshansky (Colorado), Brandon Guyer (Tampa Bay), Sean Doolittle (Oakland), David Adams (New York Yankees), Chris Taylor (Seattle), Phil Gosselin (Atlanta), Jarrett Parker (San Francisco), John Hicks (Seattle), Derek Fisher (Houston), Adam Haseley (Philadelphia), Matt Thaiss (Los Angeles Angels), Joe McCarthy (San Francisco), Pavin Smith (Arizona), Ernie Clement (Cleveland), Jake McCarthy (Arizona) and Zack Gelof (Oakland).
 
Prior to Virginia, McMullan held coaching roles at East Carolina, St. John’s and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He also managed in the Atlanta Braves organization and played professionally in the Yankees system. A two-sport All-American at IUP, McMullan was an NCAA standout in both baseball and football.
 
“Mississippi State is a place with championship tradition, passionate fans and the resources to be elite in everything we do,” McMullan  said. “Our players, coaches and staff will work every day in a way that respects and honors that tradition and earns the opportunity to compete in front of the best fanbase in college baseball. Hail State!”
 
McMullan is a 1990 graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Sandra, have three children: Maggie, Emma and Jack. Their son Jack is currently baseball player at Liberty University. McMullan’s father, John, was an All-American football player at Notre Dame and played in the NFL with the New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Titans (now the Jets).

Visit www.HailState.com for the latest news and information on the baseball program. Fans can also follow the program on social media by searching ‘HailStateBB’ on X, Facebook and Instagram.

 

The House v. NCAA settlement has yet to be approved, and it remains an imperfect solution to college sports in the NIL era.

The harsh truth is that it didn’t need to be this way. Simply put, it should have taken input from college football and basketball players — those most affected by revenue sharing.

The NCAA has consistently lost litigation due to athletes not agreeing to the set rules. It’s why the transfer portal rules were eradicated and why NIL is legal and without guardrails at present.

The need for collective bargaining and a negotiation process has never been clearer. Is there a pathway to that future without employment status for college athletes?

The settlement’s core is at odds with its claims amid roster limit issues and other changes.

Under the guise of publicity rights, athletes will sign these NIL deals directly with schools, which ultimately amount to pay-for-play.

The problem is that it limits the athletes’ opportunities to use their likeness for real endorsement deals outside of the school.

For example, a brand might conflict with the brand that sponsors the school, but the athletes won’t own their rights to do endorsements in the same way.

The athletes did not agree to these restrictions, including the compensation limits imposed by the cap and the NIL clearinghouse for third-party deals.

Jim Cavale, founder of the players association for college athletes, Athletes.org, has been working to implement a process for collective bargaining in college sports.

He views the cap on their earnings as the most contentious aspect of the settlement, given its lack of collective bargaining.

Next come the contracts where athletes are confused once they see they can’t do other NIL deals or are asked to do extra promotion for free. The coach may try to push them out, but they can’t because they’re not performance contracts.

These lawsuits will no longer target the NCAA; instead, they will target schools or even coaches, compounding the problem.

“The next frontier of lawsuits is coming directly to campus, and it’s a huge liability for everyone involved,” Cavale said.

Athletes don’t know what they’re signing up for and what they’re giving up in revenue sharing. It’s an issue that has been brought up with U.S. District Judge Wilken and the plaintiff’s attorneys, but it’s one they keep alleging isn’t pertinent to the settlement.

“They’re just trying to get an answer on the settlement, and that’s distracting them from all the other things they’re going to have to figure out next,” Cavale said. “Which are complex but yet could be simplified through taking an existing blueprint and copy and pasting it into college sports, and that’s collective bargaining.”

Athletes.org is the largest players association in the country, with 4,700 members, and their goal of collective bargaining is shared with coaches and even athletic directors.

Cavale has created a process they’ve begun to socialize with athletic directors to show them what it would be like for athletes to have a seat at the table.

“One thing that’s been encouraging about those meetings is a lot of the things that the ADs want is not far from what the athletes want,” Cavale said. “I think getting a deal done is realistic once we have those conversations.”

Cavale and his partner created a bill for their conversations in DC that shows a path for collective bargaining without employment status. He believes that route would have the best bipartisan support.

He also sees an information gap where schools and commissioners may believe collective bargaining would occur directly between the athletes and the school.

“The Atlanta Falcons players don’t collectively bargain with the Atlanta Falcons,” Cavale said. “The Atlanta Falcons players collectively bargain with the NFL.”

It’s clear that schools and athletes are lacking a vehicle to collectively bargain, and a league entity like a player’s association solves that.

The House settlement appears to have no positive impact on the state of college sports without the athletes’ input.

After a Texas bill to amend the state’s NIL law passed the House and Senate, it headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. He signed it into law Thursday morning – paving the way for some high school athletes to sign deals.

Abbott signed HB 126 into law, which allows colleges in the state to directly pay athletes in line with the House v. NCAA settlement. It also means high school athletes who are 17 and older can sign NIL deals. That’s a shift from the previous verbiage that said only college athletes in the state could do so.

Texas State Rep. Brandon Creighton sponsored the bill, filed March 10, and the state House and Senate both signed it June 1. That meant it headed to Abbott’s desk for signature, and the law took effect immediately after he signed.

Under the previous law, high school athletes were not allowed to sign NIL deals and had to wait until they got to college. The amendment changes that, setting the age requirement at 17 years old to do so.

“Unless a prospective student athlete younger than 17 years of age is enrolled at an institution of higher education, an individual, corporate entity, or other organization, including an institution to which this section applies, may not enter into an arrangement relating to the athlete’s name, image, or likeness with the athlete or with an individual related to the athlete by consanguinity or affinity,” the law states.

Texas’ new NIL law also comes ahead of the landmark House settlement, which is set to usher in the revenue-sharing era in college athletics. Schools will be able to directly pay athletes up to $20.5 million in 2025-26, the first school year of the 10-year agreement, and the law allows schools to participate in rev-share.

The previous version of the law said institutions could not “provide or solicit a prospective student athlete of an intercollegiate athletic program at the institution with compensation in relation to the prospective student athlete’s name, image, or likeness.” The amended law eliminated that language, meaning universities can directly pay athletes.

At Texas, athletics director Chris Del Conte announced plans to fully fund every sport by maximizing roster limits that would be put in place by the House settlement. Additionally, he said the school is raising football season ticket prices by $13 per game to help defray the extra costs.

“I’m going to alter the season ticket price … to help defray the cost of what we’re doing,” Del Conte said during his annual town hall in February. “I’m doing this, y’all, because I’m trying to maintain the very best athletic program in the country.

“I hope that you think the value we provide you on game day with all the things that we’re doing – whether it’s Bevo’s Blvd., the concert, everything that we do – we’re trying to create incredible value to say thank you. But more importantly, for you to understand what we’re trying to do.”

The transfer portal has only been open for a few days in college baseball but already the accusations are flying. On Thursday, East Carolina coach Cliff Godwin accused coaches at Power Four schools of tampering with his players.

East Carolina finished its season over the weekend, coming up a little short in the Conway Regional final against Coastal Carolina. And now Godwin is having to battle illegal contact.

“Our system is so BROKEN!” Godwin wrote on Twitter. “We have coaches at P4 schools texting our players directly who are not in portal! And we have proof!”

Cliff Godwin didn’t provide proof immediately, though his original tweet was still very fresh at the time of this writing. So it’ll be interesting to see if he opts to lay everything bare on social media at some point.

Even if he doesn’t, Godwin has been vocal in the past about the potential pitfalls of NIL and the transfer portal. In conjunction, the two can be especially disruptive for a coach at the non-power-conference level.

“I don’t like the portal and NIL together because it’s become a corrupt business,” Godwin said in January 2024. “So people are cheating. And I’m not perfect. I’m not saying that. But that’s not why that was created.”

As of Wednesday morning, there were more than 2,700 Division I baseball players in the transfer portal, according to On3’s Pete Nakos. So the problems aren’t going away any time soon.

Cliff Godwin outlines issues with NIL

The East Carolina coach has been blunt about how he feels about NIL, too. In short, he thinks its a system ripe for abuse. He even called it ‘pay for play.’

“They kept saying it’s not pay for play,” he said. “Well guess what it is? Pay for play.”

Even though NIL has impacted the way rosters are built at times, that hasn’t changed anything for Godwin’s approach at ECU. But balancing that can be challenging, and when NIL comes into the picture, Godwin admitted that jealousy can play a role, too. That only becomes more challenging when considering college baseball teams only have so many scholarships (currently) to distribute across a much larger roster.

“I’m all for rewarding our guys who have been in our program and have done the things the right way, from Trey Yesavage to Justin Wilcoxen to Joey Berini,” Cliff Godwin added. “I think it’s also worth mentioning that Joey Berini has never received a cent of baseball scholarship money since he’s been at East Carolina because we only have 11.7 (scholarships). [Wilcoxen] has only received scholarship this year in his fifth year. Guys that have grinded, that have developed with our coaching staff, that means something to me, because that’s what this place was built on. Now I still want them to be able to make some money if that is available. And so those guys were able to get some money, but it also creates jealousy.

“I asked Trey Yesavage this summer, ‘Does NIL create jealously?’ ‘100 percent Coach.’ So that’s another thing we have to navigate. But I’m all for helping the returners. I can’t foresee Coach Godwin offering any recruit any amount of money because that is going to take away from the culture that we have in the locker room. A lot of coaches talk about it. And I’m not sitting up here saying that we have the best culture in the country, but it means something to me to have culture. And you can’t sustain success the way we do if you don’t have great culture within that locker room.”

On3’s Jonathan Wagner also contributed to this report.