Kentucky was only a couple of wins away from winning the College World Series in 2024. What are the chances they actually do it in 2025? I’m so glad you asked.

The Bat Cats do not have the same momentum entering the postseason as they did a year ago. Kentucky followed up a Regional Championship campaign by only dropping one mid-week game and going 22-8 in SEC play. It gave Kentucky a national seed in the NCAA Tournament, which meant home-field advantage in the Super Regional.

Kentucky parlayed regular-season wins into postseason success. That home-field advantage paid dividends in the Super Regional sweep of Oregon State. Unfortunately, they won’t have that home-field advantage at Kentucky Proud Park on the road to the College World Series in 2025.

Despite a few late bid-stealers, the Bat Cats were on the right side of the NCAA Tournament bubble. The Wildcats secured a No. 3 seed in the Clemson Regional. They will open NCAA Tournament play on Friday against West Virginia.

According to our friends at FanDuel, Kentucky is +320 to win the Clemson Regional. If you prefer making a wager at a bigger price, I’ve got good news for you. Kentucky is +10,000 to keep that train rolling and win the College World Series.

Kentucky has been on the wrong side of close games all year. Maybe now the ball starts finally bouncing their way? Their march to the College World Series begins Friday at Noon on ESPNU.

College World Series Odds

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Since taking over as Georgia’s athletic director, Josh Brooks has overseen a number of different facility projects. From football to basketball, baseball, softball, and track and field, Brooks has been transforming Georgia’s facilities across the board.

However, as he works through his fourth year running the athletic department in Athens, he warned that with the coming changes in NIL, thanks to the still pending House vs. NCAA settlement, work on facilities may take a step back.

“Honestly, I’m glad we got so much done the last four or five years because it’s going to slow down as we evolve and money starts shifting more in NIL,” Brooks said. “You will see the facilities slow down. Naturally, just because we’ve got a lot knocked off the list.”

When the proposed settlement in the House vs. NCAA case reaches its conclusion, schools will enter into a revenue-sharing agreement with their student athletes. This will call for up to $21 million in revenue from individual schools being used to directly compensate athletes.

With the loss in revenue, schools – Georgia included – will be forced into redoing their budget to account for the revenue that will go to the athletes. Which, as Brooks said Wednesday during his meeting with the media at the SEC spring meetings in Destin, Florida, may mean the facilities arms race in college athletics will “slow down.”

This change comes at a relatively good time for Georgia. The 2024 athletic year was the first in which Georgia was able to show many of its most recent facility improvements.

This included the completion of a two-phase renovation project at Sanford Stadium, which saw the opening of the 1929 Club, which offered more premium seating, restrooms, and concession stands on the south side of the stadium. The new Sanford Stadium press box opened in the southwest corner of the endzone as well.

The completion of the Sanford Stadium renovations was quickly followed by baseball and softball. Foley Field underwent a $45 million renovation that saw a turf field installed in addition to the construction of a new locker room, team meeting area, pitching lab, hitting tunnels, and coaches’ offices, among other improvements.

Then, for softball, Georgia completed its $38.5 million facility that sits beside Jack Turner Stadium in October. The project provided the program with a state-of-the-art facility, something that Brooks is still intent on providing across all sports.

“One of the focuses for me is always the student-athlete experience,” Brooks said of potential future projects. “I want to go to locker room to locker. room, make sure that we’ve got a couple more areas we need to get touched up. Then I’ve got to develop my team.”

Still left on the to-do list for Georgia is the construction of a new facility for track and field that could wrap as early as the end of the year.

“We’ve got the track finishing in December, January, and then we’ll shift over to the old track becoming practice field parking and all that,” Brooks said.

But just because projects will be slowing down, Brooks doesn’t intend to do nothing. He revealed his intentions to develop a long-term plan for what comes next for Sanford Stadium, something he hopes can be left for his eventual successor.

“We have to develop a plan for Sanford Stadium, not just for my tenure, but I’m trying to think about the person coming after me,” Brooks said. “We want to start putting a comprehensive plan for Sanford together, a five-, ten-, fifteen-, twenty-year plan to where whatever we do builds upon each other to where when I’m gone, the next person comes in and goes, okay, here’s the blueprint and how it’s going to keep evolving.”

Problems can also create opportunities and with the ACC’s again-frustrating conference basketball schedule which only has two home-and-home games for each school and some schools not playing others at all, well, there’s an opportunity there. Stick with us for a minute.

Duke, UNC, NC State and Wake Forest should have home-and-home games. That this needs to be said is ridiculous because the state of North Carolina drives the ACC and always has. With 18 teams though, a round-robin schedule is not going to work because coaches want to get outside of the conference and play some lame-ass gimmes.

However, there’s a significant opportunity for those four schools and while we’ve mentioned variations of this before, it’s a bit different now:

Bring back a variation of the Big Four Tournament. Only now, with teams needing tournament credibility and NIL a factor, it can be much more than it was. And lest we forget, with the new conference rules where money doesn’t have to be split equally, the Big Four could just keep their sharer to themselves. Pow! Clemson. Ka-Bam! Florida State. Take that!

That said, the NIL is the key part to us here, which would help in recruiting.

You could have games in different venues, but for now, let’s say they’re all in the Greensboro Coliseum.

Start the event with with either Duke vs. Wake Forest and UNC vs. NC State or switch it to Duke vs. State and UNC vs. Wake Forest. Either way is fine, as long as the teams that don’t get home-and-home games get another crack.

Let players from all four teams get a certain cut of the gate, whatever that works out to. For the sake of neatness, call it a guaranteed minimum.

Now, let the two teams that advance get another cut with the winning team getting yet another.

This would serve several purposes:

• All the players would get a solid return and an incentive to play really hard.
• The fans would get rematches to look forward to, not to mention the players, who would know each other better. With the new schedule, everyone has forgotten the magnificence of a revenge-based rematch.
• All four programs would have a chance to help their NCAA arguments (consolation games would be a good idea for this reason).
• The ACC would get a nice little showcase.

Given the stupidity of the modern ACC schedule, getting extra games in, even if they don’t count in the standings, just seems like a smart idea.

MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — 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.”

Number crunching to figure out what’s fair

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.”

How much should an endorsement deal be worth?

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.”

Avoiding court, coordinating state laws are new priorities

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.’”

NCAA president Charlie Baker has arrived in Orlando for the 2025 Big 12 Spring Meetings with expansion on his mind, but it has nothing to do with the future of the College Football Playoff. Instead, Baker is focused on basketball, and more specifically, what’s next for March Madness.

Baker, who is in his third year as NCAA president, told reporters inside the Waldorf Astoria in Orlando that one of his top priorities is discussing what an expanded NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament could look like beginning in 2026.

“That would be the goal, to try and do this for next year,” Baker told Front Office Sports reporter David Rumsey. “… We’ve been talking about 72 and 76.”

Expanding the current 68-team NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament has been an important topic of discussion during this week’s Big 12 Spring Meetings in Orlando. Kansas coach Bill Self revealed on Wednesday that he and his fellow conference peers are in favor of expanding March Madness.

“Bill Self is speaking from Big 12 meetings in Orlando,” Henry Greenstein of the Lawrence Journal-World said via X/Twitter. “He said the league’s coaches would be in favor of expanding the NCAA Tournament.”

It’s been 14 years since the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament last expanded from 64 to 68 teams with the implementation of the First Four round of games. Before the 2011 expansion, the NCAA was entertaining a proposal to expand the number of teams to 96, though a new television contract with CBS/Turner Sports in 2010 increased the field only slightly. Prior to that, the format of March Madness had remained unchanged since the 64-team field was first adopted in 1985.

Back in February, ESPN’s Pete Thamel provided an update on where NCAA Tournament expansion sits. The number that leaders are targeting appears to be 76, adding eight teams to the mix. A move could be made as soon as the 2026 NCAA Tournament.

“There’s development behind the scenes about what this tournament could look like in 2026,” Thamel said on College GameDay. “NCAA President Charlie Baker is on the record saying there’s been discussions about growing the tournament to either 72 or 76 teams. I had multiple high-ranking sources tell me this week that the more likely option if the tournament were to expand would be to 76. This has been a discussion with its media partners for a while on this now, and a decision on whether it does go to 76 would come in the next few months.” 

Opinions across college basketball are going to differ on the topic. Some will be in favor of adding other spots, while others believe the event is perfect as is. Feedback from coaches might wind up being the most important and in the Big 12, they would give the thumbs up to expansion.

— On3’s Griffin McVeigh contributed to this report.

Georgia football made headlines throughout all of college football on Wednesday. From earning a new prediction for a top 10 running back to comments about a new NIL strategy, Georgia was in the news a lot on Wednesday.

But let’s first begin with the biggest story that occurred on Wednesday for UGA.

Georgia earns commitment from 4-star in-star ATH

The biggest news by far on Wednesday was Georgia earning a commitment from four-star ATH Ryan Mosley.

According to the 247Sports composite rankings, Mosley is the No. 182 overall player in the country. He also is the No. 23 player from Georgia, which shows how much Kirby Smart is continuing to prioritize in-state recruits.

The best part about this commitment however is the fact that Mosley was thought to be leaning towards South Carolina earlier this year. Georgia did come on strong in May in this recruitment, so this commitment wasn’t all that surprising, but UGA did appear to come from behind to win this recruitment against an SEC rival.

New prediction logged for 4-star RB

Speaking of commitments, Georgia is closing in on another win on the recruiting trail as well. Jae Lamar is a four-star running back and the No. 8 ranked back in the country according to the 247Sports composite rankings. Lamar has been a target for UGA for some time now, and it appears their pursuit is going very well.

Adam Gorney with Rivals recently predicted Georgia to win this recruitment, which marks the second prediction in the Bulldogs favor. It’s unclear when Lamar plans to announce his commitment, but Georgia is the heavy favorite right now.

Kirby Smart discusses strange NIL tactic

Smart made national headlines on Wednesday as he discussed a new NIL strategy some teams are using. He shared that some programs are paying recruits upwards of $20,000 per month to stay committed to their program.

Thankfully this doesn’t appear to be something that Georgia is doing, because if they were then Smart wouldn’t be talking about it publicly. But this is just another strange twist in recruiting caused by the NCAA failing to regulate NIL in college athletics.