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Despite being two months out from opening the 2025 college football season against Alabama, Florida State’s quarterback, Tommy Castellanos, has already called out the Crimson Tide.

“I’m excited, man,” Castellanos said in an interview with On3. “People, I don’t know if they know, but you go back and watch every first game that I played in, we always start fast. I dreamed of moments like this. I dreamed of playing against Alabama. They don’t have Nick Saban to save them. I just don’t see them stopping me.”

It’s a bold statement from a player who hasn’t had the most decorated college football career to this point and has yet to play a snap for his new team. But, there’s no questioning Castellanos’s confidence. 

He transferred to Florida State ahead of his senior season. It’s his third ACC school after spending two years at Boston College and one at Central Florida, and Castellanos is trying to make a name for himself off the field to drum up the anticipation for the game on the field. 

In 2023, he completed 57.3% of his pass attempts for 2,248 yards, 15 touchdowns and 14 interceptions as a sophomore. He then took a step up in his junior season, improving his accuracy to 61.5%, while throwing 18 touchdowns and five interceptions through the first eight games of the season. But, midway through the season, Boston College lost three consecutive games, and then Castellanos got hurt against Syracuse, and his backup, Grayson James, replaced him and helped the Eagles break their losing streak. 

James’ performance pushed him ahead of Castellanos on the depth chart and, to deal with that decision to change quarterbacks, Castellanos took some time away from the team, while James finished out the season as the starter and led the Eagles to a Bowl Game.

That Syracuse game ended up being Castellanos’ last for Boston College. Now, he’s got a fresh start at Florida State, where he’s trying to make some waves, and introduce himself to the Seminoles’ biggest opponent well before the season even starts.  

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Click here to view Trev Alberts’ Monday press conference.

Trev Alberts’ job title is Texas A&M’s Director of Athletics. In some ways, tailor maybe should be added.

That’s a reaction to how Alberts described the task he and A&M face in navigating the changing future of college athletics.

“(It’s) how to thread the needle between tradition and modernization,” Alberts said in a Monday meeting with local reporters inside a third-floor conference room at Kyle Field.

Maintaining traditions at A&M won’t be a problem. Successfully modernizing A&M’s athletic department to excel in the new era of Name, Imagine & Likeness (NIL) and revenue sharing projects to be much more challenging.

Reacting to the recent House v. NCAA settlement, which allows NCAA member schools to directly pay student-athletes, Alberts announced that A&M will distribute $18 million to football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball.

A popular national template suggests directing 75 percent of funds to football, 15 percent to basketball, five percent to baseball and five percent to women’s sports.

“Some institutions have chosen to use that (75-15-5-5 model) as a template for their institution,” Alberts said. “Our percentages don’t reflect that. We’ve chosen to make market-based decisions based on revenue.”

The distribution could cause derision within athletic programs. Coaches in different programs could be competing against each other to get more funding.

Alberts said that hasn’t been a problem at A&M, but he has heard that has been an issue for other colleagues.

Alberts declined to reveal the percentages to be shared with A&M’s athletes for competitive reasons. But football is the only revenue-producing sport at Texas A&M, so it stands to reason that the majority of A&M’s shared revenue will go to football players.

“I’m not going to run out and tell you exactly what the numbers are and what the percentages are because there’s a competitive piece to that, right?” he said. “But I think you’re going to start to figure out where the numbers lie.”

He said in a year there may be more data available that provides at least guidelines how players perhaps should be compensated not only by sport, but by position.

Alberts acknowledged that some programs could be at a disadvantage to conference opponents.

For example, Kentucky, which puts great emphasis on basketball, figures to share a greater percentage of revenue with its basketball players than many other SEC programs.

“You’re not going to knowingly put any of your programs at a competitive disadvantage,” Alberts said. “But I think it’s absolutely true you could find yourselves in a situation — based on the priorities of the investments — that some of your programs will have less rev share than some of their competitors.”

Some of the differences, at least, could potentially be offset by greater NIL opportunities.

Alberts said if a program, like football, has players earning substantial money though fair-market NIL deals then some funds could be redirected to other sports.

To enhance those NIL possibilities, Alberts said a new position is being created to help locate NIL opportunities and ensure they meet the standard “fair market value” as determined by Deloitte, which will act as a third-party clearinghouse for NIL deals.

“We’re not ready to announce a name, but we are hiring a new position that will be an associate AD reporting directly to me that is an attorney,” Alberts said. “It’s basically, what is our strategy and how do we leverage every one of our assets?

“If we’re able to get fair market value NIL deals at a certain level, we may not need as much rev share there. We can put the rev share over at this sport because they’re not as successful. So, that’s why I think that fair market value NIL strategy is going to be really important to our future.”

Alberts later added: “We have to be better than our peers. To me, that’s the differentiator in the game. That’s why we’re going to throw a lot of energy and effort in making sure we have a good strategy there (NIL).”

Alberts is hopeful that a sound, effective strategy could launch A&M to great competitive success.

“This is our time,” he said. “If we have the courage to make tough decisions and act and modernize in some areas, I think Texas A&M can separate and do things we’ve never done here before.

“That’s why we’re all here. The opportunities are here at Texas A&M to do things that most people can’t do because of scale, because of resources and other things.”

MOSCOW, Idaho – The Spokane Hoopfest tournament is nearly here, and tens of thousands of competitors will take the court in the largest 3-on-3 competition in the world.

Before this, however, some of the best in basketball’s history will be immortalized at the fourth-annual Hooptown Hall of Fame ceremony on Wednesday. Among the nominees for this prestigious society will be the 1981-82 Idaho Basketball team, alongside their head coach, Don Monson.

Widely considered one of the greatest seasons in school history, the 81-82 Vandals took the Big Sky Conference, and all of DI Basketball, by storm as they marched out to a 27-3 record, still the best all-time. The black and gold would be denied by very few as they went 13-1 in Big Sky play and achieved noteworthy non-conference wins over Oregon, Oregon State, Gonzaga, Washington, and Washington State to start the season 12-0. 

Sporting one of the most tenacious defenses in college basketball, Idaho allowed just 57.5 PPG as a team across 30 games, a top-20 mark in the country by the end of the year. This culminated in the #1 seed in the Big Sky Tournament, which the Vandals had earned the right to host due to securing the top spot. Inside the Kibbie Dome-turned-Cowan Spectrum, the top-seeded black and gold knocked off Weber State in the Semifinals and took down Nevada in the championship to earn the berth to the NCAA Tournament. 

As the #3 seed in the west, the Vandals matched up with the #16 Iowa Hawkeyes in what was effectively a home game in Washington State’s Beasley Coliseum. UI(daho) forward Phil Hopson led the scoring with a game-high 21 points, and four of five Vandal starters finished in double figures to win an overtime thriller, 69-67. The win was cemented by Brian Kellerman’s 18-foot buzzer-beater to end the extra period and send Idaho to the Sweet 16. 

The 81-82 squad was led by one of the most well-known faces in the history of Vandal Hoops. Don Monson was entering his fourth year at the helm of the program and had led his team to what was, at the time, the best season in school history. The Vandals finished with a program best 25-4 record in the 80-81 season and had reached the NCAA Tournament for the first time ever. They topped both of those notables with the 27-win season and Sweet 16 appearance the following year as Monson established himself as one of the best coaches in Idaho history. To date, he is one of only two coaches to lead the Vandals to the Tournament and the only coach in school history with a win under his belt.

In five years coaching in Moscow, Monson would finish with a 100-41 career record, the third most wins for an Idaho head coach to date. In those five years, his teams finished with ten losses or less in four of them and captured two Big Sky regular season titles and two conference tournament titles.  

The induction ceremony will take place on Wednesday, June 25th, at the Hooptown Courts.

While one DeBoer was coaching at Alabama this past year, another DeBoer was still succeeding at Washington.

The former was Kalen DeBoer, the Crimson Tide football coach who left the Huskies to replace Nick Saban. The latter was his daughter Alexis DeBoer, the softball infielder who stayed in Washington and became an instant success.

Alexis DeBoer put together a year in which she won Big Ten freshman of the year honors while leading the Huskies to the NCAA Tournament.

“I’m super proud of her, what she accomplished,” Kalen DeBoer told AL.com in June. “There’s a lot of eyes on her, just because of the nature of what I do. For her to be able to continue on her path and make a name for herself is something as a parent, I couldn’t be more proud of.”

Kalen DeBoer discussed his daughter’s success as part of the latest episode of “Beat Everyone” an AL.com Alabama football podcast. The full show will be released Monday night, accessible on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alexis DeBoer finished the year with a batting average of .358 and 21 home runs to go with 55 RBIs. Each statistics led the Washington roster.

“She had a great season,” Kalen DeBoer said. “The cool thing is, I just feel like there’s a hunger. That’s that competitiveness that you want to where there’s more even being done now to make sure it continues in that direction.”