TCU’s just-passed 8-4 regular season had many in the purple people masses as angry as a tourist who just paid $40 to park, and for many others as disappointed as when Junior brought home an F in civics.

Many have expressed themselves in much the same way of our old friend, the frontier prospector Gabby Johnson of “Blazing Saddles” fame: No sidewindin’, bushwackin’, hornswagglin’ cracker croaker is gonna rouin me bishen cutter!

TCU Athletic Director Mike Buddie gets it.

“I think there were 11 teams in our league this year whose fan bases wanted their coaches fired,” Buddie said on Friday morning at the FIFA World Cup Draw party at Billy Bob’s Texas, the world’s largest honky tonk. “That’s the culture that we live in. You can win [against a] ranked opponent, [next week against] ranked opponent, [a third straight win against a] ranked opponent, and then lose — they want you gone.

“It’s a new day and age.”

Like the mood of Paris in 1793 — cheers in the morning, pitchforks and the guillotine by dusk.

TCU finished in the middle of a congested Big 12 at 5-4. To put some perspective on its season, Texas finished 9-3. Of course, many UT fans think the Longhorns should win every game, too. No. 25 Missouri, like TCU, finished 8-4. So, too, did Tennessee and Iowa, two teams receiving votes in the AP poll. In the end, after 12 regular-season games, only two teams finished undefeated — Ohio State and Indiana. One of those teams will lose this weekend; they play each other.

North Carolina — guided by renowned football genius Bill Belichick — stumbled to 4–8, taking a season-opening black eye from TCU.

Just last year, Ohio State fans wanted coach Ryan Day on the nearest interstate out of town after the Buckeyes took the worst kind of a second loss of the season — to Michigan. That was on Nov. 30. By the end of January, they wanted to elect him governor after winning the national championship. 

The Horned Frogs will learn their postseason bowl destination on Sunday.

Dykes has gone 35-17 over four seasons at TCU, including 13-2 and a berth in the College Football Playoff championship game in his first season. That campaign included a victory over No. 2 Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl CFP semifinals.

TCU slipped to 5-7 in 2023 but went 9-4 last year and could do the same in 2025 with one last victory.

“We need to be better,” Buddie said. “We’re committed to getting better. I’m excited because nobody realizes that more than Sonny Dykes.

“He’s committed to addressing some needs that I think we have and more than ever before, what I do and how we strategically fundraise and approach people financially has a direct impact on your football program. I think Texas Tech showed us all that if you can build the most talented roster and develop them, really good things happen.”

Texas Tech, which is playing in the Big 12 Championship Game on Saturday against BYU, spent, according to reports and speculation, as much as $28 million on its football roster this season. The Red Raiders are No. 4 in the most recent CFP rankings.

Spending that kind of money is the result of a completely transformed landscape in college football. Colleges can now spend as much as $20.5 million on payroll for athletes in its various programs. That mostly impacts football and men’s basketball — those sports that generate the most revenue, the “revenue sports.”

Before that, each Division I school had an adjacent collective designed to allow athletes to cash in on their name, image, and likeness. That quickly evolved — devolved? — into merely paying athletes by writing checks out of the collective’s pool. Now completely legal after a U.S. Supreme Court case permitting athletes to receive compensation beyond traditional scholarships. The collectives simply became the mechanism to funnel those payments.

Most, if not all, of the collectives have now been merged with universities’ traditional athletics fundraising arm. NIL endorsement deals are now supposed to be just exactly that — an athlete endorsing a product, for example. I’m not exactly sure how all that sorts out.

“The landscape has changed, but we still have a ton of advantages in facilities and where we’re located and historical success,” said Buddie, who added that TCU also is “thoughtful and strategic in how we employ people.”

“We’re not in the business of paying $50 million buyouts for people to go away. And when you believe you’ve got the right person who’s already proven that he can win in the College Football Playoff, it’s incumbent on me to provide him every resource that he needs to be successful.”

Article is about Phillip Bells High School experience and being shopped to different schools and 7 x 7 teams. Really sad situation.

A few quotes:

“Bell’s mother, who abused drugs, shopped him from school to school, demanding up to $72,000 a year, according to court filings, public records and interviews with relatives and others who knew the family. He also joined a club team that paid thousands of dollars a weekend.’

On his visit to OSU: “The hotel room where Bell’s mother and stepfather were staying was “trashed,” leaving an OSU coach with a bill for broken furniture, his high-school coach later told relatives. A Buckeyes coach subsequently informed Bell’s mother that the team wanted her son, but the “entourage” wasn’t welcome in Columbus, the high-school coach said.

OSU declined to comment.

Before they left Ohio, Barnes’ blood sugar spiked to life-threatening levels, she suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized for several days, according to public records.”

Hoping that with support from OSU that he can break the cycle and achieve great things!

This link is behind a paywall: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/football-high-school-nil-phillip-bell-81270bdf?mod=hp_lead_pos7

Definitely worth a read – there is definitely a downside to the money flowing to these athletes. Kinda makes me wonder about the Legend Bey situation.

Georgia is attempting to get edge rusher Damon Wilson to pony up after his transfer to Missouri.

The school’s athletic association has filed a lawsuit against Wilson saying he owes $390,000 from the NIL contract he signed with the school’s collective in December 2024 ahead of Georgia’s College Football Playoff loss to Notre Dame. Wilson transferred after the 2024 season to Missouri and received one payment of $30,000.

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Wilson, a junior, led Missouri with nine sacks and 9.5 tackles for loss this season. He had three sacks and 5.5 tackles for loss as a sophomore for the Bulldogs in 2024.

Georgia is claiming Wilson owes the balance of the base pay the contract stipulated he’d be paid via a liquidated damages claim. According to ESPN, Wilson’s deal with Classic City Collective was for $500,000 spread out over 14 monthly payments with two post-transfer portal bonuses of $40,000 and that he’d owe what was still set to be paid out to him if he left the team.

From ESPN:

“When the University of Georgia Athletic Association enters binding agreements with student-athletes, we honor our commitments and expect student-athletes to do the same,” athletics spokesperson Steven Drummond said in a statement to ESPN.

Georgia is not the first school to file a suit over NIL payments to a player who transferred. But the hard-line tactic is noteworthy, and may ultimately not work out in Georgia’s favor.

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Schools typically do not ask coaches to pay out the balance of their contracts when leaving for another job. For example, Lane Kiffin did not have to pay Ole Miss what the school was scheduled to pay him over the rest of his deal with the school when he left for LSU. Instead, LSU paid Ole Miss $3 million for Kiffin to get out of his contract.

That situation happens all the time when coaches leave for new jobs. Their buyouts to get out of their contracts are far smaller than the buyouts schools owe when a coach is fired without cause.

And coaches are employees. Schools have long resisted that players be classified as employees and continue to do so even as the revenue-sharing era begins. The NCAA and its member schools have long clung to amateurism and that antiquated idea is why it took so long for players to get paid in the first place.

Georgia athletics is taking Missouri football defensive end Damon Wilson II to court in a novel, nearly first-of-its-kind case over an NIL contract dispute. 

The news was first reported by ESPN’s Dan Wilson on Friday, Dec. 5. The Tribune confirmed the news through a university source and court documents filed in Georgia by the Bulldogs.

UGA is attempting to take Wilson into arbitration and is seeking $390,000 in liquidated damages from the star edge rusher, who transferred to the Tigers in January 2025, over what the university views as an unfulfilled contract in Athens. The lawsuit is not against the University of Missouri, only Wilson.

According to the ESPN report, Georgia is arguing that Wilson signed a contract — a common practice in the NIL era — with what was then UGA’s main NIL and marketing arm, Classic City Collective, in December 2024.

Fired Auburn football coach Hugh Freeze isn’t going out quietly.

Freeze was outspoken in the weeks before his dismissal, saying he and his staff were still the right fit to lead Auburn into the future, despite going 15-19 over two-plus losing seasons. Auburn athletic director John Cohen disagreed, firing Freeze on Nov. 2, taking on his $15.8 million buyout, and hiring South Florida head coach Alex Golesh last week.

Despite that nice payday on his way out, Freeze is still venting about his dismissal and blames quarterback Jackson Arnold for why he’s no longer Auburn’s head coach.

During an interview this week with AuburnSports’ Justin Hokanson, Freeze said, “Certainly, it didn’t work out to the level that he or I both expected for him and our team. And that’s why I’m sitting here.”

Freeze recruited Arnold out of the transfer portal from Oklahoma, where he passed for 1,421 yards, 12 touchdowns and three interceptions and rushed for 444 yards and three TDs as the Sooners’ starter in 2024. It seemed to be a mutual parting of the ways between Arnold and Oklahoma, which brought in the highly coveted Washington State transfer, John Mateer, at quarterback.

Arnold, who was a five-star prospect and the No. 4-ranked QB recruit in the 2023 class by 247Sports, looked for a fresh start as a junior at Auburn, but it was more of the same for him this fall as he passed for just 1,309 yards, 6 TDs and 2 INTs with 311 rushing yards and 8 TDs before being benched Oct. 25 vs. Arkansas after throwing an interception that was returned 89 yards for a touchdown.

Ashton Daniels, a senior and transfer from Stanford, took over and led Auburn back from an 11-point halftime deficit to a 33-24 win over the Razorbacks and finished the season as the starter.

Freeze tempered his comments on Arnold a bit, saying, “Let’s be clear, this is not a beat-up Jackson deal. It’s never always the quarterback. There are other factors. I mean, he missed a touchdown throw here at Oklahoma to a wide-open Cam Coleman.

“Those plays you’ve got to make to win games. And he would say that too. And there’s also the Missouri game, where we have what, eight drops? Then there’s moments in the Georgia second half where he misses open guys, or the protection is not great, so it’s a combination of all those things.”

Maybe it’s also partly the coaching. Freeze was given a six-year, $49-million contract at Auburn after having previous success at Ole Miss (on the field, at least) and Liberty, but he went 6-7 and 5-7 in his first two seasons before starting 4-5 this year and getting fired. He was 6-16 in SEC play during his tenure.