In this week’s Akem’s Analysis, Samuel Akem talks about all the teams in the Big Sky Conference and  strength of schedule. He looks deeply into the previous top-5 teams from the conference last year (UC Davis, Idaho, Montana State, Montana, & NAU), or in other words, all the playoff teams. Also, analysis about Deloitte and the newly formed “NIL Clearinghouse”, which will serve as the new governing arm for NIL in college football.

0:00 – Intro 
3:55 – Toughest Strength of Schedules In The Big Sky 
29:00 – NIL, Clearing House, Deloitte, Collectives 
52:21 – 16-Team CFP Playoff Proposal 
1:01:10 – Final Thoughts 
1:02:37 – End 

James Madison was close to rounding out its 2025-26 roster and playing host to Ike Cornish and Justin McBride, a pair of former power conference players who were once four-star recruits ranked in the top 100 of their high school classes.

A couple of weeks earlier, the JMU women had a pair of SMU transfers — Kylie Marshall and Bri McLeod — on campus.

McLeod was one of the top players out of Canada in high school while Marshall was a top-40 player in the United States according to ESPN.

In the old days — before the House settlement, plans for revenue sharing and other direct payments to players for their services — that was the kind of news that had a way of leaking.

Even if those players hadn’t chosen the Dukes, which all four did, their official campus visits were good publicity.

Even being associated with high-level recruits was good for JMU’s brand.

But in 2025, it’s the dawn of a new era even as Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) has been around for almost half of a decade.

Their interest in James Madison was a closely guarded secret.

The fact they’d even been to Harrisonburg wasn’t public knowledge until after they’d announced commitments to the Dukes.

“It’s a different world right now,” JMU men’s head coach Preston Spradlin said. “This stuff is so tricky now. Things have to be really tight.”

The concern that news of even mutual interest between player and school, particularly when it comes to proven and experienced transfers, is twofold.

When it hits social media that the Dukes received a visit from a player, it’s not uncommon for said player to almost immediately receive a call from another program asking what JMU is offering to set off another round of negotiations.

Secondarily, other players may wonder if there’s money to go around if it appears a team is close to landing a transfer recruit.

Spradlin said even being listed among several programs that have talked to a player can lead to assumptions the recruiting process is further along than it is.

“To be honest, if it’s tweeted out that this kid was on campus, it could screw us with the next kid,” Spradlin said. “It’s so different. That’s just where it’s at. These coaches and agents try to use that stuff against you. The moment a kid tweets out that he’s coming here, another school will sweep in and say what’s the deal that you’ve got there, and try to offer him more.”

The recruiting visits themselves have changed, too.

Players and their families used to spend two days on campus with the JMU coaching staff guiding tours, showing off the basketball facilities and making sure they enjoyed Harrisonburg’s best restaurants and hotels.

If possible, the Dukes might schedule the visit to coincide with a big event, such as the spring football game, where the recruit could see and be seen by the fanbase.

Since the opening of the Atlantic Union Bank Center in 2020, more often than not, players who took an official visit to JMU later committed.

Some of those elements of the visit still exist, for sure.

But some official visits now last 24 hours or less, with a significant percentage of that time spent in a meeting room negotiating what amounts to a salary.

“This is what the difference is now between two years ago,” JMU women’s head coach Sean O’Regan said. “You still have to get to that portion of the visit where you sit down at a table. We also have to tell them, ‘Hey, understand what’s happening with the current team.’ And that’s not just about playing time now. In the past, in theory anyway, maybe you come in and you believe you can beat out the returning starter or the Player of the Year for playing time. Now it’s money, and maybe it’s a contract. And on our end, it’s loyalty to the players choosing to come back here.”

The evaluation process in recruiting has become not only observing a player’s potential to help on the court but also figuring out if their priorities line up with what JMU has to offer.

O’Regan said that while the Dukes are competitive financially with programs they recruit against, if the first thing a player brings up is money, that more or less ends the recruitment process for the women’s staff.

Spradlin agreed that taking time to figure out if a payday was the top priority could slow down the recruiting process.

“I can tell you our super power as a staff has always been evaluating and building great relationships in the recruiting process,” Spradlin said. “Not that that’s not important. It’s still very important to us, but it’s not quite as important to every kid out there. The ones that are coming here, it’s still important. But it’s taking a little bit longer to weed through and find the ones that are prioritizing that because of the influx of money.”

But, the new challenges aren’t unique to JMU’s programs.

And in the end, both the men’s and women’s teams filled their needs and essentially set their rosters for next season before most of their Sun Belt Conference rivals.

Spradlin and O’Regan both said that while they are figuring out a new process, JMU still has advantages that should allow the Dukes to compete for conference championships each year.

“It’s not exclusive to us,” Spradlin said. “It’s not exclusive to men’s basketball. In recruiting, the things that were prioritized and important, those are still important. But they don’t rank at the top of the list for some kids. I’m not saying that for everybody. There are still kids who want to come here because JMU is an amazing degree, and they want to play for the best fans in the Sun Belt. They want to play for a championship coaching staff, but then again there’s other kids who that’s not quite as important for any more because they can get more money somewhere else.”

Kansas State is reportedly in the mix for yet another high-profile and expensive college basketball transfer, PJ Haggerty. This comes just one year after the Wildcats spent an exuberant amount of money for a player who was ultimately labeled as a bust on a team that failed to make the NCAA Tournament.

Will history repeat itself? I don’t think so but we are going to find out!

Haggerty has yet to play more than one season of college basketball at the same school. The 6-foot-3 point guard played only six games during his freshman year at TCU, averaged 21.2 points per game at Tulsa as a sophomore and most recently averaged 21.7 points per game at Memphis. Here is where it gets interesting.

As things currently stand, PJ Haggerty is somewhere in between a professional career and a return to college for a fourth season. He declared for the NBA Draft and shined at the NBA Draft Combine but he is also in the transfer portal. The deadline to decide on his future is currently set for May 28.

Haggerty is going to make more money through NIL as a redshirt junior than he would as a rookie in the NBA. His price tag hovers between $1-4 million.

He was asking for $4,000,000 when he first entered the transfer portal. However, the payday continues to decrease as more and more suitors drop out of the race. It seemed as though N.C. State was the only program remaining at the beginning of May so the Wolfpack only had to bid against itself. Not anymore!

According to Hitmen Hoops, Kansas State “has emerged as a serious contender” and “has the momentum” because it is willing to offer more money than North Carolina State.

Is this going to be deja vu all over again? The Wildcats paid approximately $2 million for one year of Coleman Hawkins, which immediately looked like wasted money. Although Hawkins ultimately got better as the year went on, he could not lead his team to the postseason and dealt with horrible abuse and death threats from fans throughout the entire disappointing season.

PJ Haggerty could be next. He will make a lot more money than Hawkins at either school so it could be really rough for him if he ultimately chooses to play for Kansas State and does not perform up to his paycheck. Wildcats fans are not going to tolerate another year of NIL failure. I don’t expect that to happen but we’ll see!

The College Football Playoff will go to a more straightforward way of filling the bracket next season, placing teams strictly on where they are ranked instead of moving pieces around to reward conference champions.

Ten conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director came to the unanimous agreement they needed Thursday to shift the model that drew complaints last season.

The new format was widely expected after last season’s jumbled bracket gave byes to Big 12 champion Arizona State and Mountain West champion Boise State, even though those teams were ranked ninth and 12th by the playoff selection committee.

That system made the rankings and the seedings in the tournament two different things and resulted in some matchups — for instance, the quarterfinal between top-ranked Oregon and eventual national champion Ohio State — that came earlier than they otherwise might have.

“After evaluating the first year of the 12-team Playoff, the CFP Management Committee felt it was in the best interest of the game to make this adjustment,” said Rich Clark, executive director of the CFP.

The five highest-ranked champions will still be guaranteed spots in the playoff, meaning it’s possible there could be a repeat of last season, when CFP No. 16 Clemson was seeded 12th in the bracket after winning the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey was among those who pushed for the change in the second year of the agreement, though he remained cautious about it being approved because of the unanimous vote needed.

Smaller conferences had a chance to use the seeding issue as leverage for the next set of negotiations, which will come after this season and could include an expansion to 14 teams and more guaranteed bids for certain leagues. The SEC and Big Ten will have the biggest say in those decisions.

As it stands, this will be the third different playoff system for college football in the span of three years. For the 10 years leading into last season’s inaugural 12-team playoff, the CFP was a four-team affair.

The news was first reported by ESPN, which last year signed a six-year, $7.8 billion deal to televise the expanded playoff.

— Eddie Pells, AP National Writer

Adrian Wojnarowski knows that if St. Bonaventure is going to make a run in the NCAA Tournament, it will likely require some magic.

It’s fair to wonder, however, whether such magic still even exists in the current climate of college athletics.

In an interview released on Thursday, Wojnarowski joined CNBC’s Alex Sherman for a wide-ranging conversation regarding his past life as an NBA insider and his new life as the Bonnies’ general manager. And when it comes to the state of the sport he’s now immersed in, the 56-year-old agreed that it’s in danger of losing some of what has made it so special come March.

“It does take away the magic,” Wojnarowski told Sherman of challenges that mid-major programs like his own currently face. “What you’re seeing right now is the Power Four conferences are really dictating the rules, the landscape. You’re seeing with this House settlement, it’s the Power Four leagues deciding the rules and how this is going to go. And all of that — literally — all of it is to benefit them.”

The idea of March Madness losing some of its luster was an especially common thought during this past season’s NCAA Tournament, which was largely chalk and ultimately resulted in just the second-ever Final Four only comprised of No. 1 seeds (the tournament’s ratings, however, did just fine). With factors like NIL and the transfer portal allowing the Power Four conferences to pluck the best players from mid-major programs, potential Cinderellas such as St. Bonaventure face an even steeper uphill climb than they already did.

Just eight months into the job, Wojnarowski has already seen it firsthand, with the Bonnies’ leading scorer from last season, combo guard Melvin Council Jr., subsequently transferring to Kansas for his senior campaign. Adrian Wojnarowski isn’t bitter; it’s just a reality of college athletics’ current climate. But it has helped inform his approach as his alma mater’s GM

“I tell our folks all the time, don’t wait around for legislation that’s going to come out to make it easier for us at St Bonaventure or St Joe’s in Philly in our league, or other comparable schools to ours,” Wojnarowski said. “We’ve got to understand who we are, what our pathway is to building teams. Because no one’s coming to rescue us.”

“It’s a challenge,” he continued. “But at the same time, I’m at St. Bonaventure because I believe we can do this.”