HELENA — It’s been a two-way relationship between the Carroll College and University of Montana football programs.

Some guys who didn’t quite stick with the Grizzlies — like current Carroll quarterback Kaden Huot — have had success in Helena. And on the other side of the equation, a standout few have jumped up from the NAIA level to the Division I FCS level.

Each of the past two seasons, Carroll has produced the Frontier Conference defensive player of the year. And each time, that player has subsequently transferred to Montana.

“It shows well for our ability to develop,” Carroll head coach Troy Purcell told MTN Sports, “where they didn’t have that opportunity, and now with our coaching and our structure here and our culture here, to develop fine young men and great football players.”

On Dec. 10, Saints cornerback Braeden Orlandi — the NAIA’s reigning tackles leader — announced he was leaving Helena for Missoula. And the year before, it was NAIA All-American Hunter Peck trading Purple and Gold for Maroon and Silver. And following his first regular season with the Griz, Peck made the Big Sky all-conference first team, something he credits his time at Carroll for making possible.

“They did a great job with taking me in, developing me not (just) into a football player, but a young man, as well,” Peck said of his four years at Carroll. “And so, those life lessons are ones that you take off the football field and are arguably the most important part of the game.”

So, in this transfer-portal-and-NIL-dominated era of college athletics, the Carroll coaching staff said they understand their position in the larger college football ecosystem.

“Let us develop you. Let us make you the best you can possibly be for two to three years, get some tape, get some good film out there,” Purcell said. “You get some great ball in along the way. And then when the time is right, and it looks good, you have an opportunity to go up, maybe put a little money in your pocket, and get to play at a higher level. So, maybe that kid could be a walk-on but now has an opportunity to play for us, and like I said, we can develop him.”

COLUMBUS, Ohio — They wore red aprons, waited their turn in a line of volunteers and carried bags filled with toys through the Lausche Building at the Ohio Expo Center & State Fairgrounds.

In their actions, they were unassuming, helping bring holiday joy to families in central Ohio. But these volunteers were far from unrecognizable in Columbus.

They were safety Jaylen McClain, defensive tackle Eddrick Houston, safety Caleb Downs and running back James Peoples — a collection of some of Ohio State football’s top contributors this season.

And they were there to fulfill a vision of McClain’s.

The McClain family recently launched Everyday Legends — a foundation created to, “honor and uplift individuals who demonstrate excellence in scholarship, service, and sportsmanship.”

One of its first initiatives came via a partnership with the Salvation Army in Central Ohio. Courtesy of opportunities presented through college football’s name, image and likeness rules, McClain started a virtual toy drive in which donors could purchase toys through an Amazon wish list put together by the foundation with gifts going directly toward Wednesday’s event.

With his teammates working alongside him, McClain — who went to Target the day after Ohio State’s loss in the Big Ten Championship Game to ensure enough toys were purchased — helped those in a community far from his home state of New Jersey.

“I didn’t have everything, but my parents provided so much support for me and made sacrifices for my life,” McClain told cleveland.com. “Now that I have a bigger platform for myself as a college football player and NIL, I’m able to give my blessings off to other people, other foundations and be able to recognize other people that also have the blessings.”

As the foundation’s name suggests, McClain co-founded this venture with intentions of helping everyday people in our lives. His goals range from toy drives to buying uniforms for his youth football team and helping his high school, Seton Hall Prep.

“The intended goal is to provide support for any initiatives in any of those pillars (athletics, scholastics and community),” said Syreeta McClain, Jaylen’s mother.

“Your influence really carries,” she later added. “It carries some weight, so people are willing to give and people are willing to donate and make an impact. It really helps to make an impact. That’s the intended goal in all this: to be able to transcend the sport.”

Jaylen grew up in a family familiar with football.

One of his brothers, KJ McClain, recently signed with Tennessee. Another brother, Cameron McClain, is in the 2028 class with offers trickling in.

His father, Maurice McClain, played at Syracuse (1998-2001) and overlapped with Matt Patricia — a former graduate assistant for the Orange who is now Ohio State’s defensive coordinator.

Athletes such as Maurice didn’t have NIL privileges to help get through college, but his sons are experiencing a new era in the sport. They’re leaning on those opportunities to grow their foundation.

“He’s just like, ‘You’ve got the platform. Use it. If you could do it, then you should be able to do it. It goes a long way and helps other people as well,’” Jaylen said.

Others in Ohio State’s locker room have taken a similar approach in utilizing their NIL privileges.

In July, Downs’ foundation held an event at Topgolf in Columbus to raise awareness for families experiencing homelessness. Many Ohio State players and coaches were present for it.

While helping those in need, Downs also provided a blueprint for how NIL should be used in Columbus.

“He’s a great role model for not just me, but a lot of other people on this team,” Jaylen said. “… Just to be around him every day, I get to soak in a lot of stuff and just learn so much from him. To see how he carries himself, how he moves in terms of community service and how he moves on the field – obviously, it means a lot to me.”

The willingness to help comes without a need to ask, Jaylen added.

When word started to spread about Everyday Legends working with the Salvation Army, players reached out to Jaylen with intentions of assisting.

“We’re not just all about football. We actually have a soul, too, and care about others,” Houston said.

The toy drive, in part due to the effort of Everyday Legends, will provide gifts for more than 4,000 families in the area during the holiday season.

Jaylen hopes it’s only the start of creating a larger legacy in Columbus, which is also fueled by his play as Ohio State prepares for the upcoming College Football Playoff.

“I just want to be able to give back,” Jaylen said. “I want people to feel supported. I want people to feel loved.”

After decades of milestone wins on its climb to college football powerhouse status, Oregon found itself on the other side of a signature victory this season.

As Indiana celebrated on the Ducks’ home field on Oct. 11, an Oregon staffer shook the hand of a Hoosiers assistant coach and congratulated him on a 30-20 win that helped validate IU as a national championship contender.

“We’re hard to beat,” the Oregon staffer said.

No doubt. Since joining the Big Ten last year, the Ducks are 17-1 in conference play and 24-2 overall, with a league title in their debut season. Since 2010, Oregon is tied for fifth in the nation in victories with Oklahoma at 161. Only Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and Georgia have more.

“We’ve been building to a standard of what winning football looks like, regardless of conference,” head coach Dan Lanning said this week.

After the Ducks spent years breaking through barriers that previously required something akin to birthright status for entry, college football has met them where they are. Adaptability and innovation are cornerstones of the Oregon brand, so of course, no school was better prepared to succeed when NCAA amateurism crumbled and the ability to effectively pay players became a necessity for programs that aspire to win national championships.

Oregon football has never been better, but the Ducks are no longer college football’s gate-crashers.

“There’s been some great stories in college football, but it’s even harder to stay there, and (the Ducks) have found a way to stay there,” said Craig Pintens, who was a high-ranking administrator at Oregon from 2011 through ’18 before becoming athletic director at Loyola Marymount.

In this year’s College Football Playoff, Indiana, Texas Tech and Ole Miss are the new-money climbers, no longer constrained by their histories.

The Ducks? Heading into a first-round home game against 12th-seeded James Madison on Saturday, they are just another team trying to win a championship.

Well, maybe not just another team.

You see, Oregon is not quite a member of the establishment class, either. It has a lot more in common with Ohio State, Georgia, Oklahoma, Alabama and Miami these days than with the Hoosiers, Red Raiders and Rebels — with one notable exception.

That first group has combined for 13 national titles since 2000 and 34 in college football’s poll era, dating to 1936.

The Ducks are still seeking their first.

“They’ve built the entire sundae at this point,” Pintens said. “It’s just a matter of putting that cherry on the top. And it is inevitable. It’s going to happen.”

College football has never cultivated upward mobility. Past success is the best predictor of future success. Lineage and tradition are prized commodities.

The schools at the top of the food chain tend to stay there — or have an easier time getting back when they slip. Those toward the bottom generally get stuck.

There are outliers. Nebraska looks as if it may never recreate the glory days of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Clemson went from good to elite under Dabo Swinney, but that era of dominance is increasingly looking like a moment in time rather than a permanent change.

And then there’s Oregon, the most obvious exception that proves the rule.

The Ducks didn’t have USC’s Heritage Hall, a shrine to a program that claims 11 national titles and eight Heisman winners. They didn’t have Touchdown Jesus, Notre Dame’s iconic monument to the program’s essential place in the history of college football.

“We didn’t have the kinds of things that Ohio State and Texas and all these legacy programs had, but we did feel like we had a chance,” former Oregon athletic director Pat Kilkenny said.

The first baby step toward Oregon shedding its history came in Shreveport, La., of all places, with quarterback Bill Musgrave leading coach Rich Brooks’ Ducks to a victory in the program’s first postseason game in 26 years, the 1989 Independence Bowl against Tulsa.

The mid-1990s featured trips to the Rose and Cotton bowls that signaled progress but also showed the Ducks still had a long way to go: Oregon lost those games to Penn State and Colorado by a combined score of 76-26.

Nike co-founder and Oregon alum Phil Knight’s involvement and investment in the program brought a grander vision in the early 2000s. Why not put up a billboard in Times Square to promote quarterback Joey Harrington as a Heisman Trophy contender in 2001?

“I think our optimism was more about Holiday Bowl and Top 25,” said Kilkenny, an Oregon native. “But somebody like Phil Knight gets involved, that doesn’t work for him. He doesn’t want to do anything unless he can be the best.”

Oregon football had no distinguishing characteristics, so Knight helped create them.

With Nike’s help, Oregon made uniforms a differentiator in recruiting, unveiling a fresh look almost weekly.

“Being fashion-progressive isn’t exactly indicative of a strong football program, but (Knight) saw it as brand-building,” Kilkenny said.

The Ducks were on the front end of the spread offense revolution under coach Mike Bellotti, then promoted Chip Kelly to head coach and changed the way the game was played by optimizing fast-paced football.

When the facilities arms race was escalating, Oregon built its so-called Death Star, a tinted-glass fortress with a barber shop, sleep pods and tech-integrated lockers. The $68 million Hatfield-Dowlin Complex, funded largely by Knight, opened in 2013.

The Ducks reached the national championship game in 2010 and 2014, losing each time.

They haven’t been back since, which suggests the ascent has stalled. That’s not the case. Through a whirlwind of coaching changes from Kelly’s successor, Mark Helfrich, to Willie Taggart to Mario Cristobal to Lanning in the span of only seven years, Oregon was still progressing.

“I think they’ve built a tremendous culture, and that culture has turned over through multiple coaches,” said Pintens, who credits his former boss, athletic director Rob Mullens, with overseeing the continued growth at Oregon.

Even with Knight’s backing, Oregon is not among the top revenue-generating programs in college football.

“Oregon is not as resourced as some of the other top powers in college football,” Pintens said. “They lack a population base. They don’t play in a huge stadium.”

Autzen Stadium’s gameday experience is one of the best in the country, but the place seats about 56,000, about half the capacity of the largest stadiums in the Big Ten and SEC.

When Oregon spends, it spends on what matters most.

“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning,” Oregon’s Dan Lanning said earlier this season in response to then-Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy’s comments about how much the Ducks’ roster costs. “We spend to win.”

In 2020, the NCAA lifted its ban on paying college athletes for their name, image and likeness. Quickly, those deals became a proxy for paying players, and Oregon was again an early adopter. Founded by Knight and other prominent donors, Division Street quickly became one of college football’s most well-run NIL collectives, groups that pool funds from boosters to license players’ rights.

Taggart and then Cristobal had already changed the nature of Oregon recruiting, turning the school into a destination for blue-chippers, despite the school’s limited number of those prospects within its geographic footprint.

Lanning was hired away from Georgia to keep that going in 2021. His ability to embrace a more transactional form of recruiting while still establishing a winning culture has allowed Oregon to narrow the gap between itself and the likes of Ohio State and Georgia.

NIL has been “an equalizing force,” Pintens said.

“You could have better facilities, you could have better coaching, better everything, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have any dollars to support that, it’s going to be really difficult to put together a team,” he said.

The transformation that took Oregon decades is happening much faster elsewhere, as paying players spreads talent around and gives the traditional have-nots a chance to become haves.

“The historical programs that weren’t able to compete, it did give them a chance to put a little jet propulsion into their football program, if that’s where they chose to invest,” Kilkenny said.

Fourth-seeded Big 12 champion Texas Tech, with a roster backed by billionaire booster Cody Campbell that reportedly cost more than $28 million, this season won its first outright conference title since 1955.

In the SEC, sixth-ranked Ole Miss has effectively mobilized its resources with the Grove Collective and ripped off three straight double-digit victory campaigns while LSU and Florida (with a combined six national titles) fired their head coaches this season.

In the Big Ten, Indiana, which started the year having lost more games than any other major college football program, has turned unprecedented investment into an unfathomable turnaround under coach Curt Cignetti. The Hoosiers kept rolling after the win in Eugene, knocked off Ohio State in the conference title game, and enter the Playoff as the No. 1 team in the country, boasting the program’s first Heisman Trophy winner in quarterback Fernando Mendoza. The Ducks are no longer the disruptors.

“The willingness and the belief in taking what had been done and saying, OK, we can be No. 1,” Kilkenny said. “We can win it all, and we can be a national brand, that has all happened.”

Oregon’s challenge now is not just to check the last box on the resume and join the blue bloods once and for all but to keep the new wave of gate-crashers from jumping ahead of them in line on the way to the top of the mountain.

Kirk Herbstreit drew the ire of the college football world earlier this week. Now, he’s moving quickly to clear the air after a social media post sparked backlash following the Army–Navy game.

Herbstreit, who’s become the face of ESPN’s college football coverage, addressed the situation in a lengthy post on X (formerly Twitter). He apologized for what he described as a misleading caption attached to a video clip promoting his Nonstop podcast with colleague Joey Galloway.

“Just wanted to address a mistake that we made on my socials earlier this week related to last weekend’s CFB Saturday,” Herbstreit wrote. “We posted a video where Joey Galloway and I were talking about how strange it was to be home and not traveling on a CFB weekend since the end of August and how we felt like we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We posted the video with a caption that was very misleading about ‘Weird not having any CFB this weekend.’”

Herbstreit acknowledges that the wording created a bit of confusion, appearing dismissive of games that were played, most notably the Army–Navy Game: “Some took that out of context and ran with it. That’s on me,” he wrote. “My apologies for any disrespect (albeit unintentional) to the teams that played last weekend, especially [Army] and [Navy].”

The original post, which has since been deleted, included a clip from the podcast with the caption, “Saturday not having college football threw us for a loop,” accompanied by a laughing emoji. That message quickly drew a response from Navy Athletics, which quote-tweeted the post with a photo from Saturday’s game.

More on Kirk Herbstreit, Army-Navy controversy 

Alas, Navy went on to defeat Army 17–16 in one of college football’s most iconic rivalry games, a matchup that has occupied a standalone window on the Saturday following conference championship weekend for years. While it has no impact on the College Football Playoff, the game remains one of the sport’s most-watched events, averaging 7.84 million viewers on CBS.

In his apology, Herbstreit emphasized that the Army–Navy Game remains one of his favorite events on the college football calendar: “Not sure there is a game I personally look forward to more EVERY year than Army and Navy,” Herbstreit added. 

“They play for the love for each other and love for the game. Anybody who has ever watched me for the last 30 years on TV knows how I feel about that game.”

Beyond Army–Navy, last weekend still featured a full slate of college football action. Bowl season opened with Washington facing Boise State, the FCS playoffs held quarterfinal games, and South Carolina State defeated Prairie View A&M in the Celebration Bowl.

Listening back to the deleted clip itself, Herbstreit and Galloway never actually stated there was no football being played. Instead, they reflected on the unfamiliar feeling of being home for the first time since August without their usual travel routine.

Still, the initial caption struck a nerve. It highlighted how easily attention can drift toward the Playoff and power conference landscape at the expense of the broader sport.

Herbstreit closed his statement by reiterating that the controversy stemmed from miscommunication, not disrespect. At the least, he felt it necessary to publicly address the situation, and let the college football world know he meant no ill-will towards Army-Navy.

Kalen DeBoer has done his part to deny any interest in the Michigan head coaching vacancy, but that hasn’t stopped an army of vocal college football analysts from speculating that he could jump ship from Alabama and become the next head man of the Wolverines.

DeBoer signed an $87 million contract over eight years with Alabama early in 2024 as the man to replace Nick Saban, and so far the results have been up and down, but mostly positive.

However connected DeBoer may be to the Crimson Tide at this point in time, there are reportedly some serious power brokers linked to Michigan who are extending quite an invitation, according to ESPN analyst Greg McElroy.

What Michigan is offering Kalen DeBoer

“Michigan has been applying the full court press from the very beginning. Michigan has offered what I’ve been told is a blank check to try to get Kalen DeBoer out of Tuscaloosa and to Ann Arbor,” McElroy said on the Always College Football podcast.

That talk comes right as DeBoer has Alabama in the College Football Playoff, where he will seek to improve on his 0-2 record against Oklahoma in the first-round game on Friday.

“Now, the timing is unique here, because Kalen DeBoer is in the midst of preparing his team for [the playoff]. Frankly, I don’t think that Kalen DeBoer is ultimately going to take the job,” McElroy said. 

“I don’t think Kalen DeBoer wants to take the job. I think Kalen DeBoer is happy at Alabama. I think the narrative that he’s unhappy, or he’s this or that or his family doesn’t like this or his family doesn’t like that, I think it’s untrue.”

Current insider reporting suggests that DeBoer’s representatives are seeking a contract extension from the school for the coach, but that remains a very fluid situation right now with no set conclusion.

But if DeBoer should lose to the Sooners again and get the Tide bounced from the playoff early?

Sure, it would raise the temperature around his tenure, but to suggest that it would be enough for him to abandon ship and try again at Michigan is unlikely.

Michigan will still pursue, however unlikely

“I think people are just grasping at straws, but it doesn’t mean that Michigan won’t continue to try to woo him,” McElroy said. 

“It doesn’t mean they’re going to stop trying to go get him. They’re gonna try. Whatever they have to do, they’re gonna try, because there’s a lot of people that believe that Kalen DeBoer is one of the top coaches in America. So you go all in for that coach. And I think Michigan will continue to try to go all in on Kalen DeBoer.” 

It stands to reason that Michigan, which finds itself in a coaching decision it didn’t expect to be in at this point in time, will do whatever they can to attract a big name.

But what if that big name already has a big job?

The feeling between Michigan and DeBoer is not mutual

“They can be interested. Is the interest actually reciprocated? I don’t know the answer to that, frankly. I frankly don’t think it is,” McElroy said.

“I think Kalen DeBoer, like I said, will be the head coach [at Alabama] moving forward, but he’s going to likely turn down more money at Michigan if he does end up staying in Tuscaloosa. 

“At least, that’s what it sounds like right now. Because when I hear ‘blank check,’ you can interpret that how you want to interpret that. 

“It sounds like, to me, Kalen DeBoer is going to be very wealthy on either side. But I do know that Kalen DeBoer is, right now, not interested in having a conversation with Michigan, and I do know this: that Michigan is not interested, yet, in accepting, the answer no.”

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