The thing about covering a college football team is that it leaves you less time to actually, ya know, watch football.
It was a good week for East Tennessee State to be out of town. (We still covered the game, with a live report and a full recap).
Did you enjoy Saturday as much as I did? Did you enjoy seeing five of the top 16 teams in the country get beat? (To be fair, one of those was guaranteed, with No. 2 Georgia taking on No. 6 Alabama). That doesn’t count close calls for fellow ranked teams Indiana and Tennessee. Or games like Virginia Tech-Cal and Syracuse-Virginia that went down to the wire.
If you liked the chaos on Saturday, then do me a favor. Take a moment, detach from your sentimentality, and thank the current system in college football. Yes, the one you can’t stand. The one with no limits on player compensation. The one with (gasp) unlimited transfers. The one that the bluebloods and the Senate want to overturn. Because that current system continues to create unprecedented levels of parity in major conference football. And great action like Saturday,
I asked J.T. Chadwell, our resident sports betting writer, how much it would have paid if you had taken Saturday’s biggest surprise winners – Oklahoma, UCLA, Kentucky, and South Carolina – all against the money line. His highly unofficial estimate? For all four of those teams to win on Saturday, odds of about 225/1.
Remember when the College Football Playoff first began in 2014? Those first seven years, before NIL, looked like this.
Alabama made it six times, and won the championship three times with five appearances in the title game. Clemson made it six times in a row, won two titles, and made four trips to the championship game. Ohio State reached the playoff four times, won the inaugural title and reached the national championship game in 2020. Oklahoma made four appearances in those seven years.
I got bored just recounting this repetition, it’s probably worse reading it.
Since NIL? Five different champions in five years, and nine teams that advanced to the title game. There were four in the seven seasons prior – Bama, Clemson, Ohio State, and LSU in 2019 – and six teams that reached the title game.
In the current system, turnarounds don’t take a four- or five-year cycle. They can happen in a single offseason. And they do. That’s why Indiana transformed from one of the worst FBS teams in the nation, historically speaking, to defending national champion in two seasons. It’s why a Texas A&M team that was undefeated for almost all of 2025 is off to a 3-3 start in 2026, with its coach taking shots at the online hub of the fanbase (never a good idea) and a trip to the Gator Bowl looking like a best-case scenario. That’s why UCLA, 3-9 last year, is a legitimate playoff contender midway through this season.
But it’s not like you can just buy a championship either. The Aggies spent $45-50 million on their roster. LSU, which already has two losses, checks in somewhere above $40 million. Oregon? Between $48 and 54 million. (All these estimates come from The Athletic).
It’s not about how much you spend, it’s what NIL and the portal give you access to, from a roster-building standpoint. Deny it, like Clemson has, and you risk a slide into irrelevancy. The playing field is leveled, arguably like it has never been at any point in the modern history of the sport. It’s like buying into a poker tournament. You get a seat at the table, and you take your chances.
Sure, you’ve still got your traditional powers. But they can’t stock their entire roster with top-flight talent anymore. Those guys leave now for opportunities elsewhere. It’s how a school with a moribund football history like Kentucky lands a player like Kenny Minchey, who was simply scintillating Saturday night against LSU. That’s Minchey, who spent the prior three years at Notre Dame where he attempted 23 passes, total. That same dude, torching Lane Kiffin’s top-dollar collection of transfers, looking like a star player regardless of the jersey he was wearing or the logo on the side of his helmet.
Watching the end of that Kentucky game, seeing that sea of blue on the field, that had to stir something … unless you’re an LSU fan, in which case it stirred a very different feeling. Without NIL and the portal, that moment doesn’t happen.
That’s what people who hate NIL, who loathe the portal, overlook. They combine to create opportunities.
Is the current system ideal? Absolutely not. Does it need tweaks? Sure. But major changes to NIL compensation will bring us back to the days when you can count the number of legitimate championship contenders on both hands – or one hand – and have fingers left over.
It’s chaos, but there can be a beauty in that chaos. We saw it Saturday night.
And I, for one, am ready for more of it.
1 comment
$40-$50 million this year. How much does a contender cost in spring’27? The Big 12 sold out to monster… so-fi and Strauss have ponied up. There is always the campus side of Neyland to bastardize! And as you have pointed out, for every Minchey that is worth twice what they paid him, there is a team full of LSU and Tx A&M tanking with their hand out! It’s just NOT sustainable. Before long it will be the same teams again. Maybe different ones than before, but the 4-5 willing to pay will compete. The rest will be bankrupt or simply unable to raise enough to compete with the Dodgers and Yankees….ooops! Wrong sport just the same result.