Glass Joe

There are some interesting cross currents impacting Bama / DeBoer and navigating them will be difficult for Bama fans to digest. In the bigger picture, NIL is changing the college football landscape and hierarchy. More than anything, it’s changing the motivations and decision-making of the players themselves. Gone are the days of Saban being able to stack a 3-deep roster of elite talent based on the hope of winning championships and being developed over time for the NFL. Why? Because money is now a consideration for those players, which causes the players (and their advisors) to think to themselves “gee, I can now get paid a million dollars to play at another school, get on the field earlier, and still get to the ultimate goal of reaching the NFL”. Bama / Saban can no longer uniquely sell “come to Bama to get developed over time, win championships, and you’ll get to the NFL”. Instead, other schools can now sell “come to my school, get to the field immediately, make a million dollars in college, and still be in the NFL after 3 years”. It’s a different world now with NIL (and Portal). There’s a reason Saban quit abruptly when he did. He saw this coming. Shifting gears, more specific to DeBoer and 2025 Bama, there is certainly a cultural issue that DeBoer has to deal with that Saban never had to. As background, all the elite talent at Bama started to quickly hit the Portal in the immediate aftermath of Saban retiring (Julian Sayin, Caleb Downs, etc). The talent flight got so dicey for Bama, that their boosters had to step in and pay lots of money to stop the players from hitting the Portal. Then, DeBoer gets hired. So, culturally, you have a situation where the remaining talent originally chose Bama to play for Saban, but then chose booster money to remain at Bama once Saban retired. None of these players chose to play for DeBoer. And it showed last year. Milroe in particular was said to be resistant to DeBoer, and even chose not to show-up to practice occasionally…and he’s your supposed team leader! This offseason, it has been reported / opined that DeBoer cleaned out some of the malignant players and now the “culture is his”. But, many of the remaining talent is still there due to booster NIL paychecks post-Saban (not necessarily due to DeBoer being the coach, per se). This is going to be a difficult cultural landscape for DeBoer to navigate. His upperclassman never really chose to play for DeBoer as much as they chose Saban and then NIL to be at Bama. Additionally, Bama fans are not going to just accept that NIL and the Portal have forever changed what their expectations of Bama football should be going forward. It’s not that Bama can’t win championships any longer, it’s that Bama can’t dominate all other peer schools as they did for a decade and a half under Saban (or even under BeaR Bryant decades earlier). While Bama still has a top 5 talented roster in 2025, they need to adapt their mentality toward an NFL mindset. The KC Chiefs will likely lose 3-5 games each season and yet still be in the Super Bowl. Bama may lose 2-4 games each season, and yet still make the future expanded CFP Playoffs. You don’t have to win every Saturday, and it’s now okay to lose a few games. Adapt or die. My advice: allow DeBoer some time to let his Bama program adapt to the changing currents of college football generally, and to implement / own his culture at Bama specifically. The last thing Bama needs to do is fire DeBoer, burn $60m in buyout dollars, and then rinse-and-repeat the cycle of paying players to remain when the hire the next up and coming HC.

I think we lack the short area quickness, burst, “make a guy miss” element but not necessarily the straight-line speed element. There is no J.Blue acceleration on the current team. There is no S.Bolden zero-to-top speed in a blink guy either. Nor is there a guy with the speed / cuts of route running that we had in Bond or Golden. That is how you get open most of the time. D.Moore may have 10.6 speed, but he doesn’t have great quickness in and out of routes, nor great deceleration (stop-n-start). He’s a straight line guy. Wingo has elite straight line speed (10.5), and has great burst / acceleration, but he runs upright and kinda stiff. He is a guy who can win in wide space, but not short area space. I would not call the 2025 team a bunch of plodders, but they are not a team of guys who win with quickness / burst, not make you miss elusiveness.

@Gerry Hamilton do you think Bryant’s circle / agents want him to follow in the class after Dia Bell? Or does a path to playing time not matter as much here?

Sounds like Arch has been really…

Does anyone know the 3 groupings of NIL referenced in the chart above? A guess: ”Commercial” is legit NIL from a 3rd party commercial interest. Ex. Quinn Ewers and Dr.Pepper ads ”Collective” is the deals with the school booster collectives which tend to be more charitable-centric activities for compensation. Ex. Horns with Heart ”Collegiate” is the revenue share payments directly from the school?

I’m guessing the percentages for each positions group are an aggregation of the numbers players in each group. So, if Texas has 15 OL on the roster and 5 TE, we’d need to gross up the TEs to get some comparator of NIL spend percentage. In this example, 3.5% times 3 = 10.5%, which would reflect having an equal number of OL players and TEs on the roster. It also shows that having just 4 QBs on the roster still commands 15%-23% of the total NIL bucket.

And footballs

Offense!!! I see offense!

Prior to 1974, the UPI poll (now “Coaches Poll”), awarded the national championship after the regular season but prior to the bowl games, most notably in 1964 (Arkansas / Bama) and 1965 (MSU / Bama). It was not uncommon for the UPI national champion to lose their subsequent bowl game…since they had nothing to play for and the bowl was effectively an inter-sectional exhibition game. There have been 11 times where the UPI / Coaches poll differed from the AP Poll, but once we arrived at the BCS era, that largely resolved things (except for the final AP protest vote in 2003).

Jam Miller was really good in blitz pick-up, which will be critical for T.Simpson as he develops. Not sure what R.Young brings there.

I wonder if Sean Payton sees a bit of a Taysom Hill type of asset in Sam Ehlinger?

Who will be the starting LT if Zuhn folds inside to Center? Are they going to put true frosh L.Rogers out there to protect M.Reed’s backside this year? That’ll be a win-prevention strategy.

Well, Reed’s passing appears to be in mid-season form already.

Maybe he’s playing for the aggy basketball team instead?

Duke Pettijohn got his kid a better deal than Texas was willing to offer. Enjoy Columbus!

Most aggies can’t spell ROI

19 yards, but who is counting. 😂

You really can’t blame Zach…the long-term damage to his body of 9 career NFL carries can’t be underestimated.

Bosworth - OU Crabtree - Tech

Sark destroying Kirby during SEC media days. Love it!

Flip or no?

I hope you’re wrong. I’d prefer Bishop get all the reps possible at WR, and let Lott to elsewhere.

@Gerry Hamilton did we get outbid here, or is this Texas choosing to allocate the funds to another position (instead of paying up for a 5th DT in the class)?

Do we think this will impact Texas’ on-field success as much as missing on Denver Harris or Zach Evans?

That’s the revenue sharing component, not the total compensation. I’m not sure a P4 school is going to be competitive on the field if they choose to not payout the $20.5M allowable to athletes under the revenue sharing component. So, the $20.5m revenue share acts as a “floor” for the total compensation athletes at a P4 school can receive. But the $20.5M revenue share is not the total compensation for athletes, and doesn’t act as a compensation “cap” for athletes. Legit NIL layered on top of the $20.5M revenue share is the total athletes compensation per school, and I don’t believe there can be any “cap” on this (legally). So, the $31M for Missouri in total compensation to athletes under NIL makes sense in this context. I also think this is where the “Texas spends $35M” rumor got started a few weeks back.