Glass Joe

(Bonus KU/Mizzou fact: Mizzou has the same number of Big 12 wins between 2008 and 2023 as Kansas, despite being in the SEC since 2013.) That is an astounding factoid. Ugh, poor KU.

Yeah, I think Campbell is focused on 2031 when the media rights deals of the ACC and B12 expire. And more importantly, the CFB Playoffs contract is up for renewal. This will mark the Waterloo of college football as many of us have always known it. Campbell realizes the ACC powers are heading for P2 conferences (FSU, Clemson, Miami, UNC, and a few others), and the ACC as we now know it will go the way of the old Pac-12. When this happens in 2031, you’ll have something like 40-44 schools in the P2 conferences (today, it’s 34 schools, add ND, and add the top 6-7 schools that leave the ACC in 2031 = 42 schools). The media partners will then be faced with a big decision of the P2 conference media deals, and the CFB Playoff deal. The issue will be: do we close off the P2 with 42-44 schools? Or, do we invite a few additional castoffs from the B12 and call it a 48-school P2 structure? Campbell is trying to get Tech to be one of those small handful of B12 schools that gets an invitation to the P2 in 2031, should any B12 schools get invited at all. I imagine the P2 will wind-up at 48 schools, so that leaves 5-6 schools openings, but the B12 schools will also be competing with those non-top 6 ACC schools that haven’t already been invited into the P2 (FSU, Clemson, UNC, Miami, UVA, et al). Here is where things can get dicey. Disney / ESPN already exclusively own the rights for the SEC and ACC schools. They are likely to be the media partner that gets first dibs on the top ACC schools, since Disney controls their rights until 2036. That means as the SEC expands to add top ACC schools, it’s likely to be adding schools that make sense for its geographic and demographic viewership. That means the southeast U.S. and into the mid-Atlantic region. More importantly, it does NOT extend to the western or midwestern U.S. That means FOX will be the media entity selecting the final 5-6 refugee schools from among the B12 and any ACC leftovers that SEC (Disney) doesn’t want. How will FOX approach this decision? Well, they have already invested in the west coast (USC, UCLA, UW, Oregon), but do they want to add a few schools to form a 6-8 school division? Say, Arizona State and a Bay Area team (Cal or Stanford)? What about adding some presence in the mountain states (Colorado, Utah)? Or, does FOX want to buttress its presence in the mid-Atlantic media markets (Eastern time zone) to offset SEC encroachment? Maybe WVU or UVA or VT? It doesn’t take too long to figure out that the B12 schools in the central / plains aren’t going to be the top choices here. KU, ISU, KSU, Baylor, Tech, Okie State, etc. There simply isn’t any incremental media revenue to be additive to a media rights deal by including these schools. The Big Ten already owns the corn belt (Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana), so doubling down with ISU / KSU / KU / OSU makes little sense. I would say this to Campbell’s idea that growing the pie solves his problem: Just because the pie gets bigger, doesn’t mean your slice of it will too. It’s still a competitive feeding situation, not just a bigger trough. A quick look at B12 football viewership plummeting in the last season (sans Texas and OU) tells you all you need to know about the individual value and viability of most of the current B12 schools. And Campbell shouldn’t expect the executives at Disney and FOX to be too dumb to realize this as well.

All that matters is Sark’s shoe game. It’s elite.

All I was thinking about when USF made that game winning FG was Heze Kent and K.Guervil standing on the Florida sideline thinking to themselves WTF?

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?