Steamboat Willie

A smaller group of programs with scale, donor depth, media value, and political leverage will keep playing at the highest level. Everyone else will quietly redefine “competitive” and call it sustainability. Not because they want to — because the math forces it.

That take is probably closer to the truth than most people want to admit. What we’re watching isn’t some abstract NIL growing pain — it’s a capital structure problem finally colliding with reality. A bunch of schools are operating like pro franchises without pro revenue certainty, and now they’re layering leverage on top of volatility. That works right up until it doesn’t. The timing you’re pointing to is key. TV deals rolling over, ACC exit fees collapsing, private equity sniffing around future distributions — all of that converges around the same window. When that happens, the sport won’t politely rebalance. It’ll bifurcate.

A rewrite for Tuesday: Careful — that’s not Portal Claus on the roof anymore. That’s his private-equity cousin, and he brought term sheets. Here comes Krampus, here comes Krampus, Right down Deadline Lane. Funds advancing, futures financing, Revenue shares in chains. NIL checks, backroom decks, Discounted cash-flow dreams. What fun it is to hit refresh While PE buys tomorrow’s teams. Same tune. Corporate lyrics. Merry Transfermas — now with leverage.

Short version: The Big 12 didn’t find a new revenue stream.It found a way to advance its allowance. Whether that’s smart leverage or a payday loan depends entirely on how well these schools spend it — and how ugly the next round of realignment gets. Either way, welcome to college football’s private equity era. Please keep your receipts.

So apparently the Big 12 has decided it doesn’t want to wait around for money anymore and is partnering with a private equity–backed fund to… checks notes …borrow against its own future. Very on-brand. Here’s the gist: a new entity gets created, some conference commercial rights get parked in it, and a finance group backed by RedBird and Weatherford waves around up to $500 million in upfront cash. Schools can opt in, take the money now, and repay it later by giving up future conference distributions. It’s basically revenue sharing meets Payday Loans. To be clear, this isn’t free money. This is the conference equivalent of saying, “Yes, I understand the interest rate, but have you seen the portal?” For schools feeling squeezed by NIL demands, roster churn, and the general chaos of modern college football, this is a tempting lifeline. Immediate liquidity to keep up with the Joneses, plug holes, and stay competitive. For others, it’s a long-term mortgage on future payouts in a sport where the future changes every six months. The most Big 12 part of this? It’s optional. Opt in if you need cash now. Opt out if you think you’ll be better off later. Translation: the resource gap inside the conference is about to get louder, not smaller. Zooming out, this is another signal that college football is done pretending it’s not a business. Conferences aren’t just leagues anymore — they’re balance sheets with logos. And once private capital starts slicing up “future distributions,” there’s no unringing that bell. History says those bets usually age… creatively.

At this point, “expand the playoff” isn’t a policy discussion — it’s a trailer ESPN keeps running between commercials. 1) 16 is coming. Not because anyone found religion on fairness, but because the current setup keeps producing “wait… that team is out?” moments that are bad for credibility and great for programming. The only real suspense is whether they announce it as “listening to stakeholders” or “Phase 2 of the visionary roadmap we totally had.” 2) The 24-team crowd is basically asking for NFL vibes in a sport with wildly unbalanced schedules. More teams does reduce committee power, sure — but it also turns September into a suggestion and November into a seeding show. If you want “everybody gets a shot,” that’s fine, just be honest you’re buying more content, not protecting the regular season. 3) Record floors sound clean until you remember schedules aren’t. An 8–4 can be “mediocre” in one league and “survived a woodchipper” in another. The real problem isn’t “too many teams,” it’s “too few comparable résumés.” If you’re going to expand, do it with objective inputs so we’re arguing about football instead of vibes. 4) The fix is boring, which is why it’ll never be pure: Use a BCS-style blend (multiple polls + SOS + efficiency) to pick the field Keep a committee, but handcuff them to seeding only Minimize/avoid auto-bid gymnastics that reward conference branding over actual strength And let’s not kid ourselves: whatever format we land on, ESPN will still crank out an all-day symposium titled “Is Losing Actually Bad?” because the drama isn’t an unfortunate side effect — it’s the product they’re selling.

At this point the NIL/portal landscape looks less like recruiting and more like a swap meet with Wi-Fi. Outside of a very small circle of guys who are functionally untouchable, almost everyone is available if the timing and the check clear. Agents aren’t “gauging interest” anymore — they’re circulating price lists. Personnel departments aren’t scouting in the traditional sense; they’re filtering options. And the agent world? Let’s call it wildly inconsistent. Some operate like professionals. Others are still playing fantasy GM, floating numbers that have no connection to on-field production and hoping one school panics. The market does correct eventually, but not before a lot of absurd asks get laughed out of the room. So when a solid-but-not-irreplaceable veteran walks, it’s rarely a meltdown. It’s arithmetic. A number came across the table that didn’t align with long-term priorities, so the staff reallocates and keeps moving. That money doesn’t disappear — it just gets reassigned to a different profile they believe offers more upside. At the end of the day the question is simple: do you double down on what you already have, or do you repurpose that same budget into something you think can move the needle more? That choice isn’t personal, sentimental, or dramatic. It’s roster math.

I’m not rooting for OU or A&M. I’m rooting against the joy of everyone involved. Best outcome? They win just enough to annoy Miami and Bama fans, then get absolutely flattened later so nobody’s happy. Failing that, I’m with Team Asteroid.

This isn’t some mystery spiral — it’s aztec roster math meeting the modern calendar. Two upper-class linebackers are heading to the draft. One multi-year starter hit the portal after being told next year wasn’t guaranteed. That leaves the bowl LB room looking like: one returning rotation guy, one hybrid who’s been playing out of position, a true freshman with almost no snaps, and a couple depth bodies who’ve mostly lived on special teams. That’s not “culture collapse.” That’s December. Short term, it means the junior LB is now the centerpiece, the hybrid finally gets to play closer to where he belongs, and the freshman gets tossed into the deep end with the lifeguard on coffee break. Everyone else is there for reps, survival, and résumé building. Long term, it tells you exactly what’s coming: linebacker just moved into must-add territory in the portal. You don’t let an experienced upper-class starter walk unless you’re either confident in the youth… or confident upgrades are coming. The bowl game itself? Secondary. This is an evaluation scrimmage with a sponsor logo. Learn who can handle it, learn who can’t, then go shopping on January 2. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got Cheez-It dust on my shirt

Well said, Starters first. Depth later. No more OL experiments.

The real solution is boring, logical, and therefore extremely unlikely: Expand to 16. Use actual data (BCS-style blends, efficiency metrics, SOS) instead of vibes. Keep the committee—but handcuff it. Seed the field, don’t decide who’s worthy of oxygen. Let the best teams in. If Duke gets smoked by Ole Miss, so be it. At least we’re arguing about football results instead of moral philosophy and “deservingness.” Blowouts happen in every playoff. That’s not a flaw—that’s evidence. And let’s not kid ourselves: no matter how clean the system is, ESPN will still stretch it into seven hours of panels, graphics, and manufactured outrage. Chaos isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the business model.

Go to 16 if you want, but let’s not pretend every résumé deserves a backstage pass. Expansion shouldn’t mean charity. An 8–4 team didn’t “just miss,” it just lost too many games. Set a floor. Nine wins minimum. That still allows a tough non-con loss, a conference punch to the mouth, and one bad Saturday without turning the playoff into a vibes-based participation bracket. Otherwise we’re not expanding competition—we’re expanding content. And we already know ESPN’s got that part covered.

Short answer: when ESPN finishes counting the ad inventory. Longer answer: sooner than later. The deadline slip to January 23 tells you everything—this isn’t about competitive balance, it’s about packaging the chaos without losing a single studio show. Nobody’s walking away from the ratings sugar rush. Translation: 16 teams is inevitable. The only suspense left is whether they roll it out as a “response to feedback” or pretend it was always part of the master plan.

I have to believe QB chaos always rattles the branches, but it doesn’t knock fruit loose right away. This doesn’t decide anything—it just keeps the "Baugh Watch" scrolling instead of ending the show. Until the portal actually opens and quarterbacks stop flirting and start committing, this is all leverage games, message-board tea leaves, and agents doing warm-up laps. Translation: mildly spicy development, zero final answers.

So, bottom line: fix the trenches, stabilize the run game, and add experience on defense. Everything else is additive, not foundational.

At this point, playoff expansion feels less like a debate and more like the inevitable next episode ESPN is already scripting. After this season’s mess, nobody with a straight face can argue the system “worked as intended.” When you’re excluding teams that could plausibly win the title, that’s not scarcity—that’s a math problem. Even the commissioners are now saying the quiet part out loud, which tells you how bad it got. The real tell isn’t the rhetoric, though—it’s the deadline. ESPN quietly sliding the decision date from December to January 23 isn’t about logistics. It’s about protecting the content pipeline. You don’t kill a controversy that drives ratings; you repackage it with more teams, more brackets, and more studio shows pretending this was the plan all along. And let’s be honest: ESPN isn’t cutting playoff ranking shows. Ever. They’ll expand the field before they reduce a single Tuesday night “who’s in at No. 11?” panel. Expansion doesn’t solve chaos—it monetizes it. So yeah, 16 teams is coming. Not because the sport suddenly found clarity, but because confusion tests better on television.

Not looking good so far!!!

Exciting Volleyball

Just for clarification sake, we are talking about the Ole Miss RB?

Sark’s “mystery search” turned out to be a seasoned SEC RB coach with deep Louisiana and Florida ties, a résumé full of 1,000-yard backs, and actual proof of development. Not a vibes hire. Not a splash hire. A grown-up hire. Florida didn’t fight to keep him, Sark moved fast, and suddenly everyone’s pretending they weren’t skeptical five posts ago. Bonus points if a certain All-SEC back “coincidentally” answers a few texts. Bottom line: this checks every box Texas needed—experience, recruiting footprint, and stability. Now please find a back who turns two yards into six so we can stop lighting candles for the interior OL.

Most if not all of it won’t happen. But the fact that it could is why college football never actually sleeps—it just doomscrolls and refreshes.

If a guy is an obvious, Day-1 upgrade, you don’t hold a symposium about “fit” — you go get him and sort the rest out later. Especially when the alternative is rerunning an interior OL experiment that already face-planted. And on Scudero: this is exactly how you end up watching a plug-and-play contributor help someone else while we congratulate ourselves on patience and development. Sometimes the easy eval is the correct one. If they make you better take the upgrades and move on!

You can respect the hustle and admit the math is brutal. One league consistently drives eyeballs, ratings, and conference-game demand; another keeps talking about “process” while hoping proximity to relevance pays rent. Markets don’t reward effort, nostalgia, or press conferences — they reward attention. So sure, everyone gets a slice under the current model. But let’s not pretend all slices are earned the same way. Some programs bring the viewers. Others bring a Venmo handle and a dream.

“Markets differentiate” means Ohio State and Texas get paid more because people actually watch them. That’s fine. That’s reality. “Monopolies protect incumbents” means the same people who built the system get Congress to freeze it in place so nobody — not schools, not athletes, not even other brands — can ever challenge it. The SCORE Act is clearly the second one. And let’s not pretend Cody Campbell is some free-market hero. He’s not arguing for markets — he’s arguing for his leverage. If Tech were printing SEC-level ratings, he wouldn’t be lecturing anyone about pooled rights and commissioner egos. He wants redistribution dressed up as disruption. So no, this isn’t about fairness. It’s about power. Campbell wants more of it. The commissioners already have it. And the SCORE Act is Congress being asked to pick a side — and pretending it’s “reform.”

The SCORE Act is being sold as the magic pill to “stabilize” college sports, which is adorable considering it mostly stabilizes the NCAA’s legal defenses and the conference commissioners’ job security. Enter Cody Campbell—Texas Tech’s billionaire booster, head regent, and newly crowned Patron Saint of Saying the Quiet Parts Out Loud—who showed up just in time to point out that the emperors aren’t just naked, they’re also terrible negotiators. Campbell says the conferences could make billions more by pooling media rights, but commissioners won’t do it because they like controlling their own little fiefdoms. The commissioners, naturally, clutched their pearls and insisted they never said pooling would increase revenue, which is hilarious because the only thing more predictable than a commissioner’s denial is a bowl game corporate sponsor. So now we’ve got a full-on soap opera: Campbell yelling that the money’s on the table, the commissioners yelling that Campbell doesn’t understand the “realities,” and Congress trying to pass a bill that gives the NCAA antitrust bubble wrap while telling athletes they’re definitely not employees but should please enjoy these newly standardized NIL guardrails. If you squint, the SCORE Act looks like “reform.” If you read it normally, it’s the conferences trying to lock in their authority before Campbell shows up with a calculator and ruins the illusion. But sure—let’s pretend the real crisis here is protecting commissioners’ feelings while the industry drifts toward semi-pro status with an “amateurism” sticker slapped on top.