mikethehiker

A long and insightful article on ESPN from a couple days ago. https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/48123438/college-football-transfer-portal-tampering-how-works-crosses-line. We all know college football recruiting, contracts, and NIL are unregulated chaos right now, but the article really shines a light on the slimy realities of this 'business'. Is this really what college football fans want to cheer for on Saturdays? I know we would all answer that a little differently. Props to Dabo Swinney if he really is trying to hold the line. I feel like transfers sitting out a year would help curb a lot of this activity. Here are some excerpts: Coaches have griped for years about the out-of-control nature of tampering across college football. But this was a rarity: A head coach [Swinney] going public with precisely how his program was wronged. And not just any coach, but one with two national title rings. He laid out the story of Luke Ferrelli, a transfer linebacker from Cal who had just enrolled at his school, moved into an apartment and went through classes and workouts for a week. And then, suddenly, he bailed for more money at Ole Miss. "Right is right even if nobody does it," Swinney said. "And wrong is wrong even if everybody does it." But now that players have agents, impermissible contact has dramatically escalated. "The tampering got much more brash and blatant," one agent said. "I don't even see why schools get mad about it," one agent said. "If you don't want your kid to be tampered with, sign them to an agreement that's fair and the kid won't be looking to go elsewhere." "You almost have to tamper at times with these schools, because they don't want to pay their own players," the same agent argued. "They just don't." According to agents, the easy way to facilitate December tampering was via three-way phone calls. The agent would call the GM or coach, then add the player to the call. That way, it's the agent showing up in phone logs and not the player. Some even held these pre-portal agent meetings over FaceTime and Zoom. "They'd done three-way calls with their coaches for four different clients as early as November," the agent said. "He's up there waxing poetic about how bad tampering is, and I've been helping you tamper for a month." Swinney and other coaches have likened the renegotiation process to extortion in some cases and know they're contending with agents who could be bluffing about offers from other schools. But that's how it works when there's no data or transparency about how much college football players are earning. "Once the kid gets on campus, that s--- has got to stop," an SEC GM said. "To me, that was the cardinal sin in that situation." "He's literally in class," an agent added. "There's no way to defend it." One ACC GM felt the Ferrelli move was nowhere near as troubling as Miami swiping star quarterback Darian Mensah from Duke at the portal deadline. The Hurricanes' last-minute push to flip Mensah away from the ACC champs resulted in Duke suing the quarterback and settling for an undisclosed sum to release him from his two-year contract. "It's like they robbed a bank in broad daylight, walked out with no mask and no alarms went off," the ACC GM said with a chuckle. One month after Swinney's news conference, NCAA vice president of enforcement Jon Duncan sent a memo to member schools warning that his group has been charged with pursuing "significant penalties" for tampering violations -- including any contact between agents and coaches about players who are not in the portal. He vowed work is underway to modernize and streamline the investigative process for more expedited resolutions. "Simply put, communicating with an agent for a student-athlete who is not in the transfer portal is a tampering violation," Duncan wrote. GMs surveyed by ESPN said they haven't turned in other programs for tampering in recent years because they view it as a waste of time. It's not easy to obtain evidence and prove it like Swinney did. More importantly, staffers don't want the NCAA imaging their phones and finding proof of their own tampering efforts. "Nobody's clean -- except maybe Dabo," the Group of 5 GM said. After years of perceived investigative inaction, GMs and agents say they'll believe a reckoning is coming when they see it. "I hate to say it," one agent argued, "but the rules are a suggestion at this point." "Let's say they do penalize Ole Miss or one of these teams," an SEC GM added. "At the end of the day, it's still going to end up in a courtroom." Tampering has become so easy to do that trying to stop it might be futile. Perhaps it's wiser to confront some of the contributing factors such as fixing the calendar, regulating agents or dealing with the schools who are spending far beyond the revenue sharing cap. "It's like trying to stop a runaway train, man," an ACC GM said.

Is this Altman's last game? OBD are down 12-33 at halftime against Maryland. We are 3 of 22 from the floor (all 3 makes from Bittle) and we're being outrebounded 26-14. Altman deserves a glorious send off in front of the home crowd, but I don't see any indications that next year gets better.

Agree on the obvious dilemma created by a conference with too many teams, but divisions could make matters worse by locking in the schedule imbalance year after year. At least the current situation allows the imbalance to rotate around. I have no sympathy for this topic. Each school is raking in cash no matter the schedule or the results. Unbalanced schedules is a 100% predictable result of having too many teams in one conference.

Eight D1 power conferences with 8-10 teams each based on geography. Complete round robin for each conference allows all teams to face off. No conference championship game needed. Top 2 go to playoffs. If you're not top 2, you're not a champion, try again next year. (There is a loophole that allows a mid-major to replace a 2 if certain thresholds/ranking are not met.) Playoffs: 1st weekend in December: Top 2 from each conference go to a regional playoff where 1's battle 2's at home. 2nd weekend in December: Remaining 8 are seeded and square off with top seed at home. January 1st: Semifinals Next reasonable Saturday: Championship All players are unpaid amateur student athletes. The stage college football offers and their education is their reward. All players must sit out one year following a transfer to another D1 school with the exception of graduate transfers. All head coaches under contract cannot take another D1 position without sitting out for one year. As long as we're dreaming, that's my dream.

SEC is 2-7 in the playoffs the last three years against other P4 opponents. Both wins from Texas in the '24-'25 playoff against Clemson and ASU. The SEC hasn't beaten a BIG opponent in that stretch.

And don't forget, the SEC now plays 9 conference games. No more padding wins. Half of the SEC will have an additional loss leading to 2-3 less ranked teams. Perception will finally start matching reality.

A few of my observations: As other have noted, we have a very early bye this year (Week 5) along with UCLA. Only Northwestern has an earlier bye (Week 2 yuck). There is only one bye this year for the first time since 2023. There is no incentive to play in the conference championship game after playing 8 weeks in a row. When conferences were smaller and included divisions, conference championship games were rarely headliner affairs. Now, they are extra playoff games with seemingly no upside (unless you need the automatic bid). Illinois is the only team that gets extra time before playing Oregon (UCLA and Oregon have the same bye) - much better!! All non-west coast B1G teams have exactly one road trip to the west coast in 2026. West coast teams will make 3-4 trips back east across two or three time zones. Ohio St. has a nice trap game at USC prior to hosting OBD and coming off a bye after @ Indiana. Oregon catches a bit of a break with only three B1G trips back east and we get to play all three west coast teams, but didn't do ourselves a favor with the OOC Oklahoma St. trip. Hope it helps with recruiting.

The play I questioned was on 3rd down (and 5). You still get the field goal on 4th down to go up by 6 if you don't get the first down. The point is that you do everything you can to win the game on 3rd down instead of handing the ball off into a loaded box. Play action with the ball in Mendoza's hands to win the title vs handing the ball to Miami with plenty of time to steal your championship. The last Miami drive could have ended very differently for Indiana - don't give them that chance.

I noticed the same thing during the game when Indiana called that timeout. Great move to get reorganized and spell your pass rushers. However, I did take issue with Cignetti on Indiana's previous drive to not put the ball in Mendoza's hands to get the first down (throwing). Whether Indiana fails throwing or running, they still kick the field goal and Miami gets the ball with 1:42 left. With that much time on the clock, I feel the timeout is low impact in college football with clock stopping on first downs. Indiana should have done everything possible to get that first down instead of the lazy handoff to burn Miami's last timeout. Willingly giving it back to Miami with 1:40+ remaining was a huge mistake in my opinion. Fortunately, it didn't cost them.

A-. This was supposed to be a rebuilding year for one of the younger rosters in college football. The minus is for Dante and coaching staff not making greater strides and adjustments after a very promising start. Thinking back to Lanning's success, had Bo Nix not been injured near the end of the 2022-23, OBD would have likely survived Washington and ran the table to the playoff as the #3 seed. The "only losing to national championship game participants" would have held true for all four years under Lanning. Remember #4USC was primed for a playoff berth had they beaten Utah for the PAC12 title. That should have been OBD pounding USC and we would have jumped TCU who lost the BIG12 title game.

Ohio St. not having the luxury of Caleb Downs will have a massive impact. Generational player.

I can't remember one season since our Final Four run where we have not had to deal with a significant amount of injuries to at least one key player. We have also lacked "grown men" who can put the team on their shoulders and deliver when it matters most. The lone exception and outlier to this was Payton Pritchard during the last half of the 2018-19 campaign and the 2019-20 season that was cut short, robbing all of us of what could have been an epic run. Couisnard came close, but was still inconsistent and didn't have enough veterans around him.

We are in an outstanding position! Every fan forum in the country is trying to figure out how their team is going to take the next step next year. Even Indiana needs to figure out how to retain their momentum. For OBD, the next step is for Dan Lanning and the team to finally win "a big game". In our position, it's the national championship (since we only lose to national champions). A Big Game(TM) for most other schools may be beating Florida St., Texas Tech, Washington St., or even Oregon. That's why we're here. To help Dan Lanning and co. figure it out. Without us, they'd be spiraling into another USC.

When we are facing a team with equal or better talent levels (1-2 games per year) and that team is mentally locked on to us, we can't seem to get over the hump. No doubt Lanning has the team motivated. But it takes more than motivation and talent to win it all. It takes coaching X's and O's and recognizing what the other team is doing. I'm convinced we don't have the right coaching experience in the room to get us over the hump which is why I'm also disappointed that we didn't go externally for new coordinators, especially if Lanning knew in advance that Stein and Lupoi were looking to take off. I'm also convinced that it takes a perfect storm to win the national title in the CFP era. Ohio St. had a boatload of experience, a chip on their shoulder and generational players on both sides of the ball in Jeremiah Smith and Caleb Downs. Indiana is unlike anything I've ever seen in college football and will lose a massive amount of experience next year. Maybe next year will be our perfect storm with all the players returning. Will it be enough to overcome our lack of coaching experience?

Thank you. That could make sense, especially with Lanning's close relationship with Dillingham.