Seller's market
The current state of college sports means it's always a good time to be a free agent and, as the chaos at Tennessee shows, free agency is every day.
Before we get started this week, a couple quick bits of housekeeping.
1. If you’ve read this and found it a worthy experience, please consider tapping the little “subscribe” button below.
Why? Well, here’s my thinking:
While I continue to use X and Bluesky, I’m increasingly pessimistic about the value of either. Whereas something like this newsletter will likely equate to a much smaller audience, it also will be (hopefully) a more engaged one. The idea here is to share some thoughts, analysis and other fun stuff with more context than X/BS afford. The more folks who subscribe, the more we can create a community for further conversation, too. Will any of that actually happen? No idea. But it’s free, so what’s the harm in trying?
2. After a month off due to basketball, Andrea Adelson and I return with Inside ACCess tonight on ACCN at 6 pm. We’ll be discussing QB battles around the ACC, including Syracuse’s decision to name Rickie Collins the starter so early; tackling the college football calendar and why spring has become such a hot topic; and we’ll be discussing the best Kirkland-brand products with Stanford coach and Costco shopper, Frank Reich.
Additionally, did you know Haynes King has a children’s book coming out? With that in mind, Andrea and I will be digging into some other great options for ACC literature as you search for some good summer beach reads.
So, be sure to tune in tonight at 6 pm on ACCN (or during the many re-airings in the coming days) because you will not find a college football show filled with less actual college football talk than this one.
On to our primary topic for this week: The Portal.
Here’s a fun fact: I have a bachelor’s degree in economics.
I actually worked in accounting for a few years, but turns out I was not cut out for office life, went back to school for a journalism degree, and have largely forgotten anything I used to know about the economy.
But a few things remain. Tariffs are bad, for example. And the Laffer Curve is a thing that used to seem important. Of course, the easiest and most important thing to know about macroeconomics is supply and demand. It’s the underpinnings of capitalism, and it suggests that the price of a good is determined by the intersection of the supply curve and the demand curve.
There are, of course, lots of markets for which a simple understanding of supply & demand doesn’t quite work because the markets themselves are not entirely free and open. Health care is a good example. No one wants to die, so the demand for good health care cannot be a reasonable way to dictate prices (and, as such, prices for health care are exorbitant).
College sports right now is in a similar place but for much different reasons. As one AD told me, the current state of athlete compensation is something akin to irrational capitalism.
Let’s look at the basics:
Schools are crying about a need for cash, but the truth is, they’ve never had more to spend on athletes. Rev share (which is coming in July hopefully) means any school can spend up to $20.5M directly on athlete compensation. For football, on average, this probably works out to about twice as much as the average school was spending just a year ago through their collectives.
Those collectives still exist and have money, and because the rev share calendar won’t begin until July, any money spent on players today won’t count toward the “salary cap” of $20.5M, meaning schools are incentivized to spend a bunch of up-front money right now.
The demand curve for winning isn’t exactly as inelastic as the one for remaining alive, but it’s pretty close, meaning that there’s always someone out there who values the chance to add one more win to his or her school’s record at a dollar figure far beyond anything rational.
So, let’s take the case of former Tennessee QB Nico Iamaleava, who forced his way onto the open market despite having signed what was, at the time, the most eye-popping contract in college football history just over two years ago.
Iamaleava, the No. 23 overall recruit in the class of 2023, signed a then-unprecedented deal with Tennessee's NIL collective in 2022, one that would pay more than $8 million over his college career, when he committed to the program.
But times change quickly. That $2 million per year he was making suddenly seemed like chump change — even for a QB who completed less than 58% of his throws against teams with a winning record last year.
On average, according to numerous coaches I’ve spoken with, players’ NIL takes this year have increased somewhere between 2x and 3x year-over-year. The upshot of that is someone like Carson Beck will earn close to double what Cam Ward did a year ago, despite Ward being on the brink of a Heisman and Beck coming off a season-ending injury. The supply of good QBs is unchanged from past years, but the demand for getting one is way up — in part because schools have more money to play with, and in large part because the people cutting these checks are not viewing the ROI rationally.
In last week’s newsletter, I wrote that I was dubious the Big East would drastically outspend Power Four leagues for basketball talent just because they didn’t have to worry about also funding football, but I spoke with a coach this past week who disagreed. His rational was this: In hoops, unlike football, one or two players really can make an immense difference. And in a market in which there basically is no such thing as a long-term contract (see: Iamaleava, Nico), there’s really not a lot of risk in spending big because you get to start fresh again next year. And when coaches and ADs risk getting fired for not winning, all the incentives push toward one goal: Win at any cost.
I do think this will change. Irrational markets don’t remain irrational indefinitely. Usually cooler heads prevail. But as with toilet paper at the start of COVID or eggs a couple months ago, buyers can behave quite irrationally in the short term, and that can create some major chaos in the market.
In college sports, irrationality is the norm, and the business side of things basically has no rules right now. So, add it all up, and Iamaleava’s story all but an inevitability.
BC & Louisville’s Big Four
I was looking for some cheap ways to create some #content during these bleak months between the end of the NCAA tournament and the start of fall camp, and I figured it might be fun to come up with an all-time, all-sports Mt. Rushmore for various schools.
I’ll roll out schools one at a time over the next few months, but I posted my picks for Louisville and Boston College last week.
For Louisville: Lamar Jackson, Darrell Griffith, Angel McCoughtry and Denny Crum (though I'm a bit torn on selecting coaches).
For BC, I went with Sam Apuzzo, Doug Flutie, Johnny Gaudreau and Matt Ryan (though I might flip that to Luke Keuchly).
Of course, there are a few ways to look at this, but I tried to prioritize a) impact at the school, b) legacy at the school and c) diversity of selections by sport (not all football or men's hoops, which feels boring).
Let’s hear your thoughts, too… Either comment on this post or VOTE HERE.
Q Day is Coming
I was talking with Duke coach Manny Diaz a while back about the random celebrities you meet, and he told me the story of his first meeting with Jerry Seinfeld.
Two of Jerry’s kids go to Duke, and his wife, Jessica, chairs the school’s parents committee. At a parents’ event last spring, the Seinfelds were there, and Manny was guest speaker. And that would’ve been a fun story about meeting Jerry Seinfeld except there’s more…
As the two are chatting, three Duke students come up and introduce themselves and tell them they’re in the quantum mechanics department and proffer a tour of the school’s quantum computer.
So, Manny and Jerry spent 15 minutes learning about quantum physics and inspecting… this.
Anyway, I was thinking about that story when reading this piece from Wired that the Quantum apocalypse — or “Q Day” as it’s being called — will soon be upon us, and the folks who crack this code will, quite literally, have the keys to every encrypted device in the world.
And honestly, if Manny and Jerry Seinfeld had the password to all my stuff, I’m OK with that.
Clemson’s got game
Remember how Clemson’s receivers were a giant disappointment for the past three or four years?
Well, times have changed.
ESPN released its list of the top 10 wideouts in the country, and Clemson landed two on the list — Antonio Williams and Bryant Wesco.
This, of course, doesn’t include TJ Green, a burgeoning star, or Tyler Brown, who led the team in receiving in 2023. It also doesn’t include Tristan Smith, who has some thoughts…
“Three Waves of Terror” is what I used to call Goldschlager, Fireball and Jagermeister, but I guess it fits here, too.
That’s it for this week, but I’ve got some bigger plans for future newsletters, so consider tapping the “subscribe” button below and, in a few years when this is the hottest spot on the Intergoogles, you can tell all your friends you liked it before it got cool.