Pagoda

The portal is "officially" open. I'm sure no contact has occurred with any players or schools until this morning. Per Matt Zenitz: "In the first seven hours of the transfer portal window being open, there have already been 1,101 FBS scholarship players that have entered the portal."

Looking back at the game, the Fernando TD throws were of course awesome. Easily some of the most exciting IU athletics plays I've ever seen. But those Black and Hemby rushing TDs were so damn satisfying. IU kept wearing down Alabama until they broke and we ran right through their entire #9 SP+ defense full of "high end" recruits with 18 and 25 yard runs. Those two were superb yesterday and I'm glad they got a couple scores.

Haha. This was pre-game! Classic Cig.

He's an interesting one. He grew up in Alabama, was and probably still is an Alabama fan, and he moved here in 2021. I haven't seen any strong predictions. Hartline to USF probably reduces OSU's chances. There has been some recent chatter that he was a Bama lean. But, you can't help but wonder after that lopsided Rose Bowl result. Which offense do you want to play WR in? The nice thing is if he comes here, great. He's awesome and the buzz would be fun. If he doesn't... I will not care or worry one iota. Literally zero zilch nada.

Postgame presser

Grim CFP Bye Reaper…

Another great stat.

I am going to consume every piece of post game analysis and reaction I can find over the next 48 hours. I didn’t catch any bball titles at my age. This is the best IU win of my life… so far. What a win at Memorial Stadium West. Definitely tearing up…

The news about strong ticket sales to IU-heavy areas is starting to prove out in reality. We always traveled well for bball and we are now doing it for football. A big IU crowd tomorrow could make a serious difference. Great job by IU fans.

Gopher Dan continues to ruffle SEC feathers.

Turbo is a great name for a RB. Welcome Turbo.

Yea, I’d like to see pro (NFL, NBA) style multi-year contracts. Would cut down on the transfers, which are especially bad in CBB. Transfers aren’t as bad in CFB, but real contracts would be good there too. Need a CBA for this I’d assume. I don’t know.

Official Rose Bowl Q&A (background noise is what it is...) I liked this: Q. You know about the Bama mystique. How do you convince the players that you're playing this team, not that tradition? CURT CIGNETTI: You probably know more about the mystique than they do. Our guys just know what they see on tape.

I definitely get people missing the pre-NIL days, even though many players were getting paid under the table. Especially pre-2000 before the media deals got really big. As Home Jersey said pre-NIL wasn't the worst travesty ever, there are much bigger problems in the world. I guess I just can't expect players to forgo making money so CFB feels extra pure to the fans. A tough part of this is there isn't an alternative to CFB. No foreign league can support thousands of graduating high school football players, plus that's an unreasonable ask for high school players to leave the US. High school grads are too young and not ready for the NFL, and only a small percentage (~2%) of CFB players go pro. For many, CFB is the pinnacle of their football career. With P4 athletic depts generating $120-300M of revenue and ~75-80% of that coming from football, it's just very hard to justify telling anyone who wants to play in the only football league available to players three years post-high school you cannot make money or else you're ineligible. Maybe it would work if the whole thing were really amateur. That would be volunteer coaching staffs, $5 ticket prices to just cover stadium costs, and small media deals only for distribution with games also streamed for free on YouTube. But in reality everything is highly professional already and asking only the players to be amateurs is inconsistent. I'm not even sure players getting paid is much of a problem. The bigger issue is the lack of strong and logical governance around the game. That's wreaking havoc on CBB now, but the cause of that is the NCAA and its member institutions.

On a semi-related note I recall when they beat us in bball a couple years ago we had a deluge of Auburn fans going wild in the comments under every post from the IUBB Official Account. Like hundreds of comments talking about how they were the real blue bloods and we sucked etc etc. I can't recall any other fanbase doing that. So I would concur. They're a nasty bunch. Maybe their biggest rival doing so well has affected them.

No, as much as the don't pay players crowd wants to put huge values on full rides and merch, the fact is that's worth ~$25-75K per year. We can argue the exact number, but it ain't much, especially when one considers the lower marginal cost to the university to provide it. And it's way, way less than what P4 football players are worth. That's why we've seen P4 CFB rosters get paid $15-40M plus full rides and merch after the House Settlement -- that's their market value. These aren't children. They're adults. Adults with very rare, unique, and valuable skills. And in the United States of America people are allowed to negotiate employment terms, compensation, and get paid if people what to pay them. I don't like the opt-outs, but I recognize the economic incentive and rationale that leads to it. A player is not going to risk playing a game with little meaning and put their athletic earnings potential of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars at risk. Some of these games are so meaningless the program itself opts out. This year 10 teams did, some examples are Notre Dame, Kansas State, and Iowa State. Agreed to employment terms includes opt-outs. If schools don't like the opt-outs, they have to negotiate with the players. Just like in every other employment scenario. I've read some rev share deals have an opt-out penalty. One thing I won't do is demand players risk their careers to play in the Nobody Cares Bowl so I can have a sliver of extra entertainment during the holidays.

Perhaps the weirdest hire of the cycle.

It’ll be mildly interesting to see if the crowd bothers to give Bryson much of a cheer or a jeer. It feels like he was barely here. Regardless, he’ll always be part of the IU family. <3

On the NIL part of his deal, while as we know in reality it's pay for play, NIL cannot technically be tied to playing or anything performance related. So he gets all the NIL. As a bonus for him they probably front loaded his NIL this season to avoid the Clearinghouse launch. For the rev share part of his deal, I have no idea what's market, but this is the component that probably could be a little more variable. However I'd guess he still gets a decent chunk of it, all these deals seem player friendly in this very competitive market. Of course the other question is what is the mix between rev share and NIL. I don't know how that's usually handled. Overall -- if I had to guess he's probably $1.5M+ down the drain for TAMU.

lol -- Credit to this Minny fan for posting this and getting CFB twitter and LSU fans all fired up. Ragebait as the kids call it!

A game of this stature got us some rare Haines and Shanny pressers:

If you did that programs would just spend the same money for the top D2/D3 players. You’re missing that college fans root for good college teams, and to be a good team you need good players, and those good players are rare and worth a lot of $, to the tune of $15-40M for a football roster. We can trot out walk-ons for IUFB and IUBB, we will stink, and no one will go to games despite the name on the front of the jersey.

In whatever landscape there is going forward, I think even some B1G and SEC schools may be in a precarious position. For example, there are a few (but I've got one in mind) bad football programs in the B1G/SEC that are showing little sign of investing more in their FB program. Schools are very competitive for revenue right now, and I've got to think conferences are going to look at schools that aren't investing in football and add very little to the next media rights deal and ask themselves if they want send those schools $100M+ per year in media rights, which of course adds up to $1B+ over ten years. Why not cut their share or boot them? Let the contributing schools keep that money. Right or wrong, it wouldn't be surprising if that happened in my opinion... Thankfully, our guy Scott gets this, he said, "In the Big Ten, you need to be relevant in football to be a relevant member in your conference. We want to pay our fair share and be a valued member in football." Some people get upset with Scott over CDD/IUBB not going great, regardless of it that's true or not, they're missing the big picture. Scott's #1 priority is making IUFB an appealing media property. Not an easy task at all, but he's doing it, and hopefully he keeps it up. If IUFB stinks and no one wants to watch us, all of IU athletics has an uncertain future.