college football Page 21 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

College football on Labor Day has always been a sick joke
Labor Day Weekend serving as the official kickoff for college football is still the biggest oxymoron in sports. For decades, college football was the most abhorrent, openly accepted form of free labor. Unlike their basketball counterparts, NFL-caliber athletes are forced to push themselves through t...

NIL and the reckoning of college athletics
When you give someone an inch to placate their desire for a mile, don’t be surprised when they still ask for a mile. For college football players and other student-athletes, name, image, and likeness deals were not the final step in fixing the flawed system that is college athletics, but rather a fi...

Big Ten athletes should be on the hunt for NIL deals with airlines
Soon, Big Ten teams from the Midwest and East Coast will have a “West Coast road trip,” like they do in the pros, and vice versa. But unlike professional athletes, these players won’t be getting compensated for their “jobs,” and some of them will be on commercial airplanes as they fly across the cou...

NIL deals are flawed, but Tommy Tuberville is not the solution
The latest proposed “bipartisan” piece of federal legislation to regulate name, image, and likeness deals for college athletes is being roundly applauded by the NCAA, the college coach-turned-senator who proposed it, other college football coaches, Power Five conferences, and a bunch of people who s...

The good and bad of college football's potential rule changes
As part of what appears to be a player safety initiative, the NCAA Rules Committee is considering changing a few rules in order to limit players’ “exposures” on the field. What does that mean exactly? Well, according to reports, these changes are intended to protect player health, and could, in turn...

Bowl games are now more like the preseason than the postseason
Everything they’ve done all season has led up to this game: The [insert sponsor] Bowl. These teams worked all season long so that they could get six wins and the opportunity to play in the postseason. At least that’s what bowl games are supposed to be: The culmination of the season. But if anything ...

It’s still a terrible idea to expand the College Football Playoff to 12 teams
With the Rose Bowl officially signing along the dotted line, the expansion to a 12-team College Football Playoff is official. So, starting in 2024-25, there will be a dozen schools vying for the title, and anywhere from six to 10(?) fanbases screaming about being snubbed....

It’s about time college football stopped leaning so hard on neutral-site games
In recent years, the NCAA has saved its best Week 1 college football matchups for neutral sites — mainly NFL stadiums....

Florida A&M fiasco reminds us that college sports are professional sports
NIL is sensible. It was ridiculous that “amateur” athletes were not allowed to accept anything of financial value for their athletic talents, except for the fees to attend the institution so that they can play on the team and be properly housed and nourished so they can play well....

The NIL era is offering new avenues of exploitation
Name, image, and likeness deals were appropriately celebrated after the NCAA announced it was finally allowing the people making them billions of dollars to also get paid. However insane that sounds, NIL deals are a large step from what was the norm. Unfortunately, the gluttons at the table won’t ev...

Moving to a 16-team College Football Playoff isn’t easy — but may very well happen
“Sixteen just seems to be out there,” Gene Smith, Ohio State’s athletic director, said at the Big Ten media days. “You can’t ignore it.”...

Predicting the future NCAA landscape
As we approach an era where USC kicking off at 9 a.m. Pacific time in freezing November East Lansing temperatures is a very realistic and potentially biennial situation, let’s look at the options for college athletics going forward....

NIL turns 1
It’s been one year since the NCAA adopted a name, image and likeness (NIL) policy, allowing its “amateur” athletes to monetize and benefit off their own personal brands and make money over the table. This is all while attending one of their institutions and donating endless time to their athletic pr...

Slow your roll on the $9.5M in NIL money
If you’re at all involved in college football news, you’ve likely seen a big ol’ number floating around the rumor mill this week: $9.5 million. ...

Record-breaking NIL contract will have the NCAA pocket-watching again
The NIL landscape has opened up a world of big and small endorsement opportunities that have no tangible connections to college campuses. This deal, the largest NIL one ever signed by a non-professional athlete, has placed a spotlight on the hinterland of the NIL landscape....

Sorry Kirk Herbstreit, damn near all of the college football bowl season is meaningless
A postseason is not an exhibition, it’s a tournament to declare a champion — except in major college sports. Men’s college basketball has the NIT, and college football there’s bowl season. Both were more prestigious decades ago, but at least no one is harping about the sanctity of the NIT anymore. C...

The first surprise of the NIL era has arrived, and it’s Deion Sanders poaching No. 1 football recruit Travis Hunter
Deion Sanders has caused a shift of tectonic plates in the college football world. Since March 2020, Travis Hunter, the No. 1 overall football recruit in America, has been committed to Florida State. Hunter reiterated his commitment to the university in both September and October. The Tampa Times wr...

Pac-12 commissioner accurately refers to CFB scheduling games years in advance as ‘insane’
The new Pac-12 commissioner is ready to shake up college football scheduling, and thank God he is. George Kliavkoff entered the world of college sports just this summer, so maybe it’s his outsider perspective that’s allowing him to think outside the box, but he has put forward the suggestion that pe...

Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is my college football team to be good
The idea of getting back to a previous, dominant form is antithetical to moving forward. By looking back and chasing past eras, schools like USC, Miami, Nebraska and others are envisioning levels of dominance that are extremely rare and difficult to replicate — or in some cases *cough* Texas *cough*...

Kansas fullback converts two-point conversion into $1,000 worth of Applebee’s
Before this season, if you made a catch like the one Jared Casey did last weekend to clinch the Kansas Jayhawks victory at Texas in overtime, you’d probably be a hero on campus for a few weeks. Your family would fawn over you at Thanksgiving, your parents wouldn’t shut up to their neighbors about th...