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Today in college football news, I’ve just been handed a tube of Pringles that are apparently Los Calientes Verde Pringles. This tube’s minutes are numbered.
Business: Trump involvement emerges as House settlement nears
Promise this is going somewhere:
- “President Trump said on Sunday that he wanted federal law enforcement agencies to work on restoring Alcatraz, now a museum, to a functioning maximum-security prison.”
- “The president’s sudden push … came just hours after a South Florida PBS station aired the 1979 classic film ‘Escape from Alcatraz.’ The president spent the past weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort, which is located in Palm Beach.”
Inspiration can strike swiftly, is the point. Another example:
Three days prior, Nick Saban met with Trump in Tuscaloosa. Saban reportedly told Trump that modern player compensation has resulted in college athletics having an uneven playing field. (Saban, whose annual Alabama salaries at times surpassed those of every MAC head coach combined, also raised a similar complaint a year earlier when discussing his own retirement.)
After that chat with Saban, Trump is reportedly interested in an executive order meant to address payments to athletes. It’s unclear how (or whether) that might work:
“A congressional aide told The Athletic that an executive order might not stabilize the college sports system, which requires legal certainty and a limited safe harbor from litigation. Legal protections and the pre-empting of state NIL laws can only be addressed through congressional legislation. … Numerous bills and drafts have been introduced, announced or floated. … None of the bills has gone anywhere yet.”
Meanwhile, the House v. NCAA settlement remains close to approval. By allowing schools to set aside $20.5 million for their rosters, it’d provide far more compensation for the labor most responsible for college sports being a multi-billion-dollar industry.
But what about Saban’s worry of the playing field becoming even more uneven than the one he totally dominated? Sure, it’d arguably become even more uneven than ever before, with plenty of smaller schools having nowhere near $20.5 million to spend. So … is House itself now a target as well?
Either way, the settlement is tenuously nearing completion. As the carefully constructed stack of paperwork teeters, at least one side doesn’t appreciate the surprise gust of wind:
“An attorney representing current and former college athletes in the proposed $2.8. billion House vs. NCAA settlement said a potential executive order on the issue of NIL in college sports would be ‘unmerited and unhelpful’ and criticized Saban’s ‘eleventh-hour self importance.’”
Stay tuned. Likely to be a House update of some sort later this week, actually.
Quick Snaps
🍀🐯 A detail in the newly announced 12-game series between Clemson and Notre Dame: “The Clemson games are expected to count toward the five-games-per-year average for Notre Dame with the ACC, which means smaller brands within the league may see the Irish less.”
📚 Bill Belichick‘s book tour has gotten a lot of attention, to say the least, but how about the book itself? David Ubben has 11 takeaways from reading it. Join me in pondering this quote by the UNC coach: “Instinct negotiates between the dog’s goals and the dog’s actions. Unfortunately, we humans are not as instinctual as dogs.”
🐶 Nashville’s Jared Curtis, 2026’s top quarterback recruit, is becoming as instinctual as a Dawg. He committed to Georgia over Oregon yesterday.
💰 The Big 12 extended commissioner Brett Yormark through 2030. Still surreal that this conference is the third most stable of all.
📺 In a media mailbag, Richard Deitsch says Lee Corso‘s replacement on “College GameDay” is actually Saban, in one sense.
🎲 Dan Mullen heard from coaches who wished they had his ESPN job — and then he got back into coaching anyway. Why UNLV?
📉 Last year was a good year for defenses in college football, a rare clapback after a decade-plus of offensive explosion. Was that a blip, or was it a new trend? After reading that post by Seth Emerson, I’m buying another relatively slow scoreboard season.
🌀 Where every Power 4 school stands at quarterback, with the portal in the rearview again. Very 2020s sentence: “Incarnate Word transfer Zach Calzada, who has spent time at Texas A&M and Auburn, is Kentucky’s QB1 as he enters his seventh collegiate season.”
C’mon, Michigan: Might as well think big with Moore suspension
Some news from yesterday, via Michigan reporter Austin Meek:
“Michigan is expected to suspend coach Sherrone Moore for two games as a penalty for allegedly deleting text messages he exchanged with Connor Stalions, the former Michigan staffer at the center of an NCAA investigation into allegations of advanced scouting.
“Moore is expected to coach the first two games, including a Week 2 matchup against Oklahoma, his alma mater, before missing games against Central Michigan and Nebraska in Week 3 and Week 4, a source briefed on Michigan’s plans confirmed.”
While the broader NCAA investigation into Michigan will next include a Committee of Infractions hearing, likely this summer, I’m more interested in which games Moore is expected to miss. Why devote full strength to the home opener against New Mexico, which could be a five-touchdown underdog, rather than the road trip to Nebraska, a likely tough Big Ten opponent?
I asked Austin for his thoughts. He said:
“It’s a pick-your-punishment situation for Michigan: Suspend Moore for the first two games and force him to miss his homecoming against Oklahoma or suspend him for weeks 3 and 4 and force him to miss Michigan’s Big Ten opener at Nebraska. One way or the other, he’d have to miss a big game … unless Michigan decided to suspend him for the opener against New Mexico and the Week 3 game against Central Michigan, which would be pretty brazen, even for Michigan.”
Sure, giving Moore such a carefully measured suspension would probably make Michigan look less remorseful to the NCAA — and thus partly defeat the whole purpose. But Michigan’s already done the suspend-the-head-coach-for-consecutive-games thing (for two stints of Jim Harbaugh’s final season, when Moore led six victories during a national title run). Let’s have some fun by picking and choosing.
Deja Vu: Rivals.com completes 18-year full circle
Quick piece of news about recruiting media:
“The ownership group behind On3, led by Shannon Terry, has reached an agreement to acquire Rivals — the original authority in recruiting, high school sports, and fan communities — from Yahoo Sports.”
If you keep up with recruiting coverage, Terry’s name probably sounds familiar, and probably because of previous news items very similar to this one. I was attempting to piece together the timeline of Terry’s recruiting website dealings, then noticed RedditCFB had already done it:
- 1995: Founds Alliance Sports
- 2000: Sells Alliance to Rivals
- 2001: Buys Rivals out of bankruptcy
- 2007: Sells Rivals to Yahoo
- 2010: Founds 247
- 2015: Sells 247 to CBS
- 2021: Founds On3
- 2025: On3 buys Rivals
While reading that, I just keep wanting to chime in with, “But they were all of them deceived, for another recruiting news website had been created, bought and/or sold by Shannon Terry.”
OK, that’s all for today. Email me at untilsaturday@theathletic.com with any thoughts!
Last week’s most-clicked: Of course it was the way-too-early 2026 NFL mock draft.
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