Coaches Are Being Silly As The Sport Crumbles Around Us

Good morning and welcome to 4th & Forever, Rand & Tate’s College Football Newsletter. In the dead of the offseason, the topics of conversation in most sports tend to revolve around which players are looking good in practice and who seems primed to take a step forward next year. Not college football. In college football, our offseason topics typically center around which coach is saying the dumbest thing, why one of the most affluent programs in the sport is going to be playing their season at a practice field if a star QB’s new song is good (hint: it’s not), and how the United States government is about to fundamentally change the sport forever. It may still be four months until kickoff but there’s plenty to discuss, so without further ado, let’s get to it!

Quick Hitters

Rand here and it’s been a while since we’ve done quick hitters to catch you up on the latest happenings in college football, and quite frankly it’s by design. As you’ll read below, there are endless cases, lawsuits, and existential crises that promise to bring down this multibillion-dollar industry. My grandfather heard the same alarm bells from sports media when college football started being broadcast on cable, when the BCS was invented, or when they tore down the original Orange Bowl. He also heard for his entire life that next year was the Cubs’ year. Luckily, he was only proven wrong once. Outside of existential dread and proposals on how to ‘fix’ college football, there has been news. Do you really want to read about a theoretical Super League proposal some narcissist wrote on a napkin when he was high or the latest court proceedings from the Clemson and FSU v ACC cases? I’ll skip the legalese for you: that proposal is as dead as Kristi Noem’s dog and they’re leaving the ACC. Outside of Boulder, Colorado, the transfer portal window was pretty boring, the recruiting rankings were filled with the usual suspects, and your team competed day in and day out during spring ball and Week 1 can’t get here soon enough. So let’s catch you up on the truly important stuff that’s transpired in the past couple of months. 

Northwestern’s Ryan Field was demolished a few weeks ago as they break ground for a brand new $800 million stadium that’s set to open in 2026. That leaves the Wildcats without a home football facility for two years. Rumors swirled about playing their home games at Soldier Field, Wrigley Field, or whichever cartel-backed corporation bought the White Sox stadium naming rights with Bitcoin. Turns out, Northwestern is staying in Evanston and playing their home games at their practice facility. Yep, their lakefront practice facility will be converted with temporary structures to accommodate a few thousand fans. The exact specs are unknown and there will be some games played at Wrigley and other venues, but a majority of the games will be held on Lake Michigan with no suites, a high school press box, and a seating capacity that would make MAC teams laugh. When Ohio State rolls to town on November 16th, the monopoly Northwestern’s athletic department will hold over ticket distribution and sales will make Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster look like a 3rd-grade talent show. 

I’m sure you’re relatively aware of the protests going on throughout college campuses right now about the Israel-Hamas War. If you’re not, I implore you to look it up on a reputable news source and not expect to get it explained through a college football newsletter. Although as a politics major & history minor who occasionally listens to The Daily by the New York Times, I could probably regurgitate what I’ve heard. Anyway, the fraternities at Ole Miss did not take too kindly to protestors setting up encampments on campus and decided to fight back. So much so someone started a GoFundMe to raise money for the counter-protestors with the proceeds going to the NIL collective. Lane Kiffin promoted the GoFundMe and a few grand was raised. Hat tip to the marketing genius sitting in Tupelo or wherever you are. You’re going places, my friend.

“We’re not in the market of buying players. Unfortunately, right now, that’s what some guys are looking for. They want to be bought.” -LSU head coach Brian Kelly in an interview yesterday when asked how his defensive lineman transfer portal recruiting was going. Spoiler alert: LSU needs DL help and didn’t get their top targets in the portal this cycle. Brian, I understand this is a new world order but you’re at LSU, not Notre Dame. You’re not allowed to say those things anymore, hide behind academic standards, or offer some ambiguous statement about how Notre Dame doesn’t operate like every heavy hitter. You’re employed by a school whose big kahuna donor shelled out $30,000 to win a Jello Shot Challenge at the College World Series. There are no excuses in Baton Rouge, just results. Kelly should probably figure out that cheating and winning at all costs mentality is encouraged in the Bayou, or else he will be the first LSU head coach since 1999 not to win a national title.

If Kelly gets fired in the next few years he can call up Mike Locksley at Maryland who’s apparently trying to form his own college football coaching rehab clinic, similar to the one he came from under Saban at Alabama. Saban was famous for hiring coaches who needed their resumes updated after crashing and burning at previous stops. Famous graduates of the Saban College Rehabilitation Program include Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkisian, Billy Napier, and Bill O’Brien. Current Locksley patients include Kevin Sumlin and Josh Gattis who will work right alongside the newest hire: Brian Ferentz. Ferentz was finally fired from Iowa after his infamous tenure of merely running the worst offense in modern college football history. Ferentz will be an analyst or whatever useless title they gave him, but in Locksley’s defense, before being an OC he was a very successful OL coach under Daddy Ferentz. Who knows how this will work but as we know, every good comeback story starts with a cringe and a “you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.” Go Terps! 

A 4&F Reader’s Dinner With Kirby Smart

A few weeks ago, a dear friend and 4th & Forever reader - who we will refer to as “Mr. BBB” here for the purposes of anonymity - called me (Tate) with some very random but intriguing news: “I just ate dinner with Kirby Smart.” I was initially concerned that he might have caught Kirby in a terrible mood, as Mr. BBB had earlier sent me a picture of Kirby at this event, standing above his seat where a salad was waiting for him. We all know that Kirby Smart’s appetizer of choice is 10 cheeseburgers and a gallon of ice cream, so I was worried that the sight of a salad may have turned him into a large green monster that starts throwing massive objects at those around him, but it turns out that Kirby was as prepared as he always is. When Mr. BBB introduced himself, Kirby looked him in the eye, named Mr. BBB’s year of graduation from UGA and specific degree, and said, “I know some of your people.” Always Be Recruiting (and fundraising).

Kirby has publicly been in favor of the new NIL freedoms allowed to players over the last few years, but when he was asked at this dinner table what it’s like to be dealing with NIL on a day-to-day basis, he responded, “It’s the biggest fucking headache in the world.” 

It’s true that he and other coaches are paid handsomely for their efforts in dealing with this new age of college football, but as we’ve spoken about before, this current system is completely untenable. Fans are catching on to the absurdity that they are not only asked to donate directly to their school and athletic department but are now also tasked with funding the entire salary of their team’s roster while the school and athletic department sit back on their piles of money that they don’t have to share a penny of with their players. Top coaches have been quoted saying that a current P4 college football roster likely costs between $10-$15M per year, and even that number may be outdated. Kirby told Mr. BBB that UGA’s NIL collective is currently paying QB Carson Beck $130k per month and that Alabama is paying at least $23k per month for each starting offensive lineman. According to Kirby via Mr. BBB, that offensive line number is around $8k per month at Georgia right now, a discount Kirby has been able to get due to recent on-field and NFL Draft success at offensive line, but a discount that Kirby said is quickly fading away. 

The point is that it seems highly unlikely that fans and even larger donors around the country will continue to pay these huge salaries year after year with hardly any tangible ROI outside of some possible success on the field. Schools have gotten away with this current system of their fans paying their players salaries for a few years because according to NCAA rules around “amateurism”, it is still prohibited for the schools to provide any sort of direct payment to athletes for their services.

Thankfully, it seems we’re nearing the end of some of this chaos. We’ve been telling you that a fundamental change was coming to the athlete payment structure since we started this newsletter, and the root of that belief stems from the House vs. NCAA lawsuit which is getting closer to being settled, according to ESPN. We won’t bore you with all of the details, but this is the big one, the flipping college sports on its head one. The one that will overrule long-standing NCAA amateurism rules and allow players to be paid directly by their schools. Settlement terms are still being discussed, but early talks indicate that there could be somewhere around a $15-$20M revenue cap that schools can allocate to their athletes annually, but that is just a cap - schools don’t have to allocate that full amount. It’s worthwhile noting that putting a “cap” on the amount of money these athletes can make will almost certainly eventually be deemed illegal without any sort of antitrust exemption or collective bargaining method, but we’ll worry about that when we get there.

For now, this will not only change the overall payment structure and amount of money available to college athletes, but it will fundamentally change college athletics as we know it. Schools like Georgia, Ohio State, and Alabama will be able to allocate that full amount on an annual basis, while schools like Louisiana Tech and Buffalo may have to cut sports and will only continue to fall further and further behind in football, as TCU coach Sonny Dykes mentioned on Wednesday. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer until we see what we here at 4th & Forever have unfortunately predicted for a long time: a split between the haves and the have-nots.

We don’t like where college athletics seems to inevitably be headed, but we’re at least glad that schools will finally be forced to share some of their revenue with their athletes. It will probably make coaches like Kirby Smart’s life much easier too, as long as that chunk of revenue isn’t taken away from his massive cheeseburger and ice cream budget. 

Have a great weekend and we’ll talk to you again next Thursday.

ICYMI: Previous Newsletters

Deion Praises His Son, So We Praise Ours - A look at the NFL Draft through a College Football lens and what lessons we can learn from it

Part 2: Spring Game Truthers Unite - Continuing our spring recap series with looks at Ohio State, Michigan, Texas, USC, and a lot of ACC teams

Part 1: Spring Game Truthers Unite - Looking at a group of teams who completed spring practice and answering outstanding questions we have for them

Let's Praise Some Coaches That Didn't Even Make Bowl Games - Discussion on which coaches are primed (pun intended) for a big second year

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Rand Fisher & Tate Smillie met a few years ago through their good buddy Dave Peljovich who went to college with Rand and high school with Tate. Tate went to Georgia and has spent two years of the last three years collecting championship rings while traveling to watch the Dawgs. Rand went to known CFB powerhouse Wake Forest and currently pays rent in Atlanta but is rarely found there with all the work & CFB travel he does.