As of today, we are exactly a month from the expected (hoped-for?) approval of the House settlement which will determine, once and for all, how schools will proceed with name/image/likeness payments and management for college athletes. The question I’m grappling with is, just how much certainty does it provide?

I spent last Friday in a room with about 300 people who are highly invested in the NIL space — college GMs (P4 and G5), top NIL agents and firms, the wealth managers that represent many of the players, thought leaders and others. My co-host (CJ Cavazos of CJ Recruiting and NIL) and I asked two separate panels of college GMs some tough questions on what’s ahead, and while it was helpful, we only had 90 minutes. We probably could have used at least another 90, but that wasn’t possible. We didn’t record the proceedings, but in case you missed it, here’s a taste of what took place.

As I try to digest everything said and heard last week, there’s still a lot I don’t understand. I’m certainly not an attorney, and frankly, my interests apply only to football. With that said, here’s what I believe to be true regarding what’s going to happen in a month (pending approval April 7 by Judge Claudia Wilken).

• The limit for revenue-sharing is $20.5 million. This money is independent of collectives and will be spent by the schools themselves.
• The $20.5 million total represents an estimated 22 percent of what a garden variety football-playing school generates in revenue from its athletics program.
• The lion’s share of the $20.5 million (77 percent, by most accounts) will go to football players. I’m struggling to find an exact percentage anywhere, but I don’t think anyone would be compelled to hold to that number anyway.
• Teams have to generate their own $20.5 million; the money is not coming from the House settlement.
• Even if they don’t have $20.5 million, they must dole out the money in the same ratio that everyone has agreed upon for revenue-sharing, that is, if they are participating in revenue-sharing. They are not obligated to do that. This is just a proposed way of spending the money. Most P4 schools seem willing to hold to that, at least initially, as a hedge against litigation.
• Football teams will be held to 105-man rosters. These will be the only players allowed to participate in revenue-sharing.
• Title IX applies to scholarships, but it does not apply to NIL money. Yet. There’s litigation in the pipeline that might change that.
• Collectives are not governed by any of this. A school’s collective can raise and spend whatever it wants to.
• There is no governing body that will call balls and strikes. In a perfect world, the NCAA would do this, but it does not appear to have that capability, and no one else does, either. Basically, it’s an honor system, and will rely on peer pressure from other schools to comply.
• Through a clearinghouse, Deloitte will establish market value for any NIL deal over $600, and if judged to be out of whack, Deloitte will say so. There’s an arbitration process, and a player could lose eligibility if he signs a deal that’s judged to be not fair market value, but this seems ripe for litigation, as well. Furthermore, it seems unclear, at least to me, what compels a player, agent or team to send a completed NIL deal in to the clearinghouse.
• There is no standard contract for NIL payments to players (akin to the wage scale the NFL has adopted based on accrued seasons, etc.) because there is no collective bargaining agreement. As such, there is no reason a team couldn’t commit all or most of its football allotment to one player, technically (again, the team and player might face punishment from Deloitte/the NCAA, but then again, maybe not). It also means terms of a contract can be ripped up at any time and rewritten if both parties (school and player) agree.
• Presuming it’s approved by Judge Wilken, this will all become “the law” on July 1, when the 2025-26 academic year begins across the land.

More on these observations and what they all mean are in today’s Friday Wrap, which comes out at 7:30 p.m. EST today. I hope you’ll check it out. Not registered yet? Sign up here.

Last week, we spoke to personnel directors at several schools to get their take on the spring portal window, and how it measured up to expectations as well as how it compared to December. This week, as promised, we are passing along what we got back from several agents who had players seeking transfers. Here are our takeaways.

Talent was average.

• “The spring window tends to be weaker, I’d say this one was particularly weak. (Players) are starting to understand how the portal works, and December is really the best time to go in for them.”
• “You saw most high-end teams needing 1-2 positions, whereas in December, teams were hunting for a lot of best available players at numerous positions. April was more position-specific, based on team needs.”

• “You’re not seeing a lot of tenured guys hit the portal as you did last spring or even in the December window. Teams are doing a much better job of roster management.”

The money was not nearly as plentiful.

• “I saw less of teams being desperate to sign lesser players.”
• “I felt like more Tier 2 or 3 players were getting in expecting huge paydays based off of what they heard about the December portal, but not everyone was able to get that.
• “I felt like things were slowing down a bit and teams were starting to settle on ranges for players. There appeared to be a bit more level-headedness when it came to the April portal or a better understanding of the market/what they could do specifically as a team.”
• “This spring portal window was underwhelming to say the least. You’ve got guys like Josh Pate at 247 hyping this up to be the craziest portal window ever and it absolutely wasn’t.”
• “A lot of big P4 schools are getting away from the bidding wars. (LSU head coach) Brian Kelly came out and said they aren’t going to overspend on players just because of a need.”

Schools are getting better at all aspects of the portal.

• “Teams and collectives are getting smarter with roster retention. Coaches are able to better evaluate who is a potential roster defector and collectives are putting language in their contracts that helps from players being tampered with before the portal window opens.”
• “There’s still players that will slip through the cracks, but now it’s more of your second or third guy in the rotation at a position going to a school where he will be the No. 1 guy.”

It’s not surprising that it’s becoming more of a buyer’s market as the portal era continues and the people writing the checks get smarter about how they allocate their dollars. The ball is in the court of agents who now must figure out how to leverage their players and identify the schools with the biggest budgets. We’ll continue to monitor the development of things.

With the April portal window not far off, I continued my quest to learn as much about transferring and the name, image and likeness money that is changing the nature of college football. To do that, I had a lengthy conversation with a Director of Player Personnel at a mid-major not far from me.

We had a lengthy discussion on the ins and outs of the transfer window. Here are a few highlights from our conversation.

Up and down: I asked if it’s harder to recruit a P5 player to come to a G5 school or to lure an FCS player to an FBS mid-major. He said it’s harder to pull from P5 because such a player hates to switch “just because of the logo. Everybody is attracted to a logo at TAMU, so they would be harder to get.” Still, “the deciding factor is their playing time. If they’ve been at PVAMU three years in a row, they’re gonna be harder to get. Playing time at their old school is the determinant. A P5 who has played a lot is gonna be harder to get, unless the FCS guy has played a significant amount.”

Pecking order: The most valuable players tend to be offensive linemen, then pass rushers, he said. For the most part, start on the outside of both sides of the line for the most valuable players, then work in for players of less stature. For example, defensive tackles are valuable, but not as valuable as defensive ends. 

Looking for certainty: I asked if players in the portal might be ripe for a position switch. The response was that not only would a player not be receptive, but the coaches on staff wouldn’t, either. “Position switches would be a hard sell to the position coach,” my friend said. “When you get a portal player, you want him to be plug and play. That’s a one-off experience. If you coached him at your previous school, maybe, but usually no.”

Technology helps: The software packages sold to today’s college football team can be pricey, but they’re also diverse and directed toward every corner of the recruiting game. For instance, when I asked one DPP how he avoids publicizing the offers he makes, he said it’s impossible. “Everything is so public anyway, and there are  services that automatically scrape the Internet,” he told me. “You could get an email every single day telling you who (schools) offered, and it’s all based off Twitter.”

Minefield: It’s a dangerous game when you strategically offer a player, hoping bigger schools will flock to him. “We won’t offer people unless we are interested in them,” said the same DPP. On the other hand, “there might be a guy who may not be interested in us right now, but he might fall to us for academic reasons, so we offer him.” Now, that academic info is something that has to be gathered first-hand, which, again, requires manpower. 

A surprising turn: I asked one DPP at a mid-major if high school recruiting was now solely the bailiwick of schools like his, while big schools could sit back and harvest them once they proved themselves. He said it was the reverse: the Ohio States and Alabamas of the world can spend big dollars on five-star recruits and reap their big seasons from the start, then fill in with transfers when a recruit doesn’t work out. 

An inconsistent workload: Trying to predict how many volunteers the standard mid-major has on the personnel team is really hard. Having spoken to two schools this week, one said his team has 5-6 volunteers, while another DPP said he put together his entire pre-portal board single-handedly. While no two boards have the same level of detail and volume, that’s still a lot of work. 

Transfers won’t be the only thing happening in the football world in April. There will also be plenty of movement in NFL front offices starting in late April and continuing through July. We’ve been talking about that at Inside the League. Want even more? Make sure you register for our weekly newsletter, the Friday Wrap. 

This week, I got a chance to sit down with the transfer portal team at a mid-major school. Over an hour-long conversation, the half-dozen members of the personnel department had some interesting things to say. Here are a few highlights.

• There is no ceiling for offensive tackles in the portal. If they’re healthy and have starting experience, there is almost no limit to what schools will pay. This is probably the one recurring theme.
• Facilities are important, but less important than they were in the pre-NIL days. It will be interesting if schools stop beefing up their locker rooms and field houses and start pouring it into player compensation. “There are fewer kids asking if there’s a barbershop and a waterfall in the locker room,” is how one official put it.
• Also, players still care about things like food. You better be doling it out if you don’t have mountains of NIL cash. I’ve heard of one West Coast school that feeds all its athletes — from gymnasts to football players — in one cafeteria. Once the food runs out, it runs out, and it doesn’t matter if someone on the rowing team went back for seconds while football practice ran long.
• One other thing — if you’re at a mid-major and can’t match others’ offers, you better have pretty liberal admissions policies. 
• There are still no NFLPA-licensed contract advisors — or even non-certified ones — cornering the market. The DPPS and GMs I speak to say they are still not seeing the same faces every time. Reps are also not (yet) common on official visits. This is a tremendous area of opportunity for an NFL agency. 
• If you’re at a school in Florida or Texas, you have a tremendous advantage, even if you’re not at a P5 school. Players who leave and don’t get what they wanted usually want to return home.
• Coaches are getting more aggressive about contacting players at other schools. That’s especially true if they have a prior relationship, i.e., the coach leaves one school for another one, then starts trying to lure the kid at his old school to his new school. That’s becoming more common. The problem is, if a school tried to make a fuss about this, the player’s not normally going to go against his coach.
• Here’s a fun fact. Texas Roadhouse is headquartered in Louisville, Ky. I know this because the Cardinals aggressively court their corporate sponsors, which is one reason they have a well-stocked NIL budget. The school offers naming rights to the film room, the weight room, everything. For almost 20 years, Cards fans have been able to purchase bottles of Maker’s Mark with the Louisville logo. There’s even a Texas Roadhouse Student Center at Louisville; I’ve also heard the chairs in the meeting room have the TR logo.

If this topic interests you, make sure you check out last week’s edition of the Friday Wrap, in which I talked to 10 college personnel directors to get their respective takes on the abuses of the transfer portal. It’s here. To register for future editions of the Wrap, click here.