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Today in college football news, “Blade Runner 2049” is full of great acting, but I might give the MVP to Sylvia Hoeks, who played one of the main antagonists.
The Video Game: Price of the click going up
After EA Sports’ almost unbelievably successful revival of its college football series (more on that in a sec), I had one big question about the next edition, the follow-up coming this summer.
Well, several questions, sure. I’ve also wondered stuff like: When will dynasty mode include historical records, so I don’t have to manually track Colorado State’s entire Heisman streak in a Google spreadsheet? Will FCS teams rejoin the series? Cross-platform dynasties? Intravenous Red Bull for Chris Fowler?
But really, the main thing on my mind was the money. Last year, EA paid FBS players $600 (and a copy of the game) so it could openly depict real college athletes for the first time ever, then also reportedly paid holdout Arch Manning five figures to join the game and promote it.
And then, according to one industry analyst, the wildly anticipated CFB 25 made more sales revenue than any other sports video game ever.
So this time, it’s easy to imagine FBS players thinking: I’m a UTEP backup, not a Manning, but I can get more than $600, right?
That’s why, reading today’s new story by Chris Vannini on CFB 26’s expectations and opportunities, this jumped out at me:
“According to (NIL group) Pathway, more than 600 football players have already signed on, from schools like Alabama, Georgia and Oregon, and the group’s goal is to get every scholarship FBS player. Pathway is paying players $1,500 up front for their rights, with the end goal of negotiating a licensing deal far more valuable to players than $600, potentially including royalties for each game sold.”
Good gosh, is that collective bargaining’s music?
Also, know what I just realized? If EA is able to add CFB head coaches at some point, it might not be able to include Bill Belichick, who famously opted out of Madden each year. That’d make him the second most famous UNC figure to be a lone video game exclusion, after Chicago Bulls Player 23 himself.
Vannini’s whole story is worth reading, including for the details of last year’s IRL team whose players hassled their head coach about somehow improving their digital ratings, then won an IRL conference title. See? Video games are good for you.
Quick Snaps
💰 “You’re getting a legit six figures at the G5 level, especially at quarterback.” Antonio Morales and Sam Khan Jr. polled 13 coaches and personnel people on the transfer portal‘s 2025 winners, losers and going rates. Tons to ponder in there.
⛰️ Rich Rodriguez to Bruce Feldman: “I was out in the desert, went out in the Bayou, was in the hills of Alabama and everywhere in between. … This is home.”
🤝 This week’s most technically important GM hire: Senior Bowl exec Jim Nagy to Oklahoma. (The one I will spend far more time monitoring: Master P, the former NBA hopeful and man whose most famous music video features a golden tank on a basketball court, to the University of New Orleans.)
📆 One of 2026’s top five TE recruits won’t enroll until 2027, after his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission. Recruiting updates on him, Alabama, Belichick and more.
💰 Georgia provides an example of how schools might divvy their $20.5 million player investments in a post-House world. Some of that money will go toward new scholarships.
⏰ For NFL combine week, our college beat writers did a mock draft. Tetairoa McMillan at No. 21? Now it’s spelled Stealers.
⏳ Another reason to end the CFB season before mid-January: Ohio State and Notre Dame players had to prepare for the draft at, like, post-Iowa Caitlin Clark speed.
We Are So Back: Returning-production hopes and fears
In college football, it’s harder than ever before to keep track of which players are on which teams, let alone how much it might matter.
On top of constantly reading The Athletic, a good and important website, I’ve also been reading Bill Connelly for years, and only partly because I was his editor for like a decade. (Bragging.) One of his most useful creations, returning-production rankings, are out this week ($) at ESPN.
Digging through rosters, Bill calculates how much of each team’s output will be back next season, while also weighting those calculations based on what’s actually most predictive of success. Bringing back a lot is almost always a good sign (even if those players weren’t great), and vice versa.
Looking at this year’s numbers, I had two questions for Bill:
1. Clemson looks eye-poppingly loaded. Has anybody else ever brought back this much immediately after finishing in the AP top 15, winning a power conference, etc.?
“Best I can tell, over the past decade (excluding 2021, the year most affected by post-COVID eligibility boosts), the most successful teams to then return over 80 percent of their production the following year were:
- 2018 Michigan State (10-3 in 2017)
- 2022 NC State (9-3 in 2021)
- 2022 BYU (10-3 in 2021)
- 2024 Oklahoma State (10-4 in 2023)
“Interestingly, including the four 2021 teams who would’ve made that list, these teams saw their combined win percentage fall from 0.733 to 0.606. While strong returning-production figures are a good predictor of improvement (just as poor figures are a predictor of regression), it’s almost as if that only works for teams that haven’t yet broken through. It doesn’t necessarily make a really good team even better.”
2. A decade ago, these numbers usually showed powers near the bottom, having to reload from NFL Draft early entries. Now the chart has flipped, with G5 teams having to do the most reloading. Can those teams ever build any kind of sustainability?
“The best teams still lose a lot, but so do the worst teams. Of last year’s top seven in my year-end SP+ rankings, five rank 101st or worse in returning production, which is to be expected, to a degree. Meanwhile, of the 19 teams with the lowest current returning-production rankings, 10 ranked in the 100s in SP+, and eight went 3-9 or worse last season.
“For some, this culling was intentional. New head coaches at New Mexico (30 transfers) and UMass (28), for instance, have flipped their rosters, Deion Sanders-style.
“But in some places, there’s definitely a drag. Take Akron: Joe Moorhead had a pretty young team last year, but improved from 2-10 to 4-8. His reward has been watching six of his best players leave for power-conference teams, plus a few others for sturdier G5s. The combination of the portal (a good thing on net) and money disparity (bad and getting worse) certainly haven’t made hard jobs easier.”
Hmm. Rule proposal: Whenever a G5 team beats a power, the smaller league gets to steal the big boy’s CFP money. This time around, that would’ve meant the MAC divvying Notre Dame’s $20 million, thanks to the outgoing NIU.
Elsewhere, the “Until Saturday” podcast had Bill on to discuss the Big 12’s rare stability — and why replacements shouldn’t tank Oregon.
One Shining Moment
Speaking of EA Sports and NIL:
If you’ve never been a video gamer, you might not know how weird it felt for platoons of 2010s lawyers to suddenly realize games about college sports had been using real player likenesses all along. Yeah man, those ’90s Bill Walsh games had Totally Not Charlie Ward in them. Oh, that was bad?
For maybe the wildest example, here’s an old screenshot by Twitter’s Dr_Doughstax of Tim Tebow’s very expensive name appearing in NCAA Football 10’s playbooks, surely accidentally:
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(Top photo: Grant Halverson / Getty Images)