The Dumb Zone FREE - DZ 1-6-26 PREVIEW | Cowboys fire Matt Eberflus and Jordan Rogers on the NIL impact

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Hear the entire episode by subscribing to the show at DumbZone.com or Patreon.com/TheDumbZoneFormer marketer at Nike, Jordan Rogers, joins us in studio to discuss NIL's impact on college football ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Hey now, what you were about to hear is a free preview of one of this week's premium episodes of The Dumb Zone. If you would like to hear this program in full, along with the full archive, ah, shit. If you would like to hear this program in full with the archive of all of our past episodes, you can subscribe at dumbzone.com. The big reality in all of this is that athletes are not actually being paid for their name image and likeness. They're being paid to play on the field. They are being paid a salary when the NIL collectives came in. So the women, like in women's basketball is probably the best example of actually leveraging name, image and likeness. They're being paid for their social following, for their personalities, they can do fun TikToks, they engage with their audience.

They're not being paid millions of dollars to just play the sport on the field. In football, which is what most people care about, it's the religion in our country, players are being paid to play on the field. Like Brendan Sorsby is the one, you know, we'll probably talk about, $5 million rumored NIL deal at tech. None of that. I think I have a bigger social media following than Brendan Sorsby. No, he played a Cincinnati.

I mean, he's not that big of a, he's not a person. No one is paying him for his name, Imogen, like this. And that's the big bad secret. And that's what makes all of this so confusing is because people talk about NI, it's not NIL. We've figured out a workaround so that they can be paid salaries to do their sport on the field. And so that's where a lot of this gets convoluted. But, yeah.

And is that because, is that because that would make them employees, they could unionize, is that, that's the whole thing. That's the thing. Yeah, the NCAA wants it both ways. And the schools want it both ways. So, Dan, the reason I started getting interested in this is when you started actually seeing numbers for players, like, oh, that's not wide receiver one money. And I'm like, what are we talking about?

I'm going to have to update, you know, the software. So just like the NFL now. And that thing, I'm a big, I'm a fan of that part of following sports. You know, and the NBA, it's a bit of a headache. But you like the roster management and the asset allocation and trading and all the sort of thing. And that's part of it. And now they're talking about college sports in that way. And I kept seeing, there was this house settlement last summer where there's a revenue share in place for, I guess, Power 4.

and each school can spend up to $20.5 million. That's right. But then I would see, okay, well, this guy got a deal for $5 million. It's like, well, I bet, you know, $3 million maybe would make sense relative to what a quarterback makes in the NFL relative to the cap. But five is almost double, so you get into how is this happening. And as best I can tell is that, and yeah, I want you to tell me how they,

I want to see, I want to know what the athlete is told. because like that five million dollar deal then that this quarterback at tech is getting it might only be a million from tech yeah so the you can still do the collectives well they did the settlement thing to try to stamp out the collective okay so my big thesis when i let when i jumped into this four years ago was oh very quickly the universities who are able to figure out third party nil so the universities who have the best relationships with boosters and big companies who are able to leverage their alumni network to come in and sign athletes for, say, a million dollar deal. I'm looking at sport coffee you have here on your thing. That's Patrick Mahomes's brand. Theoretically, if they were a big company, or we could say they're Gatorade or whatever, like Gatorade is a Florida booster. Nike, Oregon booster, Phil Knight, you would, the ones who are able to figure out, like Washington. is a great example, or Miami.

To me, those Tier 1A schools are the ones who benefit the most from NIL, because what happens is they have an activated, engaged alumni network who have companies that can then come in and pay them to market. They can pay them for their name image and likeness, because that is what we do in the marketing world, particularly sports marketing. Nike sees the benefit of somebody like Baker Mayfield or Kyla Murray or Jamar Chase, and they pay him whatever the figure, you know, $100,000, a million dollars, whatever it might be to promote their company. And so it was like very clear to me that the universities who had those

company and booster relationships would be able to come in and be able to use that as a tool in recruiting. Just as the old days, it was all about facilities and coaches and access to the NFL. Now it's going to be about to the money that you can earn. Well, the NIL collective and like American ingenuity is just amazing. So they created these shell companies. who acted as if they were a classic company like a sport coffee or a Nike or a Gatorade and they just funneled the money through there and then paid them to promote this shell company.

So it's actually pretty genius. You create a fake company and there's a relative scale. Some of the collectives are better than others. But you basically just create a company and then you can pay athletes to market that company and anything that they do to market is just going to try to get people to donate money to this

amazing circle of like it's imagine a recycle symbol that's what it is you just create it you pay athletes to promote the company athletes are telling you hey go sign up for a subscription to this you're going to get exclusive insights and video and content and if you donate to this collective

you know whatever and it's just an excuse to pay these athletes a salary to come pay their school so 20 and a half million dollars was the attempt to put a salary cap on college athletics. What happened last year, though, was everybody front-loaded deals prior to the House settlement coming.

So they knew the House settlement was coming 731 or whatever it was, July 31st. And so all of May, June, July, up until July 30th, they could front-load deals. So that's why, if you listen to the report, it's a school like Texas Tech, front-loaded big time. They could come in and actually spend $30 million or $25 or $35,

and it's important to acknowledge that we don't actually know the numbers because it's not publicly, you know, traded information. It's all very shadowy. But that, that was what happened last year. And so now we're resettling. But I promise you this. If the going rate for a quarterback last year was $4 million, nobody's coming in to take $3 million this year because there's some cap. Nobody gives a shit. Just like in the NFL, your court, what is DAC mega year? Fifty three mill? Is it 50? Yeah, it's like 53. We're going to, I mean, sometimes they'll take a, Patrick Mahomes will take a pay cut because he's won a few Super Bowls and he has so much marketability outside. But you're talking to a 19, 20, 21 year old who's, the NFL career is

2.8 years. Like this, nobody's taken less. They have agents. Nobody's giving them a sweetheart deal. I mean, some of them might. But yeah, so the fantasy land that we lived in like, oh, hey, guys, there's a $20 million dollar salad that we, hey, this is all we have to work with. Yes, sorry. Somebody down the street's going to pay me four. If the kid at Duke got four, I'm getting five you know so that's just market economics yeah go ahead dan i want to get you in here no no it's all fascinating i mean it's the colleges have the money absolutely but they want someone else to pay the money always and so i just wonder i mean we were saying this when it all kind of first started like where does it all end because it's it's so different than it was

three years ago even i'll give you some predictions but yeah i think think it ends with we end up with top 40 teams we're going to have a semi first first of what we need to do in any in any conversation about it now we have to acknowledge this is professional sports it's been professional sports for you could figure out wherever the chalk line was but a lot of people point to the early 80s when oklahoma very switzer and them they sued to be able to have their rights for television and that is the domino that started all of this conference realignment the uh i have the figures but the big 10 gets a billion dollar a year for their television deal. Okay, billion dollars a year to broadcast. SEC gets $300 million a year to broadcast. Oh, by the way, sorry, the CFP. ESPN pays over a billion dollars to broadcast the CFP each year. Each year, over $1 billion.

B, billion, billion, B, billion. Not a million here. This is billion. This is a pro sport. It is the second highest pro sport watched and engaged with in America second only to the NFL. The Indiana and Alabama game pulled 20 million viewers. That is NFL. That is NFL numbers.

The only thing that touches that is college football. There is not a single NBA game. If you look at the Christmas Day games, I believe the highest watched NBA game was like $7 million. Indiana Alabama blows it out of the water. The Cowboys pulled $20 million on Christmas, and Indiana Alabama pulled that number. Now, that's atypical, but it's the only thing that can come close.

And so this is pro sports. Coaches have been making $10 million for 20 years now. You know, I always say Urban Meyer was making, I think, $7 million a year at the time. He had his two offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator were making $1 million. The year that Cardale Jones said the quiet part out loud, he said, I didn't come here to play school. Yeah. And I just think that. is the best like Freudian slip ever. And guess what? Urban Meyer did not bring Cardale Jones to Ohio State

to play school. He did not bring him there to get an education. He brought him there. He was paid there. The incentives were for him to throw a football to win a national championship. Because this is a great big marketing and branding exercise. Ohio State, Texas Tech, Texas, any of these, Colorado, if you look at the numbers for Colorado, when they got on the map with Dion, enrollment goes up like 20%. So now you're getting kids who are paying $50,000 a year for four to five, six years to enroll at your university. They're playing room and board. They are then engaged. They become donors for a lifetime for this school. So this is a multi-layered onion, but we have to call it what it is. It's professional sports. It's the second biggest professional sport in America. So I think ultimately,

to go back to the prediction, I think we break off. It's like a Super League, you know, Big Ten SEC, you have your top 40. Football breaks off from the other sports. It's ridiculous that like volleyball players are flying from Oregon to Rutgers on a Tuesday night to... So weird. How stupid is this? It is so stupid. And it's all because of television rights for football. Yeah, why didn't initially they do a deal like... Because Notre Dame does that, right? Every sport except football is in a conference. Oh, yeah. You might be right. So couldn't...

They could. Couldn't, you know, when the Big Ten, yeah, the teams that go to the Big Ten or whatever, well, there's still a Pact Ten for the... I guess we're past that, though. Yeah. But, because you already have people traveling cross-country for a volleyball game. Yeah, you do. And it's... And so I think that's the important thing to acknowledge is, like, there's only a couple of sports that actually pull in revenue.

Football makes all the money for the big programs. And then men's basketball makes... some money at some of the Blue Rudd programs, and then women's basketball can at a few, like Yukon, LSU. There's not many. South Carolina, maybe. Yeah, so that's actually something I wanted to talk about a little bit. And I want to play you an audio from a college football coach here.

But the way I think of it is that for the longest time, I think what people in the general public, if they didn't know somebody who played college sports, I think they assumed that the way that it was for in reality, like five to ten percent of them is how it was for all of them. And it's not like that at all. For most of history, most of your football team actually is going to school. Yeah. And for sure, when you get into the other sports, even if they were guys who were going to go pro on like the edge of you, it was just your top, top tier that was just using this as professional sports. But now, because they're signing these deals to, hey, this one's for the whole offensive line, or this is for the volleyball.

ball team like now they're all commodified yeah and it seems to me that that inevitably is going to result in guys never being at the same place two years in a row dan texas has a receiver named parker livingstone and he made news he was there like third wide receiver this year good player not a great player arch's roommate is an important component yeah uh and he announced over the break hey uh not my choice but i will not be at texas next year and he was kind of vague and coded about it like i'm looking for another opportunity and it's scanned as they told him don't let the door hit you yeah we don't want to pay you yeah we were paying you 500 grand you want more we don't think you're worth it yeah sorry that wasn't really part of his post we've got the auburn wide receiver one who's coming into

texas bro that's the thing yeah you can stay for a hundred available exactly now they know fully what's available. There's a website I go to almost every day now on three and they've got the transfer rankings just like we had the high school. So Texas knows and they're going to go to this kid who's their quarterback's roommate and be like, hey, that's too expensive for you. We don't think you're that good and you need to find another home, which is just antithetical to the entire idea of college. Like, I'm on board with players making money for sure, more than most, but this is fundamentally changing what it means to be in college sports. So the only way that they can stop that is to actually pay them as employees,

but then they're going to be subject to all the... Exactly. So the schools, so everybody's like, oh, well, they need to sign contract. Well, yeah, hey, totally. We'd love to sign the contract. Why does the NFL get to sign? The NFL has the most power over their athletes and the worst, you know, players association. the NFL has incredible power over their athletes.

You know, you sign that rookie deal. There's an optional fifth year. They can franchise tag you. They basically have rights to you for seven years if they want to implement it. But that's because there's collective bargaining. The athletes all get together with the Players Association. They have rights. They have practice times that they're able to do.

There's things that coaches can do. There's things that they're not. They have insurance. They have like liability claims. There's all these kinds of things that come along with the ability to negotiate for these contracts. So there's a company like Athletes.org, who I think sees the future, they're trying to get a collective bargaining agreement for college athletes. The challenge is, and you see this with the NFL, it's even worse than college.

So the NFL, the average career is 2.8 years. So a lot of these guys aren't committed to doing like long-term work of sitting on a committee. If any of you ever sat on a committee or like had to do leadership, leadership is hard. And, you know, doing stuff like this, you're essentially trying to bargain for the future generations. These guys are there 2.8 years. They don't want to spend a lot of time in their off season and all that, trying to deal with this. And so that's why they get raked over the coals by billionaire owners.

I say that to just say, take that now for college athletes who are going to have to put in a lot of work to try to do this. They're one and done sometimes. They don't have a lot of vested interest to get this thing done. And so the schools also don't want to label them as employee. absolutely are they're getting the nca is losing every single lawsuit it's just been a watershed moment now you know there's one and i'm a nerd so i read like the transcripts of some of this stuff but there's one in like USC that these athletes are suing and it's like hey do you have control can you do you

you have control over when you go to the athletic facility or not no uh we have to be there at x y you know time do you have control over what you wear when you're with the team uh no i have to wear nike where the uh so you know and if you're in a didita school you have to where Adidas because the coach or the athletic director signed that deal, you're not allowed to go off campus to do X, Y, or Z. They have control over where you live. They have all this kind of control over you, yet they want to be like, oh, they're just here for an education. Oh, we're just here for a rec sport. Get the fuck out of here. I mean, this has been pro sports for 30 years. And again, to your point, Jake, like, this is only at the big institutions for the big

sport. So it's important to separate those two. Like, you know, women's rowing. is very different, although they have some of those same requirements, than men's football at one of these power for schools. But these athletes don't have control over their schedule. I mean, school is just shoved in there. They're creating major, if we've seen like the USC, the UNC North Carolina scandal, where they have these guys in underwater basket weave. They're basically just picking their major and pushing them through class,

whatever's easiest, so that they can just pass so that they can play. Is that a detriment to players long term? Absolutely. But this fantasy that everybody lives in that like, oh, they should be there for the education, I think in the clip you're about to play, that guy had a great college experience. A lot of people have, but it's just the game has changed. And, you know, in IU football is one thing. You're getting a great education and a great team experience. LSU, Georgia, Alabama, Oregon, this is pro sports. Yeah. And I guess, I will play it. But I guess the thing is, for the health of the sport, if you were to cleave off those 40 to 50, You know, it would take a while to wrap your head around, hey, I'm a fan of Team 51 to 130 that you're not really in the mix anymore. But I think long term, it would be better for those schools to not feel like they have to compete with things they can't compete with. Absolutely. Who? I mean, CFP has been around now 14, 13 years.

There's six or seven teams who've won. The fantasy that anybody thinks that their program actually has a chance. One of the great things about NIL is that there's actually more schools in the mix now. Ole Miss, look at our final four. This is a direct result of NIL. Ole Miss, Indiana, Miami, and who's our fourth? Phil Knight. Phil Knight in Oregon, exactly.

Hasn't been able to get the big one, you know, maybe they will. They were in the first CFP, actually. And so nobody, you know, the years gone by, you didn't have a chance. I mean, it was Alabama, Georgia, Florida State, Clemson, Texas. If you started outside the top 10, you had no chance. I don't know what people. People are delusional. That's why fan is short for fanatic.

Like, people are insane, you know. This is what I think we've found, you know, Pete Roselle used to always want parody in the NFL. And he was banging that drum throughout the 70s, 80s, whatever. yet that was the time of the most the least parody right you you had your Steelers Cowboys

49ers 49ers 49ers Raiders they were always you know you had your main teams that were always good what we have found is that free agency changed that NIL is changing it

in college football and in the NBA after LeBron player empowerment there's never been more Evenly, yeah, just think that it used to be you knew who in the NBA, who was going to be in the finals before the season started every year. Just about every, or at least you knew the top four teams. You might have Jordan's Bulls beat one team, but.

Totally. And we just had Oklahoma City. But all the years you would always hear people in chart, this would kill the sport. Yeah. This would be terrible. Baseball, it'd be terrible to have free agency. Before Free Agency, how many titles were won by the Yankees or the Cardinals? You know, once Free Agency has started, that gives everybody a chance.

But somehow people still don't want to believe that or hear that. Because then the players would make money. Yeah. And they're, God forbid. Yeah. So I want every team to be able to win it, but I don't want these greedy bastards to make money. So ridiculous. check when the free agency started

and when the Cowboys' last title was. Because they line up pretty perfectly. We got one. We got Dion, though, didn't? They did get Dion. Here's the N.I.U. Coach talking NIL. He's a guy who played college coached for the Ravens for a little bit. And I think this gets to, like, we may just end up having basically two different sports.

Absolutely. I told our team the other day, you know, we lost all these guys. Let's see who plays. So it's all good when people put it on Twitter. Hey, all glory to God, I'm going on the transfer portal. Let's see if they play. How many of those guys going to play or travel or get snaps? You know, I was going to tweet something the other day, a picture of me, and say, you know what?

I enjoyed my college experience. I didn't get one dime, but the lessons I learned was more valuable than any money you can ever pay me. And I appreciate that because that is long term. people are losing the fact that this is short term I coached in the National Football League for five years five years right don't lose focus of work the long term get your degree learn valuable lessons that's going to

help you in a long term of your life that's the whole purpose this is a transition from being a kid to a grown-up and I hope people don't lose focus of that everybody's talking about everything else besides what is the most important thing for going to college because if you're going to college to go get a couple dollars you might go get a job this is too hard to go get a couple dollars learn the lesson that you need to learn to be successful in life for the next 40 to 50 years of your life i don't know it sounds like a really old school approach

and i think there's a model where n iU players make some money yeah um but But it really does. I mean, you just get to what, and I know that like the rivalries are dead and we're flying Oregon to Rutgers, although I feel like college football this year was awesome. That's the problem. Well, the ratings are higher than ever. Yeah, ratings are higher than ever. People's interest.

So everybody will say this is like killing the sport. Maybe we have a spike before it completely dies. I doubt it. Right. I think, you know, some of the, yeah, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say that it does change the idea. like I grew up as a kid foolishly actually thinking

that if I grinded hard enough, I could go cover like kicks at Texas. Yeah. Like Kyle Shanahan did. I wasn't putting together. He was the son of an NFL coach at the time. But I would watch him out there and I'm like, dude,

this is what this is. They got 140 guys on the team. You only know 10 of their names. The rest of this are guys who are going here. They live here for four years. And they get a job. Yeah. And I just wonder if that's like,

gone. The idea of just going to a school and like, I'm here and that's it. And there was never really as much thought of greener pastures. You know, like my brother replaced a guy at quarterback at Tulane. And you know what that guy did? He mentored my brother and he stuck it out for another year as a senior backup. And then when my brother's time came, he got hurt. He wasn't that effective when he came back. The head coach had brought in his own quarterback, not a guy that recruited Joe and Joe mentored him for a couple years and they stayed friends.

Yeah. They guys 20 years in the NFL of coaching and playing. I love that and I feel like that almost has no chance anymore. And that does make me a little bit sad. I think that has a chance at a place like NIU. You know.

Yeah, there you go. But again, we just have to acknowledge that these top 30, 40 programs are professional sports and the stakes are way too high. Like we are talking about literal billions of dollars and this whole like old model of sitting around the reason that that model existed is because the players had absolutely zero power and I've if you talk to people you know

I taught well when I was on with y'all last time I got calls from a couple of dads I developed a relationship with some some of them who were very big recruits right and I went I've spent some time with them and actually one of his uncles had played back at Colorado during their Harry Day and whatever and like that man was still so bitter about what had had he had gotten completely screwed because a coach left he had to transfer he had to sit out then that some other coach left brought in his own guy like the guy's college career was torched because of all the factors that are outside of their control and so has the pendulum swung too far absolutely because it's swung too far because they want it both ways they won't sign a

like a bargaining agreement. They don't want to call these athletes employee. They want to have all of the other thing. They want to be able to make billions of dollars off television contracts. They want to be able to have these massive facilities. They want to be able to pay a coach $10 million, but they don't want the players to have any of the rights that are associated with all of that in actual professional sports. And you just can't have it both ways. And so we've flipped the pendulum too far. Will it shake out eventually? Yeah, it probably will. I think that to your point, Jake, you know, the top 10 guys whose name you know are the ones who are going to be making potentially life-changing money. And the depth chart will shake out. And there will be

people who are there who just are happy to go to that school and contribute and mentor people and all that. I think that will eventually happen. But it's not happening at your big power four programs.