The Joel Klatt Show: A College Football Podcast - The Demond Williams saga & Transfer Portal Madness: how to solve CFB’s biggest problems

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

FOX Sports’ lead College Football analyst Joel Klatt breaks down the latest moves in the Transfer Portal as Oregon and Texas make big additions to reload for 2026. He also discusses what to make of Michigan’s lead RB Justice Haynes going into the Portal and Ohio State losing over 25 players into the Transfer Portal, including big recruits that have been with the team for only one season. Klatt examines whether teams need to change their recruiting philosophy in today’s era. He also disproves the narrative that Indiana is only winning because they have older players than their competition. Klatt wraps the show by laying out the fixes that would put an end to the recruiting/NIL/Transfer Portal madness that the sport is currently stuck in and why it’s critical to fix now before the best coaches in the country decide that the NFL is a more appealing option for them. 0:00-2:10 Intro2:11-7:19 Transfer portal news7:20-15:27 Ty Simpson continues to get NIL offers15:28-17:08 Ohio State and Michigan transfer portal news17:09-20:03 Demond Williams signs with Washington, then enters portal then decided to stay20:04-22:30 How to avoid another Demond Williams situation22:31-31:44 What’s the blueprint for a championship in today’s college football?31:45-45:20 What steps are necessary for fixing college football’s issues? Use my code for $100 off your SeatGeek order to the College Football Playoff National Championship. https://seatgeek.onelink.me/RrnK/KLATT100 *Restrictions Apply Sponsored by SeatGeek Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Demand Williams signing at Washington, and then the next week jumping into the transfer portal. Well, that's not great. We should certainly not be doing that. Kurt Signetti is making life really difficult on every other head coach in America. I want to keep Steve Sarkesian in college football. I want to keep Dan Lannning in college football and Marcus Freeman and Ryan Day. Every single player is a free agent every single year. You can't do that. Day like today is why we love college football.

Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome into the program. I'm Joel Klat. This is the Joel Klad Show. It is brought to you by graduate by Hilton. We thank them for their support, as always. Lots to get into today here. We're in between the semifinal, as Indiana and Miami are going to get set to clash in the national championship. I'll be having a national championship game preview.

That's coming up later in the week. But right now, we've got to get a little news and notes around college football because there's so much going on with the transfer portal open. There's so much news happening in terms of roster building. Obviously, there's some frustrations out there with just this entire month. model. So we'll talk about all of that, including some fixes. I don't want to just complain about some of the things that are broken in college football without offering you my thoughts of how and why we could fix what's going on. And I think that there are some solutions in here. So hopefully we can

get to that as well. I hope you're having a phenomenal week. I know this is a day later than we normally release. Normally we're on Monday. This show is coming out on Tuesday. But we wanted to give that recap to the semi-final, a little bit of air to breathe. So if you have not listened to the recap episode of the semifinal wins for Indiana and Miami. Please go ahead and go do that. And you can do that on the YouTube channel. When you're there, please go down there and subscribe to the channel. Hit the notification button.

That would be awesome. And if you would like to follow us on social media, we are wherever you like to social media. You can find us at Joel Clat Show. And then you can rate and review us if you're listening to this as an audio product, as a podcast, wherever you get your podcast. Let's get into it. So lots of portal news, like I said, lots of. of recruiting news because all of this is intertwined. How do you build your roster? And what way do

you build your roster? What teams are doing it well right now versus teams that are maybe getting hurt in the transfer portal? All of that coming up right now. Let's start with some of the latest news. And again, we're recording this here on what is this Monday, the 12th. So this news could be dated. This is fast and furious. But as of now, what we have got is an announcement from Dylan Rayola. So he's headed up to Oregon. and an interesting choice, obviously, because we don't know exactly, at least as of this taping, whether Dante Moore is going to come back to Oregon or if he's going to leave to the National Football League. Now, I think he should personally stay, which would make this announcement very interesting.

This leads me to believe that Dante Moore is probably going to leave, but then there's also some speculation that Riola would be willing to sit a year, like Moore did, by the way, after he transferred from UCLA up to Oregon, and he'd be willing to sit behind Dante Moore for a year up in Eugene. But that's that news. That was one of the better quarterbacks as far as stars go in the transfer portal. The one that was most highly coveted and had played really well in his career and has played very well in his career, including in the playoff with Sam Levitt from Arizona State.

He went into the portal and now he has a destination. He'll be going to play for Lane Kiffin at LSU. So LSU gets their quarterback. That seems to be a very good fit. Sam's style reminds me a bit of what. what Jackson Dart was all about. And so certainly that's a fit there with Lane Kiffin and LSU, and they get their guy.

Texas is reloading here, folks. They've had a really nice portal season. They've got wide receiver Cam Coleman, which was widely considered kind of like the prize of the transfer portal. A couple of top five running backs and a top linebacker. This is a program that obviously has money. And Sark is going to go out there and try to rebuild. Remember, they lost some pieces to the transfer portal.

So they're largely having to rebuild the running back room, the wide receiver room, but they're doing that. And they're bringing in some quality players, namely Cam Coleman, to try to help Arch Manning go to the next level and play much better than he did in this season or this last season. So that'll be interesting to see there. They got Relique Brown from ASU, Rishim Biles, the linebacker. They flipped smothers, Hollywood Smothers. He was a running back from North Carolina State.

A lot of people thought that he was committed to Bama. they were able to flip him and they got him down there at Texas. So Texas is having a very good transfer portal. What do you call it? Era session, whatever you call it like window, window. There it is. I knew I would hit on it. My big question, and it's not even a question,

but it's what I sit here and evaluate, as we watch now multiple years, this transfer portal and the teams that utilize it well, what do they do? They fill specific needs. And then they generally do really well at the line of scrimmage. Offensive line, defensive line. We saw Oregon rebuild their offensive line this last transfer portal season,

and it paid off in a major way. They get all the way to the national semifinals, which, by the way, is a level past where they were the previous year, and the previous year getting stopped in the Rose Bowl, a level past where they were the previous year. So this idea that Dan Lannning is failing at Oregon and all of these big losses, they are progressing every single year.

And that was a young football team. And you know with what they're able to do from a recruiting standpoint, they'll continue to get better. But I digress just a little bit. You look at the offensive line that they were able to rebuild in the transfer portal paid off for them. Texas Tech specifically on the defensive line. They invested heavily last year.

It paid off in a big way. Won the Big 12, got themselves into a college football playoff, which they had never done either of those things. things before this last season. So can you hit on the offensive line? Can you hit on the defensive line? And can you get a quarterback that's going to come in and be effective and be very good for you right away? Those are really the three things that I think can transform or impact the next season the most. It's great to get skilled position players, but if you can't block up front, it doesn't really matter. It's great to get a quarterback. If you can't protect him, it doesn't

really matter. Well, tech got Sorsby from Cincinnati, so a solid quarterback. And then there continuing to build on the defensive line with several guys on the defensive line. So Tech, again, doing a nice job in this window. How about Kentucky? Will Stein, the former offensive coordinator at Oregon, he's come into this transfer portal window hot. They've done a really nice job. They got a quarterback Kenny Minchie, running back CJ Baxter, who's been often injured at Texas. But when Healthy came in as one of if not the top back in a recruiting class, he's very good. They got a couple of top offensive linemen. So that offense for Kentucky could be very good. Will Stein, he knows what it looks like. He knows what it looks like to build a roster

and recruit at a high level. He was just obviously at Oregon, so he's starting to do that at Kentucky. Some news around Ty Simpson at Alabama, the quarterback, has reportedly said that he's going to go to the National Football League. I typically disagree with that decision for him. Great player. I love Ty Simpson. You guys know that. I love his film. He makes NFL throws. I will say this, though, experience pays. And I'm not talking about dollars and cents. I'm talking about success and success rate in the National Football League. And more specifically, your ability to go and compete for and win championships in the National Football League. If you look at the quarterbacks that have won Super Bowls, basically this century in the last 25 years since Brady

won his first, if you average out their college career, what you get is a college career that is well over 30 starts, well over 1,200 passing attempts, well over 750 completions, 50 touchdown passes. It's an experienced guy that goes into the National Football League and ultimately succeeds and can go and win a Super Bowl. By the way, we're seeing that with young quarterbacks that are succeeding in the NFL right now. Bo Nix, highly experienced. Jaden Daniels was highly experienced. Caleb Williams had a ton of starts under his belt. Now he's in the divisional round of the playoffs. So this is playing out. And these guys that have largely started for one year, like Dante Moore and Ty Simpson, I think they should come back for that reason.

Now, it's not like it used to be where you had to go to the National Football League in order to enjoy the financial reward that comes with quality play. Now, that's not the case. Ty Simpson can be paid handsomely to stay in school and continue that development and get more of that experience. There's reports that he's got an offer for $6.5 million to stay in school and get out there. Now, who's offering that? There's speculation here and there.

People have said Tennessee's involved. People have said Miami's involved. I mean, who knows who's offering that specific offer? I have my theory, but I don't want to speculate. He doesn't have to go to the National Football League in order to enjoy the financial windfall that comes with his success as a quarterback and his talent level as a quarterback. What I would say is a cautionary tale that when you, you look at the players that jump into the NFL and they get into a bad fit and they don't have a wealth of experience to fall back on.

Generally speaking, what happens is they don't succeed. It's interesting because this summer I was able to sit down with Tom Brady. And no one's had more success. He's the greatest quarterback in the history of the National Football League. And he had a very unique style of college career. And I think that in this one, it's not going to compare directly. because I don't, I want to preface this by saying this, this doesn't necessarily apply to Ty Simpson in that he doesn't want to compete at the college level. But listen to Tom Brady talk about his experience in college and how it prepared him to succeed at the next level.

And that is what I'm talking about. This is Tom Brady in a big noon conversation that we sat down before the year here talking about his college career. Would Tom Brady have finished his career at Michigan if the rules were the same then as the, they are now. Yeah. It's such a hypothetical situation, a question to think about. The only thing I can answer is to say that based on what my experience was, I wouldn't want it any other way than the way that I did it. My college experience was very challenging. It was very competitive. The lessons I learned in college that I referred to earlier, and certainly about competition, those traits transform my life as a professional. I was ready to compete against anybody

because the competition in college toughened me up so much that I had a self-belief and self-confidence in myself that whatever I was faced, I could overcome that. And I think if we take that away from a young student athlete to say, you know what I know it's tough to compete, but what are we're going to do? Before you have to compete,

we're actually going to put you somewhere else so that you don't have to compete, that is absolutely the wrong thing to do to a young child. And I would challenge all the coaches and all the parents. They're the ones that have to guide these kids. You can't expect a 17 or 18-year-old to make these great decisions.

They're young. They don't have life experience. It should be the parents. Be a good parent. Teach your kid the right values. What's going to sustain them in their careers over a period of time? Whether it's football,

whether it's business or whether it's teaching or law school or medical school or a trade, whatever you want to do. You're going to have to go through hard things in your life. You're going to have to make tough choices. And the value isn't always about the last dollar. So I think all these things that are happening in college sports, we're prioritizing the wrong things. We're valuing the wrong things. And I'm not saying it's not important.

It's one of ten things that are important. And certainly to me, it's not the most important. So when kids do go through that the right way, they're actually learning. the right values. And when you have the right values in life, that's going to sustain you as you move on through the rest of your life. I thought it was a fascinating answer and certainly a clip that I wanted to play back as we're talking about all this movement in college football and who it's good for, what players are going to be rewarded and how are they being rewarded? Is it financial reward? Is it opportunity reward? Is it success on the playing field? And what ultimately is, is it,

their goal. And this is, I think, something important. And it's going to become a much bigger conversation, in particular for programs and coaches, when they start thinking about how they're recruiting players and then what's important to those players and to those families. Because if what's important to players is finances, that's going to impact whether teams are going to want to recruit them, in particular, out of high school. If what they desire is personal development, that obviously puts them in a different bucket. If it's ultimate athletic development and the opportunity to go and go to the National Football League and create a career, that's something different. So again, there's so many, I think, differing and competing objectives for why players in college

football are there in the first place. What's your why? What's your why? What's your why? Kurt Signetti talks about that a lot. When he's recruiting guys or bringing guys in off the transfer portal, he wants to know what their why is. And their why is ultimately going to determine whether he wants them or not. What's up, Clatshow fans? Every great idea deserves the power to bring it to life. Meet the all-new Dell XPS laptop, the perfect combination of style, power, and performance designed to elevate everything that you do. With its modern ultra-thin design, it's as stunning as it is functional. And the battery? It's built to last all day long, from that first sip of coffee to your evening wind down.

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come together in one expertly crafted machine. Check out the all-new DellxPS at Dell.com slash XPS. Some more news in the transfer portal. Ohio State, they've got a lot of players that decided to jump into the transfer portal. Over 25 players in the portal, and that's something that we're not used to from Ohio State. This has been a program that has been very solid and certainly still has the ability to be that. But top guys from last year's class, namely Quincy Porter, jumped in there. And you saw the reaction from Jeremiah Smith and some of the other guys like, oh, man, no.

You know, Quincy Porter was a guy that Smith talked about being the next one in the lineage of the great Ohio statewide receivers. And now that is broken. And maybe somebody else can step up and be that. But we'll see. You know, obviously Chris Henry is going to sign there and he's going to go in as a true freshman. Maybe he gets on the field right away. But Quincy Porter is out. And news as of right before we started taping this.

And I believe it's confirmed now. I believe he's going to Notre Dame and will play for Marcus Freeman and catch pass. is from CJ Carter, so Quincy Porter going to Notre Dame. Michigan is a team that's gotten a lot of movement on both ways. Obviously, with Kyle Whittingham coming in, you know they're going to get some guys. And specifically from Utah, they've done that. They also got a wide receiver to pair opposite Andrew Marsh. That's Jamie French.

He comes in from Texas. He was a top 50 recruit from the 2025 class, so similar to Porter. He leaves after one year after not really being on the field for Texas, and he's going to play for Michigan. Justice Haynes, like I said, into the portal for Michigan. That's going to be a big loss, but they've got Heider, the number one running back recruit. Marshall is coming back. Maybe not enough space or enough carries for everybody, and Haynes jumps into the portal. And then the big one that everybody was talking about, and for, I think for correct reasons,

obvious reasons, is Demand Williams at Washington. And I've tried to stay away from this until now, but, but I want to touch on this. Demand Williams in this situation at Washington is, ladies and gentlemen, a train wreck. Okay? And it's one of these things that happen in our sport that we all look at and every one of us says to themselves,

well, that's not great. We should certainly not be doing that. Like Lane Kiffin leaving right before the playoff, like DeMond Williams signing at Washington, and then the next week jumping into the transfer portal. It's like, well, hold on. That's not the intent of all of this stuff. and obviously we need to change some things in order to fix that.

He re-signs for reportedly a top dollar amount. So you can at least assume that that's something in the neighborhood of $4 million. That's what the report was, although we don't know officially. And then he announced he's jumping into the transfer portal, presumably because somebody called him, tampered with him, and offered a bigger number. Or someone around in his orbit. Who was it? Who knows? There's a bunch of speculation.

We all know that LSU was targeting Demand Williams in the Transfer Portal initially. He signed at Washington, and then he jumps into the Transfer Portal after signing that contract. That's a problem. We all know that. We can all see that. That is obviously a problem. Even his agency knows that that's a problem. And so they ended up dumping him and moving away from that relationship.

It was the Wasserman group. And the style and the manner. in which it happened, there was a memorial service for another Husky athlete going on, and this news broke during the memorial. It's awful. The whole thing is awful. And he's going to have to try to repair those relationships because, rightly so, somebody finally looked at the contract. And it was pretty ironclad.

I mean, these teams and programs are not dummies. They're going to make contracts that are. are binding, at least for the year that you sign them. And somebody said, yeah, you know what, you probably need to go back. Because this is not, one, a good look. And two, you can't do that without paying a huge buyout. And so now he's going to be back at Washington. And now Jed Fish has a problem on his hands because now the trust is broken between his

quarterback and his team and the fan base and maybe even some of the coaching staff. He went on to say, I support him. and we will work together to begin the process of repairing relationships and regaining the trust of the Husky community. That's a tough deal. And it's a situation that we need to avoid in college football. We need to avoid this. And there are ways to avoid this.

I want to talk about some ways to fix what's going on in college football. Because we all can see the train wrecks. We all know the problems. And I don't think it's enough like we keep pointing at them. but no one's willing to go out there and actually fix them. And by the way, it's going to take some courage and it's going to take some brass to go out and fix some of these things in college football. But let's start outlining a framework of what needs to change and why. All right?

Let's do that. Because on this program, we don't just want to complain. We want to offer our thoughts in a way that makes the sport better and moves the sport forward. So let's first start with what are the goals of college football. and more specifically singular programs within college football. I think that this is very important because you've got to understand who you are, where you're going, and then how you're going to get there. Goals to build a program, number one, and listen,

you can make an argument that my third goal should be number one and so on and so forth. So in no particular order, these are the three goals of any program in America, really, and really any level. Compete for a championship because you want to go out there and compete at the highest level. So you've got to go out there and have a goal to compete for championships. That's pretty obvious. You want to win consistently year over year. So build something that's sustainable. If I'm a coach and I'm going to go out there and I'm going to be the head coach, the CEO of a program, my goal is to be consistent, win consistently, be

consistent day to day. Everyone can expect the same thing. We are going to do the right thing every day, build to be consistent and win consistently. And then lastly, and again, in no particular order, I want to develop young men into great men. I want them to be better fathers and husbands. I want them to be better coworkers and brothers because they played in my program. That should be the development that's going on on the personal side, personal development from young men into men. And those are the goals.

Now, again, you might have different goals based on your region and there's a rivalry here and so on and so forth, and I totally understand that. But from a generic sense, this is really what you're trying to achieve as a head coach. And yet, the structure of our sport actively works against a lot of this thing. Now, the blueprint to do some of these things, that I'm talking about, goals to build a program,

the blueprint over the last three years is pretty similar because what we've seen from Michigan in their title run, what we saw last year from Ohio State, and what we're seeing now from both Indiana and Miami is a similar blueprint. And that blueprint starts with a really firm foundation of your guys. So you've got to recruit well and you've got to get your players in there. Now, I know some will say like, no, Indiana's all transfers. No, no, no, no.

SIG brought them. They're his guys. So the foundation are his guys. Did they start at Indiana? No, they started at JMU like Aidan Fisher and DeAnglo Pons and McCau, Kamara and Elijah Surrat. These guys are SIGs guys. So the foundation is his.

Okay? And that's important. Because at Michigan, it was that way. And our Ohio State, it was that way as well when they won a national championship. Indiana, that's the same thing. Miami has done a great job in high school recruiting. So even though there's some transfers in there, the foundation are Miami guys. They're Christobal guys.

That's first and foremost. You need a foundation of your guys. You've got a hit in the portal in specific areas of need. think that's very important. And then you've got to have a long-term mindset, long-term mindset, meaning this development that I was talking about in those last three goals, not only personally, but also from a football standpoint. How do you develop guys that are your guys, keep them in your program,

and then allow them to play as veterans? Because here's the truth about these teams that are competing for championships right now in college football. They are all veteran. Here's some numbers surrounding that. Michigan, 2023, Ohio State, 24, and then both of the championship game participants this year in 2025, Miami and Indiana, they are highly experienced. If you look at the starters that are on the field, that are ones contributing, the number of three-plus year players that guys have been in college for three-plus years, it's basically the same. Michigan had 17, Ohio State had 19. Miami and Indiana both have 19.

If you look at four plus year players, guys that have been in school for four plus years, it's again, basically the same. Miami's got 14 of those guys on their team as starters. Indiana, 18. So a little bit more for Indiana, but basically the same. And then if you look at five plus year, guys that have been in school for five plus years, virtually even, Indiana 9, Miami 8. And that's amongst the starters, the guys that are going to be on the field.

And those numbers are very much in line with what, Ohio State was in 24 with what Michigan was in 23. So this is no mistake. Guys, we are seeing exactly what it takes to go compete, to go compete for and win a championship. And that is experience, veteran players. Because again, Indiana and Miami are virtually identical when it comes to experience. There's this narrative out there that, you know, Miami's a bunch of 19-year-olds and

Indiana's a bunch of 23-year-olds. and oh, this is not fair. It is false. It is totally false. Those numbers bear it out right there. They are both very experienced team. There's maybe not a more experienced player on the field than Carson Beck. I don't understand why these Miami people are out there running with this narrative. Oh, wait. Yes, I do. Why? Because it's Indiana. And you're starting to see this from a lot of different circles in college football. The fact that Indiana went from in two years, in two years, the losingest program, in the history of the sport to a to a seven and a half eight point favorite in the national championship game is ruining it for everybody else.

And I'm talking about the expectations on your program and more specifically on your coach. Kurt Signetti is making life really difficult on every other head coach in America. What they're doing and how quickly they've turned this around at Indiana right now is a shot across the bow at everyone. And it's like, hey, why can't you do this? So it's no longer available for head coaches to put what I would call imaginary ceilings on their program. And a lot of guys do this because, by the way, it's job security.

Job security is for every SEC coach to talk about the gauntlet of the SEC schedule. Oh, man, no one can win down here. That's job security. It's job security to say, like, hey, with the constraints we have, what we're doing is really good. And you convince people over and over and over of that. And then everyone's like, well, our guy is doing the best he possibly can. But the problem is, is now Indiana is coming around and just shattering all of those false ceilings, just shattering. And now everyone's kind of sitting there and they're sitting back and they're looking and they're like, well, hmm, why can't we do that?

Because all of those players are available to us, the way that he evaluates those players, that's available to us. And so it's becoming problematic, I would just say, for other coaches around the sport. College football national championship game is officially set with Indiana and Miami matching up in Miami. That's why I need to tell you about my special hookup from today's sponsor, Seatgeek. Everyone can use my code, Clat 100, and get $100 off tickets on Seat Geek to the championship game, whether you're a new customer or not. Seat Geek rates on a scale of 1 to 10.

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Thank you to Siki for sponsoring today's show. Now, that was a bit of a tangent there, but I just wanted to talk about the experience because that's the blueprint. So if we're talking about goals to build a program, how do you fulfill those goals, how do you compete for championships, win consistently, develop boys to men personally

and on the football field and become better football players? Well, it takes the opportunity to develop guys into veterans. And yet, our end, entire structure makes it really difficult to do that because we're seeing that play out in real time with guys like French transferring after his first year after being highly recruited, guys like Quincy Porter transferring after being highly recruited. What is the motivation for Ohio State or Texas to go out there and spend the resources necessary in order to recruit the best players in the country if there's no guarantee that

they're going to be there to develop into the player that you can win a national championship with? I think that's a fair question. What is all of this going to do to high school recruiting? I think it's going to change it fundamentally. You've got to really understand the players why. Is he there for money? Is he there for development?

Is he there to go to the National Football League? And if he doesn't know, is he going to waffle after one year? All of that is very interesting. And so you're trying to build this veteran team and develop and you're trying to sprinkle in transfers in areas of need. And you know what? It's impossible. And why is it impossible?

Because the hardest part about this is that every single player is a free agent every single year. You can't do that. You can't do that. We all know that this framework is totally unsustainable and has to change. It has to change. We all know that. And yet it's like turning the Titanic to change it. Like we see the icebergs.

We are hitting them actively. And yet we won't change the direction. of our boat. Like, what are we? Come on. Come on. We've got to be able to change. And someone has to have enough courage to fight the things that keep us from changing. And I think that that's a very important piece. So what are the action steps? What do we need to change and how do we do it? Let's get after it. Who's going to have the courage to step in the fight, to step in the arena and challenge the status quo and make the changes necessary to make our sport better for everybody. Because guess what? This is not great for the players either. They're getting bad advice.

I firmly believe DeMond Williams got bad advice. Maybe not from Wasserman, but from somebody in his orbit like Tom Brady was talking about. Like who's got the ear of these players that have their personal development top of mind? That's a question. That's a question. What are the fixes? How do we navigate what seems to be a minefield, an ocean full of icebergs and come through it on the other side. I believe that it's actually very simple. Let's talk about some of these fixes and we can do it fairly quickly. The action steps are as follows. Number one, someone needs to have enough courage to step up and say these players are employees. I understand some people are vehemently against that, but that is actively

what is happening. They are. And all we need to do is label. them as such. Once you do that, it opens up a world of possibilities and frameworks and structures in order to negotiate with the players as employees to get a framework that helps limit their movement and protect them as people. That is obvious. That is obvious. So we need to do that. We can get to a CBA, a collectively bargained agreement, but only once somebody has the brass to step in and have the fight and say, you know what, these are employees. We are paying. We are paying. We are paying them straight from our revenue stream. They are employees of the school, and that's what they are.

So let's get them under that umbrella, and let's collectively bargain with them and get a framework that's better for everybody. And we can limit some movement. We can do a lot of different things. What can we do if we have a CBA? Well, number one, we can have binding multi-year contracts. Binding multi-year contracts that are not just contracts that you can buy out of. Like you don't see in the NFL, players can't buy out of their contract.

Now, they can request a trade. they can hold out, and obviously you're welcoming in some of those dynamics, which I know people are not going to like, but a binding multi-year contract would be much better for both the player and the program in college football. And it's not even close. One, two, and three-year contracts. If you had one, two-and-three-year contracts, then let's just say, sake of argument, a guy like Quincy Porter, who was one of the better wide receivers in the class last year. It goes to Ohio State, and he says, listen, I'll sign with you, but I'm only willing to sign a one-year contract. Well, maybe then Ohio State could look at him and say, you know what?

We're only going to recruit you if you sign a two or a three. And then they can mutually part ways in the recruiting process. Ohio State doesn't have to waste resources, including NIL resources, on Quincy Porter, because they know he's not going to be here for multiple years. And maybe there is a program that's like, listen, you're going to be here for one year, you're going to be on our field, we'll take you right now. I don't know who that is. Missouri, Michigan, Texas, Texas.

I don't know. There's going to be somebody, but at least everybody would be up front with what's going on. I'm here for a one-year contract or I'm here for a multi-year contract. I'll sign a three. Well, now the investment from that program, let's say it's Ohio State in this instance, is going to be much different. Maybe they'll even pay him more, knowing that he'll be there for three years. And more importantly, once you get to the next transfer portal window, you will know who's available and who's not. just like free agency and the National Football League, both from fans, coaches, players, everybody. So the players will know what seats are available in different programs, and it's not just a total free-for-all, the deck of the Titanic.

No, no, no, no. It's not a free-for-all. You'll know which seats are open, which programs need, which position groups. It's better for the players in that sense. It's obviously better for the coaches because he doesn't have to recruit his entire team every single transfer portal window, and it's better for the fans. Because now you'll know, okay, who are the players that I'm at, actually concerned about that could jump into the transfer portal.

And then you can have your graphics about resigning. Great. His contract was up, and now he's resigning with us. Wonderful. All of that is better than what we have now. Multi-year contracts, binding multi-year contracts. The other thing a CBA would do that I think would be really good for players is it would force the representation, whether it's management or agents, to register.

And once you have registered third-party officials, if you want to call it, call them management agents. What you can do is you can better tamper, or you can better enforce tampering rules. All of that would be better for our sport. Now, what's the hard part? You've got to challenge the status quo because you're going to have a lot of dinosaurs

that are like, they're not employees. Yes, they are. We just have to label them as employees so that we can move forward with something that is better. That's better for everybody. I would also have the transfer portal in a different time frame, and that brings us to our second fix. One is label them employees. The other is fix the calendar.

And I always talk about fixing the calendar. And to be honest with you, I used to think to myself, like, why don't they just do this? It's such a, it's such an easy fix. So why doesn't it happen? And I started realizing it's like, oh, okay, yeah. Like, there are archaic structures that are preventing this from changing. And there is a subset of people within the sport that are dead set on protecting some of those archaic structures. By the way, it happened in that first thing.

There are some people that are dead set on being like, no, this is amateurism. This is amateur sports. They're not employees. I don't know. That's an archaic way of thinking about this. That way of thinking needs to die. It does. We need to move off of that.

Someone needs to challenge that group and say, no, this is where we're going. Same thing in the calendar. What are the challenges in the calendar? Well, one of the challenges is the playoff and its structure and how we schedule the playoff deep into January versus trying to finish the college football season by at the latest January 1st or January 5th and making sure that we are competing straight through. We don't have long breaks in December.

There's so many advantages to trying to play this playoff, get this competition done before the first week of January. There is so many benefits. One of them is that you can avoid the National Football League. Then you don't have to have some of your most marquee products on Thursday and Friday night. You don't have to avoid the National Football League and have your national championship game,

which should be your tent pole event, your marquee event. And we played on a Monday night randomly in January. Obviously, that's bad for the sport because we're not showcasing those events, which need showcasing to the best possible ability. That's just part of the schedule, right? We can avoid the National Football League.

and we can compete, end, and then roster build. That's probably the most important piece of fixing the calendar, but someone needs to challenge the status quo of the playoff schedule. Everything that goes on with that, the tournament of roses and the Rose Bowl parade, they need to challenge that and say like, well, why are you going to dictate how we do this? Because us trying to fit college football in its modern version around archaic things is not working.

The other is spring football, by that. the way. There's a subset of coaches that still hang on to spring football so tightly that it has impacted where the transfer portal lands. So there was a big, I don't want to call it a fight, but there was a big discussion amongst coaches last year when they were moving from two portals to one portal. So if you remember, we used to have two transfer windows. That was a disaster. And they all knew, but we got to have one transfer portal window. Okay, great. Let's have one transfer portal window, where's it going to be? And there were a lot of coaches that wanted a March transfer portal window. And there was a lot of people that even wanted a May transfer portal

window. So a spring transfer portal window, more towards the end of the semester from an academic perspective. Now, May kind of lost out first, and then people started settling on March, all right, March. But then there was this subset of coaches, primarily from the SEC, that wanted January is the transfer portal window. And the reason that they wanted the January transfer portal window is so that they didn't have to go through the spring semester and have spring football with players on their roster that they knew wouldn't be on their roster in the fall,

whether those players were going to leave willingly or if they wanted to run them out. Okay, so think about that for a moment. Because you might be thinking to yourself like, well, that makes sense, Joel. Okay, on the surface, it makes sense. Until you realize that we're trying to fit, a very new product,

product, excuse me, like the transfer portal in a singular fashion, in a one window fashion, and we're trying to fit it around an archaic structure of spring football. Spring football is archaic, these 15 practices that you had like happen at the end of February or early March and then you're off. And it's like, well, that's obviously an easier fix.

Why are we bending ourselves backwards to fit spring football when we could do spring workouts much better. If you had the transfer portal in March, then in April you could finish the academic year, and in May you could start off-season workouts with what I would call OTAs. Some of them padded, some of them not. And in May and June, you could have OTAs. And by the way, you could have more than 15

because you wouldn't have to be in pads the whole time, and you probably wouldn't want to be in pads the whole time, but you could install, you could do everything that they do at the National Football League level, and you could do it in May in June, which means that you would have the entire spring semester to get healthy as a player, complete classes and actually retain some of your academic eligibility and movement towards a degree, which we've totally lost, but this would obviously benefit that. And then you could make a decision that's not an emotional decision right after the season,

but it's got some time between the season and when you were making a decision to go out there and actually go into the transfer portal. and if you couple that with multi-year contracts, we would know exactly who's available in that transfer portal window. So what are we doing here? Because we are bending ourselves like a pretzel in college football and making things very difficult on ourselves and our coaches more specifically

by trying to save amateurism and save the postseason schedule and save spring football. All of that stuff is archaic. We need to have a modern lens on all of those things, all of those things. And it would be better. If we don't do this, if we don't do this, I think that it spells doom for college football, to be honest with you. There's going to be more program player lawsuits like I'm sure was threatened in the Washington situation with Demand Williams. You're going to have more of that.

That's not good. High school recruiting is going to be hurt because who's going to invest in high school recruiting if that player is just going to leave after a year? So all those opportunities and that entire process for a high school player largely impacted and never the same. College is going to be reluctant to sign high school guys unless they have some sort of commitment towards the future. And I think that the bigger impact, we're just going to flat lose coaches. Some of our best coaches in our sport, which the NFL always sniffs around, what keeps them from going to the National Football League, if you're going to continue to put them into this structure that is totally wrong. and they can't succeed in.

And there's no loyalty in. And they've got to recruit every single player, every single year. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants. What keeps Ryan Day in college football? What keeps Marcus Freeman in college football? Now, I would argue it's the ability to impact players and build legacy. Impact and legacy are what is offered in college and the college level that maybe isn't

offered at the NFL level from a coaching standpoint. But guess what? Quality of life? Way better in the national. football league way better. And all we have to do is have the difficult conversations. Somebody needs to have some character here and a spine. Stand up to the archaic things in our sport that hold us back and move us forward with things that we know would be better. That's an obvious thing. It's not hard to fix. Make them employees. Fix the calendar. You do those

two things. College football is immensely better right away. I want to keep Steve Sarkisian and college football. I want to keep Dan Laning in college football and Marcus Freeman and Ryan Day and so on and so forth. That would be better for our sport and it would be better for the future of our sport so that kids that are enjoying it right now and playing football and flag football at 10, 11 and 12 years old, that they have something resembling what we love there for them when they're here to compete in college football. That's what I think we should do. All right, that's going to do it for me. We'll be back later this week. We have got the championship game preview coming up. So I'll break everything down for an Indiana-M Miami matchup. That's going to be awesome.

I'll probably end that show as well, try to recap some of the things that become final here in the last, what is it, four days of the transfer portal window. A lot of big names still need to be signed. A lot of big programs still need to fill a lot of holes. So we'll try to update you on that for that episode as well. You can subscribe to us here on the YouTube channel at Joel Clashow. You can follow us on social media at Joel Clashow. All of that is available to you. you. I hope you have a wonderful week. Please share the show with a friend and we'll see you next time.