
SL Xpress
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Recruiting - 2020
2019-2020 Football Season
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Posts posted by SL Xpress
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1 hour ago, honolulu horn said:
One of my favorite parts of this recruiting cycle is when we lose out on someone, we say "Texas has fidelity. They have a monetary cap on recruits, and they aren't going to go over and get in a bidding war...that's for someone like Tech or Baylor to do." Then when there's a chance to get a really solid player, the tune changes to "Holy shit empty the bank and go get that guy!"
To be clear, I'm 100% on board with your strategy. Cooper would be a great get. I also know shit about fuck.
I see this kind of post all the time. Like a message board is supposed to be some kind of hive mind. I see it from content creators who depend on engaging with their audience, then blame the audience for demanding contrasting actions on the part of the content creator. I mean, I see it from all segments of the population regarding all sorts of things.
There can be a group that thinks Texas should be fiscally responsible in terms of their overall budget, their budget within positions, their budget with current players and upcoming retention --- contrasted with their budget for the acquisition of new talent. And then there can be an opposing segment that so desperately wants the dopamine hit from a talented teenager creating validation and affirmation for their favorite college sports team that they excitedly wish for other people to spend a small fortune to get the kid to say yes.
People can hold contrasting opinions. Within the same person, frankly. One of the things that makes people most interesting to me is when they can simultaneously feel strongly in support of two opposing sides of the same position. It happens to me, too.
But mostly I think it's a group of people who are very comfortable with spending someone else's money with no real limitations, and then a group of people who hope Texas has a plan they're trying to follow in terms of roster payroll.
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58 minutes ago, BurgleBro said:
Has any program had such great sustained success leading to such an outcome recently?
So is recruiting gonna get boosted by 3 playoff appearances? 4? Will it even get a boost with a title?
Its clear the money is tied up or Texas decision makers don't want to commit money this summer out of fear.
We need to cleanse our minds of any success at all helping anything at all into the future.
We need to step away from the jump to conclusions mat.
There is no way to accurately speculate what the future is going to bring other than it's going to be very different than what it is now. Acting is if this is the final form of college sports - and college football specifically - and even more specifically, college football recruiting - is silly.
Eventually there will be some kind of federal legislation, because that's the only avenue that can bring some resemblance of stability. Until then the whole ecosystem is going to be whipsawed from one direction into another based on the most recent court cases/settlements, new state laws passed to give the local programs a competitive advantage, and how different programs find ways around various restrictions.
But acting like what has been going on the last few weeks is a harbinger of what the future will look like is silly. At the end of the day any sales pitch needs the opportunity to get your foot in the door. Relationships still matter. They always will. Success on the gridiron will make a difference. But when we're talking about millions of dollars being thrown around for individual players, of course that's going to often trump how many playoff appearances, NFL draft picks, or individual accolades are being earned. But it doesn't mean they don't matter at all.
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4 minutes ago, Bevo said:
It has been so many years, but I vaguely remember that the high school knock on him was that he was lazy - but it was known that he had an NFL body.It wasn't just the high school knock on him. That was the knock on him early in his college career, too. But with Casey Hampton as his teammate, that wasn't going to cut it. To Shaun Rogers' credit, he got on board with Hampton, and they turned into one of the most fearsome duo of DTs we've ever had, which is an extremely high bar, frankly.
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I root against everyone who had a chance to go to Texas but chose to go elsewhere regardless of the reasons. It’s different when they didn’t get the opportunity, but I enjoy being petty.
There’s a lot of making fun of the 9.95ers on this thread, but I feel like I’ve been steered correctly on my expectations for pretty much every recruitment this cycle outside of maybe KJ Edwards. I know some people are disgruntled because we apparently led at some point with a lot of targets, but once the bigger NIL deals started rolling in the 9.95ers adjusted accordingly. Him declaring for Oregon surprised no one who follows On Texas Football.-
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He has a good looking shot with very nice touch. It's smooth action with a nice arc. He's going to have to tweak his mechanics to get the shot off faster though. He is the equivalent of a QB with a huge, slow windup. He's going to have some difficulty getting that shot off at times. Nice looking player though. Nice shooting touch, good athlete with a good frame.
So…Garrett Gilbert. -
14 hours ago, satyanash said:
If Curry just got the hell away from the ball, so much would have been different for UT over the following decade. A triumphant Akers gets buy-in from boosters + recruits after reaching the promised land and competes on even terms with Switzer, Sherrill's momentum at A&M is blunted, and we don't panic-hire McWilliams. Once Switzer is busted and Sherrill fizzles out we run the SWC in its final years before heading to the Pac-10 in 1992 on a high note, while A&M and Tech are relegated to joining the Big Eight.
Instead 1985-1995 was a absolute graveyard of a decade where Switzer, Sherrill and Slocum took turns beating us every season.
That's fanciful.
First of all, Akers shouldn't have sent Curry out there in the first place. Just send out the regular punt team. They'd never practiced it. Akers put Curry in a position to fail, and that's all there is to it.
Secondly, Texas was going down to mediocrity whether Akers won the championship or not. That '83 team was ridiculously loaded. But the recruiting behind that team had already been eroded.
Third, Akers wasn't that good of a recruiter. He recruited well in spite of himself. He would regularly slow play players, telling his staff, "you got to make them want it." He was terrible with African American families. Completely tone deaf. The staff would prep families for his in home visit, telling them what he'd say before he'd say it so they could just nod their head at how ridiculous he sounded rather than get offended.
Also, I don't know what you mean by a panic hire. The athletic department was poor at the time. Deloss Dodds wisely took a back seat regarding the head football coaching hire because he didn't want that to be a part of how he was measured for doing his job. If he just took marching orders on that hire he could go back to fundraising and make that what he was measured by.
There's also no way the state legislature was going to let Texas go anywhere without A&M, Baylor, and Texas Tech. Not without paying the price of opening up the PUF to all state schools, which wasn't ever an option.
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3 minutes ago, Bevo said:
So NIL has to come from a 3rd party that is a legitimate business entity. Basically, all you need to do is create a hedge fund where a percentage of profits goes towards player development. That sounds easy enough. My brother was a VP in M&A at JP Morgan. It would take him all of a couple of weeks to set it up with coordination from the One Fund. And the companies that it invests in will use players as sponsors.
That's the intent of the House settlement. It's unclear how it will be enforced. We know some of the mechanisms. We do not know how effective they will be. We can also surmise it will be tested by programs seeking a competitive advantage.
In addition the House settlement has multiple legal challenges it will have to face. Also, there are other legal challenges to the NCAA that were not covered by the House settlement.
The Texas One Fund has said they will retain independence from the athletic department, even though donations go towards Longhorn Foundation points. They have now pivoted to creating partnerships with local businesses for NIL opportunities to be given to Texas student athletes, rather than asking for charitable work. I don't have a clue how any of that works, but that's what they've said.
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I think a big part of the point of spending $1 million on a softball pitcher was the message "if you're good enough, we're willing to blow our budget on you, too, so come to us and let's make a deal."
It's unclear just how much of their wealth the Double Eagle guys are willing to invest in the football program specifically, and the athletic program in general, but it's obviously quite a bit. And unlike Phil Knight or T. Boone Pickens, they're pretty young.
As far as declining enrollment, a good way to reverse that is to field a good football team.
It's hard for me to envision Tech becoming a new Miami of the 80s through early 2000s. Or the SMU of the early 80s. But they could be like A&M under Sherrill and Slocum. Dominate their conference with no top 5 finishes. Look at what a golden age Aggie fans think of that as.
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8 minutes ago, markstanco said:
Dont look at 30 mil from your perspective. If he has $1000 throwing $30 at something isnt that much. Also, he has more than a thousand and it will continue to grow.
It's really two guys. John Sellers and Cody Campbell. They both played football at Texas Tech. They were partners with Double Eagle. They're the guys who brought in the softball pitcher, NiJaree Canady, from Stanford, for $1 mlllion per year both last year and this coming season.
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7 hours ago, Lonestar88 said:
The outrage would've been from other teams/fans. "Texas is ruining college football!!11". People care a lot less when its an irrelevant Texas Tech program.
All I can say is that I predict the numbers keep going up until there's some kind of legislation or the system starts collapsing. Maybe this new enforcement mechanism does something to curtail the spending, but I doubt it.
Texas isn't going to ruin college football any more than it ruined the Southwest Conference or the Big 12. But I feel like you know that.
In any case, I did miss the point of the post.
I do feel like Texas Tech can spend its way to relevancy if they have the right coach. I have no idea if McGuire is that sort of dude, but if you spend enough more than everyone else year after year, eventually it comes together. That's assuming the Double Eagle guys continue to believe this is a good use of their immense wealth. And it assumes other programs don't get their own very generous benefactors and outspend them. But that goes back to my first sentence.
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19 minutes ago, 6th Street said:
Happy we landed Turntine. High upside dude.
Imagine the outrage here if we were the ones who gave Ojo that stupid ass $5.1M deal.
I think the amount of outrage could easily be exaggerated.
Most people find it remarkably easy to spend someone else's money.
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Yeah, this is a good slump buster. Excited to have him.
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5 hours ago, BurntOrange&White said:
The cap is revenue sharing provided by school, not NIL.
The school is signing NIL deals with athletes. It's still NIL.
The terminology is confusing.
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4 hours ago, WBT said:
You must have missed roughly 2007-2022. It sucked.
Lol. It did suck. So did 1984-1997.
Mack Brown got lazy. Charlie Strong and Tom Herman were terrible hires. The worst thing that could have happened is that Texas brings more talent in to waste on those bozos. Yes, it sucked, but maybe we had to go through all that to get to where we are now.
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4 hours ago, immamac said:
How many NIL deals have you done or been a part of or read or seen anything about other than the news?
Compliance has always existed, just because it's delloite who can torpedo the deal doesn't mean there hasn't always been someone who could torpedo the deal.
What you are seeing now is SCHOOLS being able to offer money in addition to the collectives that were already going, and in many cases in lieu of the collective (many have been shuttered or combined with the internal AD) the reason a lot of the parity is happening now is because schools that didn't have their NIL shit together all of the sudden have millions to throw around. Its going to be terrible for them, they are going to mismanage rosters, overpay for players that aren't high enough impact, do really stupid shit to be part of the Joneses etc.
Texas already has a machine, it has discipline, it has a roster retention plan, it has depth, and it has the resume for a program developing players into NFL players.
A handful.
Beyond all that, rules are being broken. Rules are going to be broken. And then how it's dealt with will determine how well the House settlement holds up in the short term. In the long term there's going to be some other dynamic in place because there are going to be more lawsuits, more settlements, more judgements, and then eventually, some sort of federal legislation.
I'm not terribly concerned about Texas. We'll be fine.
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5 hours ago, JFKFC said:
There is no cap on NIL.
Yeah, the terminology gets awkward. There's a $20.5 million cap on NIL provided by the schools. There's no cap on third party NIL, but all deals over $600 are supposed to go through a clearinghouse that determines if they're legitimate. If the NIL deal is determined not to be a market rate NIL deal based on an algorithm, the deal is supposed to be blown up.
Right now Texas is deciding on an administrative level to not do booster led NIL deals for the 2026 class. So they're counting on the $15 million or so out of the $20.5 million allotment the school has put forward specifically for football, plus whatever NIL deals the metro area of Austin can produce for local athletes - plus whatever national brands want to get on board - to compensate athletes. Other schools don't seem to be following the same formula, so for the 2026 class other programs appear to have more money to throw at athletes than Texas does. That's a bit of a question, but that's the appearance.
Like I've said multiple times, the ink isn't dry on the House settlement, so we'll have to see how it all works out. But I can say that if Texas abides by this, and other schools choose to add more booster led NIL deals, then Texas isn't going to just have a tough time recruiting in football. They'll have a tough time recruiting in any sport where booster led initiatives are being used to acquire talent. That will become very obvious very quickly. I just don't see how Texas allows that as a long term situation.
But the House settlement is not college sports' final form. Not by a long shot. We are in a phase of complete chaos, where the rules will change regularly, and programs that value winning will have to constantly adapt.
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6 hours ago, Not a Sock said:
We’re in a NFL style era of championship windows, Sark has to win a title in the next two years with the roster he has built before we are in rebuild mode. I just don’t believe that Texas is going to have some late surge of flips and sign a top 3 class, that just strikes me as wish casting. Either Texas just doesn’t have the free funds to match other offers given how loaded and expensive our roster is. Or we are going to see the most epic, meltdown, drama filled plane crash if schools are the lying to the order of millions of dollars they don’t have. I really just don’t believe it’s the latter, as much as I want it to be.
That is not what is going on.
It's more like a cap has recently been instituted, with no clear enforcement mechanism, and no clear punishments if a team goes over the cap, so some programs are trying to abide by the cap, and others aren't.
It's basically very similar to pre 2017 except with a higher floor for wages for student athletes. If you want to ignore the rules and spend up to the limit that your boosters will spend above the $20.5 million provided by the athletic department, then go ahead. And we'll see if these enforcement mechanisms have any teeth or not.
We're extremely early in this iteration of recruiting, so we'll see how Texas responds over time. There's not a need to rush to action simply because people are panicking on message boards. The roster is in great shape. The signing period isn't until December. Let's see what happens.
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Just now, LCHorn said:
This is probably true to a point, I.e., a lot of the program’s revenue includes donations that can either go into Bellmont or Texas One. The advantage UT/Austin (keeping those separate because location is a big part) should have is that, over a long enough time line, the specific advantages for the school to generate real value independent of wealthy donors should make the revenue stream bigger and more consistent.
In other words, it’s healthier to have a Ewers getting paid to do Dr. Pepper commercials than to have Cody Campbell at Tech pony up extra money for NIL that maybe comes out of what he’d normally spend on Tech university donations (or maybe he just donates more in total but is apt to get fatigued as the money demands increase).
The only problem with that is the NIL money from Cody Campbell types is front loaded, whereas Dr. Pepper commercials are potentially there, but speculative.
I read an article recently about the Zuckerberg-Chan Foundation pulling out of financing an East Palo Alto private school:
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative plans to shut down East Palo Alto school
The moral of the story according to many witnesses is be wary of entrusting your endeavors to one donor because they may cease funding, and then you cease to exist.
Same is true for Texas Tech and Oregon. Oklahoma State was helped immensely by T. Boone Pickens who singlehandedly helped make OSU athletics more competitive with the rest of the Big 12. Then when he died, those donations dried up for the most part.
The great thing about Texas is there's a deep bench. It's not an unlimited bench, but it's not one benefactor the way it is with other places.
I feel confident Texas is in a good place whatever the future of college athletics ends up being. But like Littlefinger reminds us, chaos is a ladder. SMU is now in the Power 4, and made the college football playoffs last year. Texas Tech made it to the championship game in softball. There are a lot of places that are going to go all in at least in the short term to see if they can rise up the ladder. Some of that is absolutely unsustainable. But if they see some short term success it incentivizes another wave of programs to try to do something similar, or if they have deep enough pockets, they keep raising the ante in an effort to see how far up the ladder they can go.
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19 minutes ago, closetojumping said:
It's as I've been saying, one of three things is happening, probably all at different places:
1) Programs are making up money and hoping to backfill it on success and rev share later. (USC, at least)
2) Programs are foregoing what they have on campus to make big offers to recruits and build from there. (ATM, Florida)
3) Programs are going to wash through more than $20.5M and call it all rev share, whatever the numbers are. (LSU)
There are probably some morons who just aren't calculating the current roster much at all for future monetary needs and just assuming "it will work itself out" when, indeed, it very well may not.
Also they're using third party NIL money and daring the new enforcement mechanisms to do their job either by not reporting it or reporting it and seeing what happens.
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26 minutes ago, Josef Pwag said:
I'm confused. The house settelment puts a cap on what the schools themselves can pay, but I thought NIL was still uncapped. How does putting a cap on NIL jibe with the unanimous Alston SCOTUS decision?
Here is what ChatGPT told me...is this wrong?
What the House settlement caps:
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Schools that opt into the settlement will be allowed to pay current Division I athletes directly from school revenue—up to an annual cap.
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That cap starts at $20.5 million per school for the 2025‑26 academic year and is expected to increase by about 4% annually over the next decade (potentially reaching around $33 million) uscannenbergmedia.com+15cbssports.com+156abc.com+15.
What they didn’t cap: third‑party NIL deals
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Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) money that athletes receive from third-party sources—such as individual endorsement deals, collectives, or boosters—is not counted against the school’s revenue-sharing cap. These deals remain unlimited in terms of the amount, as long as they reflect fair market value and serve a valid business purpose
Well, any summary of the House settlement is going to be inadequate, because a) it's a summary b) there are unintended consequences, some of which can be foreseen, and some it of which cannot.
College football is in something of an existential crisis. How can that be, SL Xpress? It's never been more popular! The ratings are through the roof. There's more money pouring in than ever before!
Sure, then a disruption happens, and suddenly we see the cracks in retrospect that were always there previously.
College football has lost control of their labor costs. Over the past 30 years there has been a meteoric rise in salaries among coaches and administrators. There have been facility funding wars. But a lot of that was possible because of the artificial suppression of wages for the players, set at the cost of a scholarship, and then amended over the years to some cost of living and travel expense allowances that didn't even approach the market value of talented players. There has always been a black market since college football became a thing, that grew exponentially after WWII with black market trend setter OU. Saban and others brought around another era which saw the amount given to everyone associated with talented players - including the players themselves, but not exclusively - rise extensively, but since it was a black market, it didn't come close to what their real market value is.
The thing is, college football wages are not tied to profit/loss statements. Businesses can overpay their labor force, until they go out of business or are purchased by someone else because they're no longer competitive. Like someone told me, the numbers don't matter until they matter. For most businesses layoffs occur prior to that because they're not growing enough or they're losing money.
But for college football players, they're insulated from those dynamics somewhat because their market value is determined by the ego of wealthy boosters, not by profit/loss statements.
That hasn't changed. The House settlement didn't change that. It's put up some parameters to try to help keep the labor costs from spiraling out of control, but the market is going to do what the market is going to do. Just because someone sets up some boundaries, doesn't mean those boundaries are going to be respected. To have people respect boundaries - and this is in any setting, not just football - there better be some consequences for going off the rails. The more severe the consequences, the more effective the boundaries will be.
What are the consequences for not abiding by the House settlement? Nobody knows. Until that's clear, plenty of groups are going to test things. Which is what we're seeing. Texas is not going to be one of those. Texas sees that the labor market for college football players is unsustainable, so while Texas has a competitive advantage in that landscape, it's not good for the sport as a whole, so they're taking a disciplined approach so far and trying to abide by the letter of the House settlement. At least right now.
Here's the dirty secret. None of the key decision makers in college football think the House settlement is any kind of answer. They're not fools. That's why the Big Ten and SEC commissioners were in Washington trying to get a bill passed. That's why the Notre Dame AD went golfing with Trump. What they're hoping is that the House settlement shows lawmakers they're trying, but the message to them is "we need legal help from the federal government." Which is a scary phrase to utter, but in this case it's true. There's no mechanism which will allow college football to govern itself effectively. Whatever they try to do will end up in court and be struck down due to antitrust, Title IX, or the issue of players not being classified as employees. Like the movie Wargames "the only real choice is to not play the game," but I think we can all agree none of us want to see Texas opt out of college football a la Ivy League style.
As far as this recruiting cycle the dynamics have changed, just like they changed when the Alston decision was first handed down. It will continue to change and evolve. closetojumping has the best post I've seen on the subject, and he's as close to a subject matter expert as we have on this board. Here's the link to his post for anyone who didn't see it on the previous page:
So we're just going to have to wait and see. We have a great roster right now. UT's response to this new environment is going to continue to evolve, but we have a chairman of the board of regents and an AD who are on the same page with this stuff. We didn't make the decision to join the SEC just to turn into Vanderbilt. I feel highly confident Texas is going to come out of all of this A-OK. But in the short term there's going to be some rough patches. That's what we're seeing right now.
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- Popular Post
- Popular Post
2 minutes ago, Fondren & Main said:Nobody was raped or murdered though. So, they’ve got that going for them!
Do they? Do they?
The Meme That Hilariously Won't Die: Craig James Killed Five Hookers at SMU - D Magazine
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58 minutes ago, BurntOrange&White said:
Only one school has ever been ass fucked by a governing body of college athletics and that was SMU.
That actually isn't true.
Also, SMU deserved it. The misplaced sympathy around that program in modern times is nauseating.
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46 minutes ago, closetojumping said:
Ohio State and Texas made payrolls of $25M last year. The 2025 Texas numbers were fucked up in terms of the layer cake when delivered to Bohls, but in the grand scheme, correct. He described them incorrectly but the total was right.
Yes. I've said Ohio State had a payroll of $25 million often. Which isn't $20 million.
Oregon was around $20 million last year. I do not know what their payroll is going to be this year, though. They are building a brand new start of the art sports complex exclusively for the football program. Just started construction on it. So it's not like they're pulling back.
I have talked to no one who has verified the $35-40 million from Bohls until now, but if you say the number is correct, I believe you.
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4 minutes ago, Fondren & Main said:
Deloitte ain’t fighting shit. All it will take is the first lawsuit for them to back off. They’re just interested in grifting revenue from the NCAA clowns.
What's hilarious is if they try to pass enforcement off to the conferences, which it appears is one of the strategies to avoid antitrust. Yes, the Big 10 and the SEC are going to bring the hammer to Ohio State and Georgia respectively. That's going to happen.
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Texas Recruiting Notes 2026: Boulevard of Broken Bagmen
in 🤫$9.95🤫
Posted
Shipley's. GTFO with your Dunkin Donuts.