The NCAA told you this was about paying the athletes, and I believed it for about forty-five seconds before realizing the people saying it were the same people who spent thirty years telling you amateurism was sacred.
What they actually built is a toll booth. Texas dropped twenty-three million dollars on the transfer portal this offseason — more than any program in the country, more than Ohio State at twenty million, more than Oregon at nineteen — and the bill isn’t for players they recruited out of high school and developed over four years. It’s for players some other school recruited, developed, and then watched leave the moment Austin waved a bigger number. Hollywood Smothers was Alabama’s running back. Cam Coleman was Auburn’s wide receiver. Now they’re Longhorns. The check cleared. Nobody has to pretend otherwise anymore.
The SEC GM who lost Coleman put it plainly: “Cam Coleman had a blank check from us. Trust me, he wasn’t going [to Texas] for less. He got paid a ton.” Read that sentence again. A school offered a blank check and still got outbid. That is not a market. That is an auction where only a handful of bidders can even get in the goddamn room.
https://x.com/on3nil/status/2026385042495181013
Texas’s $23M portal budget was the highest in the country for 2026, according to SportsCasting analysis, ahead of Ohio State at $20M and Oregon at $19M.
What makes this beautiful, in the way a dumpster fire is beautiful, is how Steve Sarkisian describes managing it. “We got to have our list of needs, our list of wants, and our list of luxuries,” he said during Citrus Bowl prep, “and then what’s the dollar sign next to all that?” He went on to explain that agents call him with numbers he can’t touch, so he tells them good luck, hope you get it, call us back if you don’t. That’s not a coach building a program. That’s a general manager working the waiver wire. The vocabulary of roster construction has entirely replaced the vocabulary of player development, and nobody in Austin seems bothered.
Arch Manning, to his credit, took a pay cut. His NIL valuation sits around five million dollars, and he voluntarily reduced his deal to free up capital for portal acquisitions. A twenty-one-year-old quarterback subsidized his own program’s shopping spree by taking less money. The NCAA’s definition of fair is whatever the richest schools can afford, and apparently it also includes star players tightening their own belts so the institution can rent better supporting players around them. Quinn Ewers looked at an eight-million-dollar offer to stay and walked anyway. He’s in Miami now. Make of that what you will.
The NFL Draft tells you everything you need to know about where this ends. The 2025 draft produced twenty-six first-round picks from just two conferences — the SEC and the Big Ten. Every other conference in the country combined for six. The talent pipeline that used to run through Clemson, through Iowa State, through Cincinnati — the one that gave mid-major programs a reason to exist — has been redirected. You can read what Nick Saban told the Senate about NIL and you can read about what $10 million looks like for an “amateur” athlete and none of it changes what’s actually happening: the SEC and Big Ten are monopolizing the pipeline that produces professional talent, and the mechanism is money that only they can access at scale.
The ACC and Big 12 retained just over half their top portal targets this cycle. Ten of the sixteen biggest departures went to SEC or Big Ten programs. The rest of college football is not competing in this market. It is occasionally allowed to participate in it, until someone with a real budget notices the player.
The kid who gets screwed in all of this isn’t Cam Coleman, who got paid a ton. It’s the redshirt sophomore at Kansas State or NC State who watched the portal strip his team down to the studs for the third consecutive year and is trying to figure out why he should keep blocking for a backfield that might not be there in March. Nobody’s writing the check for him. He’s the one who lives in the dorm and counts on the scout team and isn’t worth bidding on yet.
Twenty-three million dollars doesn’t buy you a team anymore. It buys you a year of one, if the agents don’t call back with a better offer first.
