How can you recover an onside kick and no time ran off the clock? But, Mississippi pulls it off! A team abandoned by its coach is now in the semi finals.
ND couldn’t build a roster like Indiana or Miami because we’re somewhat restricted by transfer admissions. Here’s the data on how teams were built. The first number is recruited kids and the second is transfers. Georgia 90.0% 10.0% Ohio State 72.0% 28.0% Oklahoma 68.0% 32.0% Alabama 62.8% 37.2% Oregon 57.4% 42.6% James Madison 57.2% 42.8% Texas A&M 55.2% 44.8% Miami 46.4% 53.6% Tulane 44.5% 55.5% Texas Tech 36.7% 63.3% Indiana 34.6% 65.4% Ole Miss 33.7% 66.3%
I know it’s been mentioned before but an odd thread to this year’s final four…all four head coaches were on Saban’s staff at some time during his tenure at Alabama. Oddly, I don’t think any of them were on the staff at the same time.
Ole Miss is my team now, 1) it would be a kick in the fruit basket to Kiffin and 2) Chambliss is a a great story, even better than Mendoza.
Plz tell me Kiffin gets NOTHING from Ole Miss post season success? The only thing he deserves is a kick in the cajones, but I'm pretty sure he sold those to the devil long ago...
Nope he negotiated that LSU would pay him whatever incentives that Ole Miss would have owed him for any play off success that they had. The good thing is that since Golding is not an interim coach he gets the credit for every playoff win.
Some Portal stuff. Ole Miss QB starter before he got injured, Austin Simmons , is in the Portal and likely headed to Missouri. Irish Backup QB , Kenny Minchey, is reportedly headed to Nebraska.
ESPN is reporting that there are over 4 thousand players in the Portal. That's just nuts. I've also read that the entire Iowa State team is either out of eligibility, gone to the NFL or in the Portal. Iowa State and new head coach Jimmy Rogers have to rebuild almost all of the program's two-deep entering the 2026 season. Following the departure of Matt Campbell for Penn State, the Cyclones have lost almost 50 players to the transfer portal in addition to the exhausted eligibility of one of the winningest senior classes in school history.
I picked this post off of another board that I read. Interesting perspective IMHO. Grad School Football? Instead of college football? Some of the recent commentary around IU has been in reference to their average age. Even without Diego Pavia on the roster, the Hoosiers have the oldest lineup in the sport, many of whom are graduate students. And Cignetti's team plays like a bunch of graduate students who are allowed to compete in undergrad intramural leagues. We saw that very situation at Rice - at one point the grad school as a unit was placed as competitive equivalent to one of the dorms - and the resulting games looked a lot like IU vs. Bama in Pasadena. A large talent pool of experienced players can overwhelm a team with a more normal age distribution in the roster. We have seen other examples of this. In football, the Marshall game was definitely one where the collection of experienced SEC castoffs humbled an early season Notre Dame. Ten years ago in basketball, Mike Brey tried to use the same strategy to pit experience vs. youth in the "one and done" era, and it almost worked. But in college football, this trend will kill the undergraduate opportunity to play. It's already making high school recruiting irrelevant, which is why we're going to need rules sooner rather than later on transfers and NIL amounts. Whether change in these rules brings IU back down to earth or not is another question ... but it will undoubtedly close the age and game experience gap, which is what I see as a source of much of their competitive advantage.
I don’t know if this is why Indiana beat the hell out of Alabama but the NFL found out quickly that uncontrolled free agency and uncontrolled funding led to extreme inequity. Some agency must step in with rules regulating transfers and NIL in the major college sports.
You see this in college hockey where a fair number of players don’t enter college until after they ran out of eligibility in junior hockey or other developmental leagues. Western Michigan won the championship last year and one of their leading players was 25. Pretty common for some of the smaller schools to stack their roster with players 23-25 years old. It can be tough for an 18 year old phenomenon to physically deal with a 25 year old man.