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Get over yourself, Notre Dame
A breakdown of the CFP's Irish snub and the school's ridiculous reaction, plus info on a new college sports CBA and more.
Wow.
Quite the Sunday, eh? College football was lit on fire yesterday, which I’ll get into in today’s newsletter. We also have some information about the historic Athletes.org CBA. Keep reading for all of that, plus the rest of the latest news from around the NIL world.
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— Kyle
Collegiate Ticketing: Build the Season That Fans Want
Colleges are realizing something important. The strongest signals for fan demand, student engagement and alumni intent all show up in one place: the ticketing journey. Every purchase, add-on and seat choice reveals what people value long before the season starts.
Acing 2026 and 2027 is no longer about selling more tickets. It is about creating one connected experience across athletics, arts and student life. Most campuses still run separate systems that fragment data, duplicate effort and make it hard to see the full picture.
A modern ticketing platform changes that. It unifies signals from every event and turns them into real insights you can act on. Marketing teams get clarity on who responds to what. Finance teams get clean, accurate flows without manual work. Fans get a simple journey that feels consistent across the entire campus.
Schools already using this approach are seeing the shift. Higher cart values through smarter add-ons. Better retention through memberships. Stronger cross-event engagement because all departments share the same view.
If you want to plan next season with confidence instead of guesswork, join our upcoming session. We will show real workflows, real examples and practical setups that help colleges shape a winning season.
Register for the webinar here.
KICKOFF
College sports inches closer to a CBA
Athletes.org, a non-profit player association for college athletes, has unveiled the first-ever college sports collective bargaining agreement, outlining terms that would last four years.
The years-in-the-making proposal is a 35-page document that addresses many of the issues athletic directors and coaches want leaders in Washington, D.C., to address:
the removal of limitations on third-party NIL payments
a maximum of five years of eligibility
an age limit
a templated revenue share agreement for all schools
school-specific revenue-sharing percentages, based on pro rata revenue per sport
a compensation cap and minimum spending determined by conference or sport
a revenue sharing cap on freshman athletes
A bulk of the proposal focuses on football. Jim Cavale, the co-founder of Athletes.org, drafted the proposal with input from current and recently graduated athletes. Athletes.org represents 5,000 athletes across all sports and divisions.
“The intention is that this Collective Bargaining Agreement would replace the fragmented NIL compensation model with a sustainable, enforceable structure for college athletics,” Athletes.org co-founder Brandon Copeland wrote in a statement. “By consolidating athlete compensation into a single income stream and shifting away from strictly NIL-based payments for athletic services, this framework establishes a fair and practical structure for athlete compensation and negotiations.”
In the proposal, Athletes.org used professional CBAs as an example of how to transform competition and generate value. A CBA would help college sports navigate the current financial system, which has 50 different sets of laws across states.
One of the biggest unknowns regarding collective bargaining and college sports is who exactly the players would bargain with. The CBA would also require athletes to have an employee designation. But again, employees of who or what?
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Can we please stop the Texas Tech hate?
I still don’t understand the narrative around Texas Tech, Oregon and other non-traditional powers that crash the party in college football. The negativity doesn’t make sense. People talk down about the Red Raiders and Ducks by making comments about buying championships as if Ohio State, Texas and Georgia don’t spend top dollar. The Buckeyes admitted to having a $20 million roster last season. Texas spent way more than that this year. What exactly is the issue? It’s 2025, folks.
DOWN TO BUSINESS
Sorry, Irish, but get over yourselves
As I sank into my recliner Sunday afternoon to watch the College Football Playoff reveal unfold (and the Cleveland Browns’ loss to the Tennessee Titans), I couldn’t help but channel Dick Enberg and exclaim at 100 decibels, “Oh my!”
Really, it was inevitable. No matter which team between Miami, Notre Dame and Alabama got shoved aside, somebody with a playoff-worthy resume was going to be left at the altar. And a precedent was going to be etched in stone.
Remove any rooting interest, and we should all agree that Miami missing out would’ve been the biggest crime. Head-to-head has to matter. Otherwise, just put the season on simulation mode.
The debate between Notre Dame and Alabama was a coin flip. If the call had gone Notre Dame’s way, conference championship games would have been put in hospice care, and the Deep South would have organized an uprising aimed at the committee. (Although Georgia and Alabama staying put after the Bulldogs’ 28-7 victory on Saturday also harms the status of conference championship games.)
What I am annoyed about is the pearl-clutching in South Bend. Forgive me if this is holier than thou, but the reaction from Notre Dame is beneath everything the university stands for. Stop with the rhetoric about a stolen playoff bid. Yes, this committee was a total farce and butchered the weekly rankings. Did its chair, Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek, give dubious answers? Of course. But Notre Dame is complicit in its omission from the playoff.
No. 1: The Irish finished 10–2 with a 1-2 record against ranked opponents. This isn’t Florida State 2.0.
No. 2: Notre Dame helped design the 12-team playoff. Former athletic director Jack Swarbrick wasn’t just in the room; he held a drafting pen. Notre Dame gets a seat at the grownups’ table on postseason structure. Ohio State, Michigan, Alabama and Georgia do not. Their conference’s commissioner represents them.
Initially, the four conference champions had automatic byes. Notre Dame said, “No problem! We’ll be the No. 5 seed, play a home game and keep all the money, even if we’re undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the polls.”
No. 3: The most consequential piece of Sunday’s decision was Notre Dame’s independence. The Irish got burned, in part, because USC and Boise State were mediocre this season, and Arkansas, NC State, Stanford and Syracuse were somewhere between horrible and forgettable. That could have been avoided if Notre Dame were in a conference. Its strength of schedule would have been better, and it probably would have played in a conference championship game.
Look at Alabama: The Tide has one of the best wins of the season, at Georgia. But it’s 1-2 in its three most recent games against FBS teams. However, one of the losses came in the SEC championship game against Georgia.
And look at the ACC, Notre Dame’s pseudo-home: Last year, SMU lost its title game and still made the field. Every season shakes out differently, but the pattern is becoming clearer: Independence carries risks.
Ross Dellenger detonated a Sunday bombshell that Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua tried to shy away from on Monday, a previously unknown wrinkle in the CFP contract that allows Notre Dame to have its cake and eat it, too.
Notre Dame has its own NBC contract. If the Irish make the playoff, they get to keep the $4 million payout all to themselves instead of sharing it with a conference. Their independence is coddled. The rest of college football needs to stop enabling it. Trade-offs are part of life, but Notre Dame has been able to skirt them.
In 2020, the ACC bailed out Notre Dame by allowing it to play in the conference, making Bevacqua’s comments on Monday laughable. No other program gets that kind of Most Favored Nation status. This is why the Irish are so polarizing. (Not everything Bevacqua said was wrong; ESPN’s weekly playoff show needs to be put out to pasture.)
I don’t begrudge Notre Dame’s leadership for defending its program. But I’d advise everyone to stop talking now, especially after pulling a loser move by declining a bowl bid. From a football standpoint, turning down the practice time is baffling. Optically, it’s disastrous. Notre Dame quit. Period. It’s antithetical to everything Marcus Freeman evangelizes to his team.
Oh my.
More news and links:
Daniel Libit of Sportico had a fascinating story about a Delaware football player who’s suing for compensation after being dismissed from the team for seeking a medical second opinion.
Georgia is seeking nearly $400,000 from a former player who transferred to Missouri in what could be a precedent-setting case.
Washington Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell introduced the HUSTLE Act to help protect athletes’ NIL Payments.
Arkansas coach John Calipari had an all-time quote: “He’s using NIL for his first wife’s alimony.”
ESPN examined the NIL-driven parity taking over college football.
ATHLETE SPOTLIGHT
From Division II to a national ad
What a ride for Trinidad Chambliss. A year ago, he was an unknown Division II QB at Ferris State. He transferred to Ole Miss as the backup, got the starting job after an injury and then led the Rebels to a spot in the College Football Playoff. He also just went through the Lane Kiffin rollercoaster. Now, he’s in a national AT&T ad.
