Jumbo Package: It’s a very cynical National Signing Day if you once enjoyed college football

It’s officially National Signing Day, an event which lost all luster with the early signing period, and then was finished off for good with season-long free agency where “tampering” isn’t even a concept anymore.

How bad has it gotten? This bad:

Nebraska Cornhuskers head football coach Matt Rhule will stop at nothing to prevent other teams from trying to poach players from his program.

Even if that means cancelling the school’s spring football game, which is one of the most popular spring games in the entire sport.

Rhule’s goal with the cancellation, which he called “likely,” is to keep rival programs from getting a good look at his players to lure into the transfer portal.

“The word ‘tampering’ doesn’t exist anymore,” Rhule told reporters on Saturday. “It’s just an absolute free open common market. I don’t necessarily want to open up to the outside world and have people watch our guys and say, ‘He looks like a pretty good player. Let’s go get him.’”

Last year, PSU’s spring game drew 60K — fourth only behind PSU, OSU, and Alabama. I only wonder how long until other schools follow suit. You can easily foresee G5 programs doing this, or cellar dwellers with some hidden gems. Enshittification continues apace, gentlemen.

EDIT: No sooner had I written the above ‘graf, when Talty dropped a piece over at CBS. Rhule is not alone…cancelled spring games are about to be the norm, at least if Lane Kiffin is any indication.

Rhule and Kiffin are significant data points, and I suspect are harbingers far more than outliers. At least until we get some brakes put on this mess — and I’m not convinced we can, short of Congressional action.

Done with the bad news? Nope. Not even remotely. Three more schools are under investigation for players point-shaving.

For good measure, Ty Haywood — a one-time five-star tackle and ‘Bama verbal — finally committed to Michigan today, although he had done so months ago…without even visiting Ann Arbor.

It’s about the bag for a lot of these players, and coaches are only incentivizing it.

Or, in the case of the Georgia legislature, igrown damn men are waging lawfare to gain competitive advantages for State U…because that’s a great use of their time and taxpayer dollars:

Let’s wallow in rage, why don’t we?

Why didn’t ‘Bama bench Milroe last year? Troll-in-Chief Goodman has some fair points. And others display a striking level of bad faith and/or ignorance we’ve come to expect out of him.

The reason for those losses was a combination of poor preparation by the coaching staff and inconsistent quarterback play by Jalen Milroe.

Maybe those two things are related, but either way I’m not about to start blaming Alabama’s offensive line for all of Milroe’s blunders. With a trip to the playoffs in the balance, why didn’t DeBoer and offensive coordinator Nick Sheridan bench Milroe after the first half against Oklahoma?

Was it out of loyalty? Was it fear of being exposed? The most consistent thing about Milroe last season was that when things started to go badly for him they usually got worse. It didn’t take a coaching mastermind to spot the trend. If backups Tyler Simpson and Austin Mack weren’t good enough to come off the bench in 2024, then I’m not convinced they’re the answer for Alabama in 2025.

Apparently, intangibles mean absolutely nothing in Goodman’s world. It was Milroe’s team. He was the first to buy-in, so he earned a lot of grace from a first-year staff for holding the rest of the roster together. And the simple fact is we saw what happened previously when even the GOAT tried to sideline him: the team revolted and flat-out refused to block for Ty and Pyne.

Was the team unprepared too often? Yup. Were there offensive line issues? Certainly. But there was also a nasty vein of entitlement that had been allowed to fester within the program by two successive staffs. The only way that was ever going to change, without hemorrhaging another two dozen players, was for the personnel problems to matriculate out of the program.

That’s why he wasn’t benched.

Best recruiters? All are from the top three spenders in CFB. Six of the seven top classes? They just happen to be in the Top 8 of pay-for-play Uncle Sugar.

Ohio State set the precedent last year, and it was one I desperately did not want to ripen into maturation: you can literally buy a ring.

I held out some hope that the sport may have been in better shape had the Top 5 spending teams all flamed out: Oregon, Georgia, Ohio State, Texas, and Miami. For a while, it looked like it was going to do precisely that. But 80% of those programs made the playoffs, and one won the trophy.

Subsequently, we’re in a lot worse spot than we were a year ago.

It’s solely about Mammon today, folks; just no good news to report. Sorry about that.