Ben Gilbert

Yes, would pool money, not through the school, completely different than the school.

And they had funny sounding named organizations and LLCs and websites that looked a lot like the school's colors, but weren't actually affiliated.

And they would do these weird deals where they would tell the AD, the athletic director or the coach of a team, hey, we've raised X money.

Go tell that high school recruit that if that recruit plays for you, then we will do a private side deal with them to pay them money while they come and play for your team.

So you have this strange structure happening at the very same time that they created the transfer portal, which for a very long time, the college game had this role where if you're going to change schools, you have to sit out for a year.

So it was a big penalty.

You actually had people who were sort of like loyal to their schools, who would play for their schools for three or four years before going to the NFL, who would sort of build a reputation with that alumni fan base.

And with the transfer portal, every year people just decide willy-nilly to enter it.

I'm going to go where I'm going to either make the most money or have the best shot at NFL draft prospects by getting more playing time.

The interesting thing is next year is when the schools actually will start recruiting

being able to pay the players directly and there's like a salary cap of sorts

Uncoordinated, everybody just acting in their own short-term best interest, including the schools, the way that the super conference alignment happened and the Pac-12 completely blew up.

And it's just so sad to watch as someone that is a really big fan of college football.

One interesting take you and I both heard from separate people is that it's actually been good for the NFL because now that players can make money in college, there's not as much of an incentive to get thrust into the NFL before they're ready.

They can sort of develop longer mentally and physically before coming to the NFL.

So we may have sort of better rookie classes out of the draft in future years as you sort of see more mature players coming out.

Yes.

All right.

So our big ultimate thing here, team valuations have gone up way more than I would have predicted.

No, and we'll get to the real numbers, but at most that's probably what a quarter of what a team would cost.