NCAA Football 2022/2023 Season Catch All!

Aaron Judge while being simulcast on college football games the past 2 weeks:

2-11, 7 BB, 1 HBP, 6 K, 0 home runs

.181/.526/.181 slash line

Whelp, we shot ourself in the foot over and over with stupid penalties.

And our kicker sucks

With ESPN's College Game Day headed to Kansas next week, that will leave just seven Power 5 schools that have yet to host the show: Cal, Duke, Illinois, Maryland, Rutgers, Syracuse and Virginia

Midweek crossover.

WHEN ALABAMA'S NICK Saban and Texas A&M's Jimbo Fisher traded barbs this year over payments to college football players through name, image and likeness deals, Saban called for transparency, and Fisher said his team was an open book.

"I have nothing to hide. I have nothing to hide. And our program has nothing to hide," Fisher said at a May 19 news conference. "Be interesting if everyone could say that."

Saban, who had accused Texas A&M of having "bought every player" during recruiting, advocated for transparency on May 31: "I'm all for players making as much as they can make," he said. "I also think we've got to have some uniform transparent way to do that."

ESPN sought to take the coaches and other universities up on the notion that NIL information should be more transparent, asking a sampling of 23 universities -- 20 from Power 5 conferences -- to release their NIL-related documents or data. Across the board, schools provided few to no records. In the case of Saban's Alabama, the university declined to release any information. And at Fisher's A&M? The university said it would provide hundreds of records, but still hasn't; records that officials did release omitted financial terms, athletes' names and sports; and though A&M did end up releasing a per-sport breakdown, it came months later after ESPN made a subsequent request.

No uniform NIL transparency or deal-disclosure rules exist, meaning the only way to get any kind of picture of what's happening in the marketplace is by cobbling together incomplete and unverifiable figures from public statements from athletes, the companies they endorse, and others. Some of that information, though, revolves around an athlete's marketplace value as opposed to what they're actually earning. Even NCAA officials, who have at times been denied access to school records, told ESPN they've found instances in which numbers shared publicly are exaggerated or inaccurate.

1) NIL isn't run through or by schools; it's between third parties and players, so the schools don't naturally have the data ESPN is seeking. ESPN (and any more than casual fan) should know this. They report as if they don't.

2) Assuming the schools got this info from their players, there are serious privacy issues with the school just handing that info over to whoever asks. Likely their lawyers have advised them of this.

ESPN sent a follow-up email to several schools explaining how federal student privacy laws allow them to release records if students' identifying information were removed or redacted, but few schools budged.

Days after Fisher stated that his program has "nothing to hide," he chided a local reporter who asked about NIL deals for football players: "You're news. You're media. I'm asking you, did you do your research? ... Nobody wants the truth," Fisher said May 22.

So, on May 23, ESPN asked Texas A&M for records that would show NIL figures with the names of companies, compensation amounts or other categories, or for any report with aggregate totals. On June 7, Texas A&M offered to provide copies of 490 contracts to ESPN, but with names, sport, company and dollar amount redacted, for a processing fee of $1,470.06. The school offered no other records with NIL totals.

ESPN paid the fee in June, but as of Oct. 6, the university has produced only 47 contracts.

Texas A&M released aggregate data only when another reporter, from the Bryan-College Station Eagle, requested it in August -- three months after ESPN's request. The data, which the school gave to ESPN after yet another request, showed football players received $3.4 million in NIL deals, 81% of the almost $4.2 million for all athletes from July 1, 2021, to Aug. 1, 2022, and far above second-place men's basketball deals at $472,735. The women's team with the most in deals was softball, with $35,337.

When asked why Texas A&M didn't provide the aggregate data to ESPN in response to its initial request, the school's open records coordinator, Tricia Bledsoe, wrote that the information was created after ESPN's request submitted in May but before the Eagle submitted its request Aug. 17. The metadata of the document that Texas A&M sent to ESPN, however, show it had been created on Aug. 31. When asked about this discrepancy, Bledsoe said the "information existed before the request and was put into the provided document."