Justin Berkley

The NFL ain’t giving a college team a franchise. The more likely scenario (in the spectrum of “not very likely scenarios”) is a minor league affiliation.

The issue that I run into is that the 32 best football programs aren’t necessarily the 32 best athletic departments and the 32 best football programs don’t “match” the geography of the NFL teams very well. Who you gonna put as the regional affiliate for Las Vegas? New England Patriots? Chicago Bears? New York (Giants or Jets)? If you choose someone “local” in any of those situations, you’re not choosing based on being one of the best teams. Now, could you make the argument that with NFL media contract money (let’s just say that the NFL wouldn’t do this for less than $100M per year per team) would make the regional college team one of the best programs in the country? Yes. But there are no NFL teams in South Carolina…or Alabama…or Oregon. You’d either have to choose based on geography/market or current football prominence…neither are exactly right. Once you get the geography and the tie ins figured out, the idea is fairly simple: 1) Sell the naming rights to the stadium to the NFL team. “Washington Commanders Stadium at Worsham Field”…something like that. 2) Adopt the collective bargaining, free agency, and salary cap models that are already in place in the NFL. College players are paid as reservists or practice squad players or create a “minor league” pay model. Players become employees of the NFL team, eliminating the facade of “student athlete.” Players can enroll in the university if they choose to seek a degree, athletic departments can choose to offer scholarships if they choose. 3) Allow for reverse redshirting where the NFL team can call up a college player in a pinch for a limited number of games per season…tells recruits that you can put them directly into the league. NFL teams have the unrestricted ability to pursue contracts with college players from their affiliate upon graduation -WITHOUT having to go through the draft or burning their draft picks. If we were the Washington affiliate, they could pursue Drones in mid-season and say “we want you to be a QB on our roster next year and we’ll pay you $XXXX to sign with us now. 4) Vertically integrate operations, coaching, analysts, recruiting, etc. so that redundancies of trying to run two professional football organizations are eliminated.

Elected officials qualify as “adults” but I totally support the thought of a tzar stepping in and saying “now, now children…you must share.” That ship, sadly, has sailed, caught fire, run aground, sunk, and all the crew have died of scurvy.

PAC/BigXII/ACC I don’t know that the leadership inside our conference (read:schools) is forward thinking enough to seriously pursue something like that but yeah…Bezos could own the first coast to coast superconference.

Staff is good for splitting the one possession games. WVU, Syracuse, and ND were all “one score” games with late drives being the difference maker. I “think” (hope?) that defensively our new coaching staff will be good enough to split 3 50/50 games. I have no idea if the offense is going to be serviceable. All other things being equal, that should put us at +1.5 over last season, or 7.5 as the o/u line. I think he’s right that INT’s are going to be the difference maker for this team and there are a lot of (dubious) factors that are not in our favor. New-to-us/inexperienced WR’s, leaning on two QB’s with their own “stuff,” and a one deep Oline should prove pretty challenging.