On the Diamond
Texas Tech softball faces Ole Miss in the Women’s College World Series this evening with first pitch at 6:00 p.m. and streamed on ESPN2. Along with Ole Miss, Texas Tech is in the same bracket as Oregon and UCLA.
In the Hall of Fame
Texas Tech announced the 2025 Hall of Fame class on Tuesday:
Aaron Hunt (football)
BJ Symons (football)
Cierra White (women’s track and field)
Gabriella Dominguez (women’s golf)
JaCorian Duffield (men’s track and field)
Janine Beckie (soccer)
Matt Kastelic (baseball)
Ryan Aycock (football)
The class will be inducted on Friday, November 7th as Texas Tech hosts BYU that weekend.
On the Gridiron
Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger on the “heated” situation regarding the SEC and I’ve got zero f#ck$ to give regarding the SEC. I’m done with them:
“I guess we’re going to war,” said one Big 12 athletic director.
At the center of this brewing battle is a memorandum of understanding that the 11-member CFP governing board — the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame — authorized last spring. The document grants format decision-making powers starting in 2026 to the SEC and Big Ten — a move to keep the two goliaths from separating to form their own playoff.
According to most who have viewed the memorandum, the agreement grants the Big Ten and SEC control over the format but directs them to have “meaningful consultation” and collect “input” from the other conferences and TV partner, ESPN.
Have they satisfied the agreement’s language to hold “meaningful consultation?” Some do not believe so and have sought legal counsel over the validity of the document.
Other things that Dellenger is reporting? The new CFP model is a 5+11 model, which would award 5 auto bids for conference champions and 11 at-large bids, but no one wants this as long as the SEC stays at 8 conference games. The SEC coaches favor the 4-4-2-2-1+3 model (4 auto bids for SEC & Big Ten, 2 auto bids for Big 12 & ACC, 1 bid to the Group of Six and 3 at-large bids). The regulation of NIL by Deloitte sounds like a disaster (or lawsuit) waiting to happen:
The officials from the Deloitte-run clearinghouse “NIL Go” — the centerpiece of the new enforcement entity, dubbed the “College Sports Commission” — is sharing data with coaches and athletic directors, including that 70% of past deals from booster collectives would have been denied. Deloitte also shared that about 80% of NIL deals with public companies were valued at less than $10,000 and 99% of those deals were valued at less than $100,000 — figures that suggest the clearinghouse threatens to significantly curtail the millions of dollars that collectives are distributing to athletes.
CBS Sports’ John Talty on the frustration with reform regarding the transfer portal and the Power Four want to force the Big Ten and SEC agree to a 65% of the power on rule-making.
Currently, the Power Four conferences are pushing for a weighted vote that would give them 65 percent of the power on rule-making committees. Even that amount, which would give the Power Four conferences significantly more power than they have now, still comes with risk. One high-ranking source said there are concerns that all it takes is one conference not voting with the others — or even ceasing to exist altogether if there’s further realignment and consolidation — to prevent approval for solutions. Sankey said Monday that he’d like to see that weighted vote go up to at leas 68 percent to avoid some of those issues.
Multiple Big Ten and SEC sources have expressed extreme frustration to CBS Sports about being unable to push through changes because smaller conferences won’t support it. The transfer portal situation has been especially frustrating that the conferences that would seemingly benefit from not having a spring transfer portal window won’t go for it just because the SEC and others want it. The SEC’s representatives on those committees have made those arguments to no avail, according to sources. When you have conferences that didn’t hesitate to fully fund the $20.5 million cap and others that won’t spend a dollar on revenue sharing voting on the same issues, you can see how it can go awry quickly.
The SEC’s success, in particular, has seemed to hurt its ability to make rule changes when smaller conferences question its motives.
“It’s really hard to be playing in a championship setting and having to deal with it, but when I brought that up as a complaint or problem it was told to me, ‘There’s no crying from the yacht,'” Smart said. “If you’re going to play in these environments you have to be willing to do that. Now it’s we can’t do that.”
Smart believes the implementation committee, which includes two athletic directors from each power conference, will ultimately have say over the transfer portal.
ESPN’s J.J. Post with spring transfer superlatives:
Best homecoming
Micah Hudson, Texas A&M to Texas Tech
On Dec. 15, Micah Hudson announced he’d be transferring from the Texas Tech Red Raiders to the Texas A&M Aggies. He’d later step away from the program in January.
On April 27, Hudson announced his next destination — back to Lubbock, Texas, to rejoin the Red Raiders. Hudson, a former five-star recruit, was the highest-ranked recruit in Texas Tech program history when he first committed in high school.
“Lubbock has always been home, and I’m forever grateful to the coaching staff, teammates and fans who make that possible,” Hudson said in a statement.