Welcome To The Twilight Zone, Where Uncle Sam Says NFL Players Can Return To LSU And Other College Football Teams

NEW ORLEANS, LA – JANUARY 01: Head Coach Kirby Smart of the Georgia Bulldogs jogs onto the field during the College Football Playoff Quarterfinal game between the Ole Miss Rebels and the Georgia Bulldogs on Thursday January 1, 2026 at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, LA. (Photo by Nick Tre. Smith/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

For those of us standing firmly on Planet Earth, while college football these days continues to operate somewhere around Mars, Jupiter or beyond the farthest Black Hole, well, we’re not alone in our thinking.

This sport has gone loony.

Worse, given the willy-nilly millions to billions of dollars sprinting across the current hemisphere of college football, there’s no end in sight to the madness. Even Congress failed to bring sanity to the situation despite six years of legislative initiatives in both houses and $15 million from lobbyists.

Let’s start . . . anywhere.

Riley Leanard shocked the senses this spring when he announced he took a pay cut as quarterback going from the University of Notre Dame ($1.6 million) after the 2024 season to signing a rookie contract with the Indianapolis Colts (1,078,464).

To save you the math, that’s nearly a 40% difference.

Which is why power conference teams now need general managers (you know, like the NFL) as well as athletics directors. Those GMs will manage football budgets this season with a median cost of $23 million, according to nil-NCAA.com, or more than $30 million, if you’re talking about the SEC.

Elsewhere, courtesy of the Transfer Portal in its eighth year, college football rosters have gone from decades of stability to the haves who can give even marginal players huge NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) deals and the have nots who are just waiting for a financial boost from the next conference realignment.

About conference realignment: It’s out of control.

All you need to know is the Big Ten is still called the Big Ten, but it’s really the Big Eighteen, going from its original Midwest standbys of Ohio State, Michigan and the rest to include those such as Oregon, Washington and UCLA.

The salaries for college head football coaches?

Don’t ask.

OK, if you must know. According to CBSSports.com, the top 10 highest-paid head coaches in the sport make at least $10 million per year.

Just a decade ago, there were zero.

Then again, a decade ago, the College Football Playoff (CFP) was only in its second year, featuring four teams and a total payout of $425,043,857, according to businessofcollegesports.com. Now the CFP has 12 teams, with the expansion to 24 (and likely beyond) on the horizon, and frontofficesports.com placed the total payout last season at $116 million.

Yeah, it’s about money.

The NCAA and its major conferences have lots of it, and this sums it up from collegesportsauthority.com: The Big Ten’s current media rights package, signed in 2022 with CBS, Fox, and NBC/Peacock, is worth approximately $7 billion over seven years (Sports Business Journal), making it the largest deal in college sports history at signing. The SEC’s agreement with ESPN/ABC, running through 2034, is valued at roughly $3 billion over ten years (ESPN press release via SELC). The NCAA’s deal with CBS and Turner Sports for the Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament — the contract that funds March Madness in full — runs through 2032 at approximately $8.8 billion total (NCAA.org).

Then there were the recent decisions from Venus or maybe Neptune by federal and state courts to allow a fifth year of eligibility to college football players, even if they signed a professional football contract.

To compete on campus again, those players only were required by the courts to terminate their pro deals and to repay any pro earnings.

Executives for the SEC and the Big Ten came to their senses, though. They exercised their legal right to do what they believed was best for their conferences, but the big picture remains the same.

Cue The Twilight Zone music.

“I feel like I took a freakin’ gummy,” Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay told reporters Tuesday when asked about the latest bit of lunacy involving college athletics in general: Courtesy of those court rulings this week, two NFL players were originally cleared to join the LSU football team.

In case you didn’t know, LSU is not in the NFL.

“I can’t even comprehend this stuff. It’s wild,” McVay continued, and then there was Todd Monken, the Cleveland Browns head coach who had one of his players wishing to leave for the Tigers of college football while still active with the NFL franchise. It was tight end Dae’Quan Wright, and defensive tackle Zxavian Harris of the New Orleans Saints was the other one.

Wright and Harris played at Ole Miss for Lane Kiffin befoe Kiffin bolted the Rebels near the end of last season for LSU to become the third-highest-paid head coach in college football at $13 million per year, according to CBSSports.com.

Even though Wright was physically there for the Browns’ preseason game at home against the Buffalo Bills Saturday, he mentally had one cleat out the door and headed for Baton Rouge, Lousiana.

“Ain’t this (expletive) crazy?” Monken told reporters after the Browns’ 31-7 loss at Huntington Bank Field. “I mean, I don’t even know what to say. As far as I know, he had a medical issue that hasn’t allowed him to practice. That’s a medical issue, has nothing to do with me. Then he was cleared, so we dressed him just in case we had to have him, but when you don’t rep it’s hard to put him on the field.

“I wondered why Lane Kiffin reached out a week ago. Now I know. (Expletive) I didn’t know, now I know. I didn’t call him back, I guess now I should’ve.”

Or maybe not.

Why leave Planet Earth to try to make sense of stuff from outer space?