A Tale of Two College QBs

This is All Fields. If you’re new here, we do this every Friday, bringing you a short essay with some musings on the wide world of sports. We cover a lot of ground, hence the name, and we try not to be total prisoners to the news cycle either. We’re just interested in what’s interesting.

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Is today’s NIL landscape better than it used to be? Or worse? It’s one of those simple questions with a less simple answer.

Short version is: depends who you’re asking. If you’re a D1 athlete in a revenue-generating sport today, this is about as good as it’s ever been. Talk about player empowerment. You can make millions of dollars a year in the Power Five. You’ll still get paid more going pro if you’re a first-round pick — I’m mostly referring to the NFL at this point, though that’s true in the NBA too — but it’s not so far off that a lot of guys are waiting it out for a little while, taking the surer thing. We’ve seen a lot of players do this, guys who would’ve 100p headed off to the league sooner than they are now.

You can also transfer schools with abandon, though both the QBs we’re covering today are testing the edges of that particular envelope.

Let’s start with Jaden Rashada, who is probably, sadly, best known as the original NIL disaster. Most will remember him as the guy who infamously flipped from Miami to Florida, and then backed right out of Florida too, in the earliest days of true NIL chaos. It was a cautionary tale. He thought he was signing a $14M deal. Then, as the story goes, the Florida collective didn’t get the money together, and they terminated the deal.

Florida released him from his letter of intent, so Rashada went to Arizona State instead, played a few games before getting hurt, moved onto Georgia, where he didn’t get any playing time, then moved onto Sacramento State, where he also barely played, and then moved onto Mississippi State, where he’s set to compete for the backup job.

All to say, his career has not exactly blossomed after the messy start. The only reason he’s back in the headlines right now is because the lawsuit he brought against Florida’s head coach at the time, Billy Napier (as well as a UF booster and staffer), just settled out of court. Y’know, the American way.

I hope Rashada got his, and by the sounds of it, he did. But two can play that game, here in the US of A, so let’s see how things are going in the heartland. Cincinnati sued outgoing quarterback Brendan Sorsby this week, accusing him of refusing to pay them a $1M exit fee after he transferred to Texas Tech this offseason.

Cincinnati’s suit alleges that they agreed to a two-year deal, and if Sorsby decided to bolt after one season — which he now has — then he’d owe the school that sum back. The university says Sorsby left and never paid up, leading them to seek the $1M in liquidated damages.

Sorsby’s not the first, he’s just the latest. We saw this with Darian Mensah and Duke/Miami, and before that, with Damon Wilson and Georgia/Missouri. For that reason, I want to be careful about painting with too broad a brush. There are particulars to each case.

And yet, the broad strokes do suggest a little bit of a shift in terms of the power structure here. In all these cases, these are schools trying to wrest back a level of control. I don’t currently have much reason to doubt that Cincinnati’s telling the truth about Sorsby agreeing to a multiyear deal and skipping out early. I bet he did.

I also bet that when he got a little better this year, and was thus offered an opportunity to go and start at a better program, he took it. No disrespect to my fkn boi, Bearcats legend Tony Pike (IYKYK), but Texas Tech is indeed a bigger fish, having spent much of the last season as a top-10 team.

So Sorsby bolted. Again, understandable enough. But all of these cases rest on a bit of a… let’s call it a disagreement in terms. Because the schools appear to be enforcing these deals as they would any other breach of labor contract, in much the same way they’d go after a professor. Maybe Professor Professorson (again, IYKYK) was granted tenure then skipped town. I don’t know! I’m not in academia!

The point is: they’re treating this like the thing they’re not supposed to treat this like. In the form of these lawsuits, they are saying the quiet part out loud. These players are employees of the university, and when they sign an employment contract that they then break, then we are well within our rights to enforce that contract. Which would be all well and good, except the players and their representation also seem to be keenly aware that that is not something the schools are willing to admit or concede.

The old “student athlete” thing is actually quite important in this context, as students are free to transfer whenever they want. There are no restrictions on their movement. They don’t sign a deal with one school and are then prevented from studying elsewhere. It’s a matter of enrollment.

For that reason, it could be difficult for schools moving forward — and already has been, for schools like Duke — to continue having this both ways. My sense is that athletes and their representation are increasingly cognizant of that tension, and they’re far more willing to test their luck than in years past.

Look at Diego Pavia, or Charlies Bediako, or Trinidad Chambliss. You’ve got degrees of right and wrong in all of those cases, but the point here is more that all of them have brought cases. Shooter shoot, as they say. And everybody’s got the green light.

College sports are a fun little microcosm of American society in several respects, not least of all because they are a uniquely American invention. Nothing remotely like this system exists anywhere else in the world.

It is also, in keeping with the American tradition, extraordinarily litigious. Like, impressively so. And that’s a really interesting element of where things stand today. From a structural standpoint, the very prevalence of college sports’ broader legal bind — which, at this point, is pretty fuckin’ well-documented — produces a litany of lawsuits. It’s self-fulfilling. And I’ve got a feeling there’s a long, long way to go before the case of college sports is settled too.

🏒 I would love to just breeze right on past the political valence of it all and say congrats to both the U.S. men and women’s hockey teams for going the distance. Connor Hellebuyck was magnificent. And since we’ve been rewatching Friends lately, I’ve had many timely occasions to say to Laura, “Hey! That guy’s in Miracle!” and again explain what that movie’s about. I’m not sure it’s stuck yet, but I’ll keep trying.

🏀 How good are the Pistons? And the Spurs? It’s been fun seeing some by the transitive property questions surface between those two teams and the Thunder, who I would still call the favorite, but not by nearly as much as all of us would’ve thought a few months ago. Cade Cunningham is really and truly here. And much as I really have started to resent the league’s tanking culture, it’s hard to argue with the results from all three of those teams. Detroit had the league’s worst record in 2023-24. The Spurs went 22-60 that year, as well as the year prior. The Thunder got good earlier, but they put on a similar tankfest from 2020-22. All these teams are here in large part because they tried not to win for multiple years. That’s a problem! And I remain unsure of how to fix it. But I’m cautiously optimistic that the league is taking this all the more seriously this year and intends to shake things up with the draft yet again.

👋 Finally, a fond see ya soon from All Fields HQ. Laura’s due in March, and I’ve already been finding it difficult to keep up with my newslettering duties as we get our prenatal shit together. So, as I embark on paternity leave, so too does All Fields. Thus, I’ll be signing off for a little while starting today, and I’m not quite sure when we’ll be back. Guess it depends how well my daughter sleeps through sports. Talk soon, folks. Be good in the meantime.