Week Notes: January 24, 2026, National Champs Edition

I’ve never been the biggest college football fan. I didn’t go to a huge state school with a big team. I didn’t grow up in a college football family. The NFL has always just spoken more to me starting as a kid as a Bills fan before the Ravens showed up in town in 1996.

For me college football has always been a bit sloppy. These are kids out here, after all, playing a very difficult and physically intense game. The quality of play compared to the NFL has always been harder for me to watch. Missed throws, dropped passes and poor defense isn’t an entertaining sport in a time when there are endless entertainment options available.

The majority of the ‘big’ games have traditionally been lopsided blow-outs with big school power players always having the advantage. I’m not interested in watching a giant school with a dozen future NFL starters beat up on a small school by 50 points week after week. It’s just not that interesting.

This week the Indiana Hoosiers won the College Football National Championship. Yes, the traditionally basketball-focused school outlasted and outclassed some of college football’s most storied and powerful programs. Prior to this week Indiana hadn’t won its conference since 1967, and had never previously won a playoff game. And this year they went undefeated to a national title.

The sport is feeling different. It’s more like the NFL, and that’s a great thing. Players are being directly paid to play the sport through NIL money which means there’s no rush for the best players to jump to the NFL to cash in on their abilities. There were multiple players 23 and 24 years old playing on the Miami team that lost in the championship: unheard of prior to the NIL for a good player. Good football is a mental sport and keeping players in the system longer to gain more experience is making the players, and the sport, better.

The ‘transfer portal’, which is a super cool name for players being able to transfer to different schools if they desire, has been much maligned as ruining the sport as well. There’s no loyalty to schools, the critics say. They said the same thing when the NFL embraced free agency decades ago. They were wrong then, and the critics are wrong now.

The sport has evolved, and it’s okay. It’s better. The competition level is higher. The players are staying around longer and building their skills before making the jump to the NFL which is making both college football and the NFL better in the long run.

The money being funneled into college programs is a good thing for the sport. I love that Marc Cuban can donate his money and time to make his alma mater better. I hope there’s much more of this in the years to come. It’s not just Indiana, but they’re proving the model and they are writing the book on how to succeed in modern college football.

I’ll still be mostly watching football on Sundays. But change in college football is good. It hasn’t been great for a long time, despite some fun regional rivalries and historically interesting matchups. Indiana’s year was so fun to watch and it gives me a lot of hope for the future. The TV ratings (this was the most viewed title game since 2014) and the online discourse shows that the general public agrees with me. College football has evolved, and we’re here for it.

Have a great weekend. ❄️