Mailbag: How the Big Ten’s rev-share strategy saved the system in the Demond Williams saga, new hires for old Pac-12 schools and more
The Hotline mailbag publishes weekly. Send questions to wilnerhotline@bayareanewsgroup.com and include “mailbag” in the subject line. Or hit me on the social media platform X: @WilnerHotline. Some questions have been edited for clarity and brevity.
If you missed it, last week’s mailbag focused on the top college sports stories in 2025, the SEC’s postseason struggles, the Group of Six’s future, Lincoln Riley’s contract and more.
Explain the mechanism that Washington used to compel quarterback Demond Williams to return because the consequences were too onerous to ignore, like LSU losing out on $4 million in NIL for 2026 or however it’s phrased. — @dukestainer
Who tampered with Demond Williams? What’s the scoop? Please find out. — @demai_j
LSU is the prime suspect, for two reasons: The Tigers need a quarterback, and coach Lane Kiffin recruited Williams during his prep career in Arizona. In fact, Williams committed to Kiffin (at Mississippi) before flipping his pledge to then-Arizona coach Jedd Fisch in the summer of 2023. When Fisch left for Washington four months later, Williams followed.
That said, there’s no public proof of LSU’s guilt at this point. Whatever discussions took place between Williams’ inner circle and the school pursuing his services were, of course, private. Fisch didn’t know; nor did Williams’ agent, Doug Hendrickson, who also represents Fisch. (If you missed the news, Hendrickson terminated his relationship with Williams on Thursday.)
And to be clear: We don’t know all the factors that motivated Williams to reverse course and honor his agreement with the Huskies. But the financial piece obviously played a major role in the decision and is worth addressing, in part because there are much broader implications.
The contract that helped keep Williams in Seattle is effectively preventing the entire industry from collapsing on itself.
How so? It all starts with the Big Ten, which created a template for revenue-sharing contracts between its member schools and their athletes. The schools aren’t required to use the contracts, but many do, including Washington.
Now, keep in mind that Williams didn’t sign an employment contract. The athletes are not employees in the legal sense and therefore cannot be prevented from leaving for another university. Instead, the revenue-sharing agreements, per terms of the House v NCAA settlement, are for NIL. The schools are paying athletes for the use of their name, image and likeness. They are in-house marketing deals.
The key piece in the contracts crafted by the Big Ten is a clause that gave Washington the right to retain the revenue-sharing/NIL amount if Williams signed the agreement and then left for another program.
The exact wording in the contract states the athletes grant their school the “irrevocable” rights to their NIL.
In other words, Williams signed an NIL deal with Washington for $4 million. Had he then departed for Baton Rouge, or anywhere else, the Huskies would have been owed $4 million.
Williams certainly could not pay that amount, and any school desiring his services wouldn’t want to pay that amount on top of whatever financial agreement it reached with Williams.
The wording of the contract is designed to prevent exactly what Williams and his handlers tried to do: Disregard a signed agreement.
The Big Ten was smart to craft enforceable NIL contracts. Without them, Williams likely would not have reversed course and dozens, if not hundreds of Big Ten athletes would face zero consequences for reneging on signed NIL deals with their schools.
“The stakes are enormous,” an industry source said. “If we can steamroll signed contracts, we don’t have anything. The players would have month-to-month deals.”
It would be mass chaos … on top of the mass chaos that already exists.
Washington was, in many regards, the test case, and athletic director Pat Chun offered crucial insight in his public statement on Williams’ return:
“It is critical in this post-House, revenue-sharing environment that contracts with student-athletes are not only enforced but respected by everyone within the college sports ecosystem.”
The degree to which schools will “respect” the in-house NIL deals is up for debate. With Williams, at least one school did not. But the deals appear enforceable enough legally to have caused Williams to reverse course.
Presumably, he is not alone.
Within the Big Ten, at least, those NIL contracts are written in a manner that’s likely preventing dozens of players from ignoring their signed revenue-sharing agreements.
Instead of mass chaos, there is merely basic chaos.
And we should add a final note of context: SEC commissioner Greg Sankey had plenty to lose in the Williams saga.
Sankey has been a staunch proponent of schools abiding by the revenue-sharing and NIL rules and the enforcement decisions made by the oversight body, the newly-created College Sports Commission.
Had one of his schools swiped a Big Ten athlete under contract (with tampering as the mechanism), Sankey’s credibility on the issue would have been severely undercut and his relationship with Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti might have been damaged.
Of the former Pac-12 schools with new coaching staffs (Cal, Stanford, UCLA and Utah), which is primed for success and which has red flags based on the hires? — @VegaLocoYaYArea
There are many ways to reduce risk in the hiring process. Selecting a coach who knows the terrain is one; selecting a coach with experience running a major college program is another.
All four of the departed Pac-12 schools that changed staffs this winter opted for one of those two models.
Cal and Stanford hired alums who are first-time head coaches (Tosh Lupoi and Tavita Pritchard, respectively), while the Utes promoted an alum who was already on staff (defensive coordinator Morgan Scalley).
Only the Bruins prioritized head coaching experience with Bob Chesney of James Madison.
When it comes to red flags, the Hotline always looks in the same place first: Rookie coaches who hire inexperienced coordinators to oversee the other side of scrimmage.
In this regard, Cal took the greatest risk. Lupoi, whose expertise is defense, hired an offensive coordinator who has never been a play-caller. Jordan Somerville was an analyst at Oregon and, for the past two years, an assistant quarterbacks coach for Tampa Bay.
That would be a clear red-alert situation if not for the presence of Nick Rolovich, a former head coach who was on Cal’s staff in 2025 and will serve as the quarterbacks coach, presumably with a heavy role in game-planning and play-calling. With Rolovich, the Bears are merely dealing with a yellow alert.
The other first-time head coaches at former Pac-12 schools, Utah’s Scalley and Stanford’s Pritchard, have made smart decisions on the coordinator front.
Scalley, a defensive specialist, hired Utah State playcaller Kevin McGiven, whose system is comparable to the scheme Utah used in 2025.
And although it’s not official, Pritchard, a former Stanford quarterback, reportedly is hiring Pete Kwiatkowski to run the Cardinal’s defense. Kwiatkowski has spent the past decade as the coordinator for Washington and Texas.
UCLA’s situation is worth mentioning, as well. Chesney, whose background is defense, hired Dean Kennedy to run the Bruins’ offense — the same role Kennedy filled for Chesney at James Madison. But the jump from Sun Belt to Big Ten competition is massive. We’ll see how things play out for UCLA’s offense.
Based on ABC’s success with its double- and triple-headers of SEC games, do you see Fox cutting out CBS and NBC in the next contract so that it can have an all-day block of Big Ten games? — @draywilson29
Keep in mind that the “next contract” is five years away. The Big Ten’s seven-year deal, with Fox as the primary rights-holder that sub-licenses inventory to NBC and CBS, expires at the end of the decade. There are four more football seasons under the current agreement.
Also, we don’t know what the next realignment wave, expected to materialize in the 2029-31 window, will bring with regard to membership in the power conferences. (The potential for a super league in the early 2030s looms over the industry.)
Clearly, the ABC/ESPN deal with SEC is delivering phenomenal ratings that fully justify Disney’s all-in agreement with the conference. The vast majority of the highest-rated games in 2025 involved at least one SEC team and were on ABC.
The Big Ten games on CBS and Fox didn’t generate comparable audiences. If Fox thought the Big Ten’s inventory was worth weekly double- or triple-headers each Saturday, it would not have sub-licensed games to other networks.
There is one essential difference between the two media ecosystems: SEC fans are passionate about viewing all SEC games, not just those involving their favorite team, whereas Big Ten fans watch their team but aren’t as compelled to tune in otherwise.
The result: An average SEC game will draw more eyeballs within the conference footprint than the average Big Ten game will from its footprint.
Of that dynamic, Fox is undoubtedly aware.
Regarding the transfer portal, do you see college football moving towards an NFL-like model along the lines of standardized contracts with buyouts, salary caps? And what about stricter transfer windows (like a two-transfer limit) and revenue sharing? — @Cargoman0363
There is one solution to those issues and so many more: collective bargaining.
Until the schools sign a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the athletes, the chaos will continue with rules that are largely unenforceable. Countless court rulings over the past three years have indicated as much.
With a CBA, college football could create a free agency period; it could limit the number of transfers; it could set nation-wide NIL rules.
But there can be no agreement between the schools and the athletes without a players’ union akin to those in the NFL and NBA. And there can be no players’ union without employment status for the athletes, according to many legal experts.
To this point, the schools simply aren’t willing to declare football and basketball players employees.
Also, why would the athletes agree to employment status? Under the current system (i.e., anarchy), they have unlimited freedom of movement and multiple streams of revenue.
If there are no restrictions at the moment, then any agreement naturally would result in athletes having less.
The NCAA screwed up so badly that players have zero reason to take the one step that would end the chaos.
Imagine that it’s 2030: What will be, and would be, the ideal teams comprising the Pac-12 football conference? Does the winner get an automatic bid in the CFP’s 12- team playoff? —@RichUSCAv8te
Two semantics are baked into the question that must be addressed:
— There won’t be a 12-team CFP in 2030. Heck, there probably won’t be a 12-team CFP in 2026.
The conference commissioners have a Jan. 23 deadline to set the playoff format for next season. We suspect they will expand the field to 16. If not, it assuredly will expand by 2027 (to either 16 or 24 teams).
Whatever the size, there will be a spot reserved for the highest-ranked conference champion outside the Power Four. That could be the Pac-12 winner or the American winner. It might be the Mountain West, Conference USA, MAC or Sun Belt winner. But there will be just one automatic bid for those six leagues.
— The Pac-12’s grant-of-rights, which ties the nine schools together, expires after the 2030-31 academic year. By the time we hit 2030, the conference will be headed for either dissolution or expansion. The status quo seems unlikely.
Our bet? Expansion. We don’t foresee enough teams having better options — even from the downstream effects of a super league — to initiate a collapse of the new Pac-12.
And if the Pac-12 does expand in the 2029-30 window, it would probably absorb the top of the Mountain West.
Or it could merge with the American in some form or fashion.
There’s also a scenario in which many of the legacy Pac-12 schools return, albeit without their football programs, to create a massive regionalized conference based on the Olympic sports and perhaps basketball.
By early 2028, we should begin to have clarity on the industry’s next iteration.
Can you explain the NIL lawsuits in Georgia and the recent situation at Washington and share your thoughts on potential ramifications? — Dave H
One difference in the situations is that defensive end Damon Wilson, who has been sued by Georgia for liquidated damages, signed his NIL deal with a collective last winter, before revenue sharing became the law of the land.
Demond Williams’ contract with the Huskies is for in-house NIL (rev-share).
Both Georgia’s actual lawsuit and Washington’s threatened lawsuit had the same goal: recoup cash.
But again, no school can prevent a player from withdrawing and enrolling elsewhere.
Wilson’s case is closely-watched within the industry as the Bulldogs attempt to claw back $390,000 in NIL that was promised to Wilson before he entered the portal (and subsequently emerged at Missouri).
It’s believed to be the first instance of a school pursuing legal action against a former player over NIL.
Saint Mary’s plays San Francisco next week. The Gaels are often speculated as a Pac-12 expansion candidate. If only one of these two are invited, then please state the pros and cons for each. — @Seattleite206
The case for Saint Mary’s is flimsy. The case for San Francisco is non-existent.
The Hotline has always been skeptical of SMC’s value to the rebuilt Pac-12. It’s a small, private, non-football school with money trouble and a basketball program that, while highly successful, doesn’t move the media valuation needle one iota.
The most compelling case for the Gaels is scheduling: 10 basketball schools works better than nine.
But is that reason enough to feed another mouth and reduce the revenue splits for the other schools? Clearly, they don’t think so, or Saint Mary’s would have been added by now.
The Dons, who aren’t nearly as successful as SMC — they have one NCAA Tournament appearance this century — don’t make sense on any level.
We suspect the new Pac-12 will expand in the next 12-18 months, but it’s difficult to envision any of the WCC schools as primary targets.
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