Pete Thamel on the set of College GameDay Built by the Home Depot. Photo by Joshua R. Gateley / ESPN Images
College FootballESPNBy Sean Keeley on

Try as you might to consider college football an amateur sport, that ship has essentially sailed (and did a long time ago, really).

ESPN college football insider Pete Thamel appears to have ripped the band-aid off when it comes to how he reports on college football players and the incentives involved with their decisions to play for certain schools.

On Dec. 5, Thamel posted on X that “Cincinnati quarterback Brendan Sorsby has agreed to a new deal to stay at the school, per ESPN sources.” A day later, Thamel posted that “Kansas quarterback Jalon Daniels has agreed to a new deal to stay with the Jayhawks for 2025, his final college season.”

In the age of NIL, the verbiage makes factual sense. Certain players are using incentives like that to decide whether or not they will stay at their current school or transfer to another. In other cases, it could be the difference between a player going pro or sticking around for another year. While it’s messy and there have been headaches, this kind of autonomy is crucial for student-athletes who put their bodies on the line for a billion-dollar industry. It then makes sense to refer to these arrangements as the business deals that they are.

Of course, it’s still gonna feel weird to many and downright wrong to others.

This is the first time I’ve seen a reporter pass along information about a college player staying at his school to as “agreed to a new deal,” but this is what’s happening on a fundamental level, so might as well lay it out that way.

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— Matt Norlander (@norlander.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 5:34 PM

It certainly does feel weird to see college football discussed in such stark business terms, but the truth is that we’ve needed this for a long time. Thanks to the NCAA’s longstanding desire to keep athletes away from financial gain as well as coaches and administrators hoarding all of that money for themselves, we often infantilize the players and ourselves by putting our heads in the sand around compensation. The players deserve to be treated as the money-generating labor that they are.

It’s time for everyone to grow up, and using this kind of language helps us do that.

[Pete Thamel]

About Sean Keeley

Along with writing for Awful Announcing and The Comeback, Sean is the Editorial Strategy Director for Comeback Media. Previously, he created the Syracuse blog Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician and wrote 'How To Grow An Orange: The Right Way to Brainwash Your Child Into Rooting for Syracuse.' He has also written non-Syracuse-related things for SB Nation, Curbed, and other outlets. He currently lives in Seattle where he is complaining about bagels. Send tips/comments/complaints to sean@thecomeback.com.

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