Whit Babcock didn't just hire James Franklin. He got the Board of Visitors to approve $229.2 million in institutional support over four years.

The early returns are already visible.

Within two weeks of the announcement, Virginia Tech generated over $1 million in new ticket revenue. The annual scholarship fund crossed $18 million. And Babcock has already greenlit "NFL-like" renovations to the Merryman Center—not because they had to find the money, but because they already had it.

That last part is the real story.

Most athletic departments scramble to fund their coach's wish list after the hire. Virginia Tech pre-loaded the budget. When Franklin said "this is what I want," Babcock said "OK" instead of "let me make some calls."

Babcock admitted past facility upgrades were "piecemealed together." Not anymore. The department posted a $5.1 million surplus on $161.2 million in revenue last year, and Babcock is targeting $200 million annually through jersey patches, field logos, and a Playfly Sports partnership.

This is what competing at the top of the ACC looks like now.

Franklin was the perfect hire for Virginia Tech. And Babcock is making sure he has every resource to succeed. Some ADs get lucky. In this new era, Babcock is doing what successful ADs are going to need to do.

Why this matters: This is the new blueprint for major hires. Get institutional buy-in before you make the call, not after. ADs who show up with a vision and the funding to back it land better coaches and give them a real chance to win. The ones who hire first and fundraise later end up on the hot seat themselves.

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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti sued the NCAA to secure unlimited transfers for college athletes.

Now he says the unrestricted portal is "sucking the life out of college sports."

That's not hypocrisy. That's the point.

Skrmetti doesn't regret the lawsuit. He argues the NCAA was behaving illegally, and someone was eventually going to push back. The litigation wasn't designed to create the Wild West permanently, it was designed to prove the old system was broken beyond repair.

Now comes the hard part: building what's next.

Skrmetti is clear about who should do that work - and it's not state attorneys general filing lawsuits. He wants coaches, athletes, conferences, universities, NCAA leadership, and Congress at the table together.

"I don't think we want state political figures doing that through litigation," Skrmetti said. "It really needs to be a conversation between everyone who's involved in this."

He's right about the problem.

The portal has become college football's biggest headache. Rosters turn over annually. Relationships between coaches and players are transactional. Programs that can't keep up financially are falling behind permanently.

But tearing something down is easier than building something new.

Skrmetti lit the match. Now he's waiting for someone else to draw the blueprints. The question is whether college sports leaders can agree on anything before the whole thing burns down.

Why this satisfies: The guy who created the chaos is now publicly calling for someone to fix it. When the architect of unlimited transfers says the portal is "the single biggest problem that needs to be solved," it signals that regulatory change is coming—whether from Congress, the NCAA, or the conferences themselves. Every coach and AD should be paying attention.

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The new College Football Playoff selection criteria has a detail that slipped past almost everyone.

Starting in 2026, the automatic bid reserved for the highest-ranked Group of 6 team doesn't require a conference championship.

Multiple G6 leaders didn't know this.

Chris Vannini reports that the provision was embedded in the MOU signed nearly two years ago—but many G6 administrators believed they had secured a champion-specific guarantee. They couldn't recall any conversation among themselves about removing the requirement.

On paper, it makes some sense.

The rule theoretically protects highly ranked G6 contenders who suffer upsets in title games. Think 2021 Cincinnati or 2017 UCF—dominant regular seasons derailed by one bad night. Under this system, they wouldn't automatically lose their spot to a lower-ranked conference champion.

But the unintended consequence is obvious.

If you don't need to win your conference championship to make the Playoff, what's the point of the game? G6 leaders are already worried about devaluing their title games and plan to discuss revisions later this year.

Boise State AD Jeramiah Dickey isn't waiting.

"The system they built wasn't built for us," Dickey said. "It has been intentional. Speak now or forever hold your peace."

He's right. The Power 4 wrote the rules. The G6 signed them without fully reading the fine print.

Why this matters: Conference championship games are the crown jewel of the G6. They're the biggest stage, the best TV inventory, and the clearest path to national relevance. If winning them becomes optional for Playoff access, the entire value proposition for non-Power conferences gets weaker—and the gap between the haves and have-nots gets wider.

Link to Story 1 Link to Story 2

Southern Miss just replaced Charles Huff with Blake Anderson.

On paper, it looks like a downgrade. Huff was a rising star. Anderson is 56 with a messy Utah State exit.

We ran both coaches through our Splits Profile—a scoring system that measures performance across game contexts: home, road, late season, ranked opponents, bowls.

The result?

Same score. Same type of coach.

Both strong on the road. Both solid late-season closers. Both weak in big-stage games against ranked opponents.

Huff was on the way up—a trajectory hire. Anderson is a known commodity with 10 years of head coaching data. His ceiling is visible. And it looks a lot like 6-7 to 7-5 seasons with occasional division title shots.

Two years ago, they went 1-11. Now they're bowl-eligible with a coach who's won three conference championships and knows how to rebuild a roster through the portal.

But fans expecting a continuation of the Huff trajectory—the "copy-paste a championship program" effect—should recalibrate.

This is a floor-protection hire, not a ceiling-raising one.

[Read the full deep dive →]

That's the picture this week.

Southern Miss made the safe hire. Virginia Tech made the expensive one. And both might be exactly right for what each program needs.

Meanwhile, the man who blew up the transfer portal is now begging someone else to fix it. And G6 leaders just discovered a Playoff loophole they didn't know existed in a document they signed two years ago.

College football in 2026: chaos with a side of fine print.

Tuesday, we're back with more new coach profiles.

Blake Anderson isn't the only hire worth examining. We're continuing our "Is this a good hire?" series - running new coaches through the data, asking the hard questions, and giving you the honest assessment before the season starts.

Because by September, it's too late to set expectations. The narratives are already written.

We'd rather get ahead of them.

See you Tuesday.