Alabama native Quinshon Judkins was the SEC's 2022 freshman of the year, a two-time 1st team all-conference selection and the Ole Miss record-holder for rushing yards and touchdowns in a season.
He's pictured above with current teammate and Georgia native Caleb Downs, the SEC's 2023 freshman of the year and 1st team all-conference selection. They faced each other in Tuscaloosa last season for a game which counted (Bama won) and then again in Columbus earlier this month for one that didn't (Scarlet won).
This sequence would have been impossible to conceive a decade ago - it didn't even take a decade for the myth of amateurism to dissolve into unregulated free agency. Guys performing at their level would not be jumping from their programs to anywhere but the NFL Draft upon eligibility.
And that's without getting into whom Judkins will line up next to this season (we're typing split backs into existence) which is another 1st team all-conference selection, Ohio State record-holder for rushing yards in a game by a freshman and Virginia native TreVeyon Henderson. Viva unregulated free agency!
This was all true as recently as December:
- Judkins had the Ole Miss starting job at tailback locked down with a justifiable Heisman campaign in the cards
- Downs had the Crimson Tide set at strong safety for at least the next two seasons
- Henderson was easily Ohio State's best backfield player regardless of position with a decision to make about his final season of eligibility.
And yet now they're all college teammates. At least they are for today, anyway - the NCAA spring transfer window is wide-open until April 30 so we won't know for sure if they'll all stick around to run out of the tunnel together in Ohio Stadium on August 31 when the Buckeyes open 2024 against Akron.
Haha that's impossible. No, it's possible because it's permissible. Not to get into semantics, but you might be confusing possible with highly likely. Damn you, unregulated free agency.
Billionaire owners aren’t uniformly available to enforce honor amongst thieves in this unregulated environment, which is great news for OHIO STATE FANS.
The NCAA was earnestly anointing high market value football players as student-athletes so recently it's difficult to accept one or three Ohio State headliners could be enticed to jump ship and play somewhere other than Columbus when the Zips arrive to take it on the chin in their season debut.
Possible and highly likely have merged a lot more often recently. Ole Miss had no reason to believe it couldn't retain Judkins for another college season in lieu of NFL aspirations. The work Alabama put into securing Downs one recruiting season ago apparently came with no retainers in the event of a head coach retiring.
The reasons ranged from load management to NIL, so if you can make sense of the moving and unconnected parts to recruiting and re-recruiting capital-S Star players, you're almost ready to understand how major college sports work in 2024.
Unrestricted, lightly regulated player mobility is now not only in play, but a highly-clickable spectator off-season sport - which means recruiting season has three player acquisition strategies where there only used to be one. The legacy strategy was Performance, which is matching the player's college experience closely to or above the value proposition he was promised as a high-schooler.
Pampering and Tampering are the two new formalized instruments. Perks are no longer relegated to the shadows thanks to NIL, and since binding language and delegated buyouts for premature NIL contract breaches all come from the same donor kitty, it's a free-for-most with the wealthiest athletic departments which have deep donor benches leading the way.
You are probably an Ohio State fan. You can find it unsavory, but your team is advantaged.
Ohio State quarterbacks Lincoln Kienholz, Will Howard (formerly at Kansas State) and Julian Sayin (formerly at Alabama) run during the first spring practice at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. © Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK
Billionaire owners aren’t uniformly available to enforce honor amongst thieves in this unregulated environment, which is great news for you. As for the talent pool, Judkins, Downs and Henderson (he stayed! He could have left! He could still leave and play somewhere else because it's permissible!) represent the highest-caliber, lowest-risk assets available.
Among the 500 spring portal jumpers - about half of what the fall window had - some were just searching for something different or more favorable. Others got a tapped by the tampering stick, which with this multi-window system is going to get a lot thicker than it already is.
Ultimately, what Ohio State pulled off this offseason looks like a template for how to effectively manage the perilously imbalanced equation of NIL opportunity and selflessness. With Judkins and Henderson, differing styles and load management concerns were a unifier - and for whatever reason the program didn't prioritize current Colorado Buffalo Dallan Hayden.
Load management is less of an issue in basketball, unless you're matched up with Draymond Green for 48 minutes every single day and risking CTE along with chronic groin trauma. Aaron Bradshaw's acquisition probably had less impact on Felix Okpara's departure from Ohio State than tampering did.
There's literally nothing stopping the Buckeyes from doing what an athletic department that's one Hall of Fame women's basketball coach away from being comprehensively irrelevant in the current millennium just did to its frontcourt. But however attractive Bradshaw and Okpara playing together might have looked, there's no hole in Ohio State's roster. They're just thin again.
Which is a delicate and even trickier balance for low-depth positions in football. Justin Frye's shaky unit features a dozen guys who could be enticed up until midnight next Tuesday to join another roster. All of the big fellas are in play, despite the Slobs' downgraded reputation since the pandemic.
The Buckeyes should fully engage Pampering mode in order to ensure that unit retains its critical pieces while it searches for more depth - like, they could really use another offensive tackle. But if losing one of those guys in late April seems impossible, then you're just not paying close enough attention.
It's possible because it's permissible. Judkins and Downs are Buckeyes. That was impossible too.
