08/23/2026
The TRO Insanity Is Going to Ruin College Football
I’m going to say this as plainly as I possibly can.
This TRO nonsense is going to ruin college football.
And I have absolutely no patience left for pretending otherwise.
We are now watching players use temporary restraining orders and court rulings to challenge eligibility rules, enter the transfer portal and potentially show up on somebody else’s roster. At some point, somebody needs to ask a very simple question:
What about the players who have actually been there?
Think about this for a minute.
A kid enrolls in January. He goes through winter conditioning. He gets up before daylight and lifts weights. He goes through spring practice. He spends the summer running, lifting and working with his teammates. Then he survives fall camp, fighting every single day to earn a spot on the depth chart.
He has done everything a college football player is supposed to do.
Then somebody potentially comes walking through the door because a judge issued a TRO, and suddenly that guy could be competing for his job?
Are you kidding me?
If I were a player on that football team and watched somebody who hadn’t gone through spring practice, summer conditioning or fall camp walk into the building and get inserted ahead of guys who had been there doing the work, I can tell you exactly what I would do.
I would organize a damn team walkout.
Enough.
At some point, the players already in that locker room have to matter.
College football has become so obsessed with individual player rights that we have almost completely forgotten about the rights of the other 100 players on the roster.
What about the kid who turned down another school because he believed he had an opportunity where he was?
What about the player who stayed instead of entering the portal?
What about the senior who spent four years waiting for his opportunity?
What about the freshman who enrolled early specifically so he could learn the offense and compete for playing time?
Apparently, everybody’s rights matter except theirs.
And this is exactly what happens when you try to operate a sport without enforceable rules.
The NCAA establishes an eligibility rule. Somebody challenges it.
The NCAA establishes a transfer rule. Somebody challenges it.
The NCAA establishes a portal window. Somebody challenges it.
And increasingly the response seems to be: get an attorney, find a courthouse and see if a judge will let you play.
That isn’t governing college athletics.
That’s chaos.
I have been around football most of my life. I’ve coached players. I’ve evaluated players. I’ve trained players. I’ve watched kids spend months preparing for opportunities that sometimes amounted to five snaps on a Friday or Saturday night.
And one thing football has always taught is that you earn your opportunities.
You don’t parachute into August and expect everybody else to move over.
There is also something much bigger at stake here.
The locker room is supposed to mean something.
Those winter workouts mean something.
Those spring practices mean something.
Those miserable conditioning sessions in June and July mean something.
Fall camp damn sure means something.
That’s where football teams are built.
It isn’t just about learning plays. It’s about trust. It’s about knowing the guy beside you suffered through the same workouts you did. It’s about earning respect from teammates before you ever earn applause from fans.
Now we’re flirting with a system where somebody can potentially bypass much of that process and still arrive in time to affect somebody else’s season.
I despise it.
And before somebody tells me this is simply about protecting the rights of athletes, understand something: I am talking about protecting athletes, too.
I’m talking about the ones already on the team.
We have spent the last several years dismantling virtually every guardrail college football had because somebody somewhere decided every restriction was unfair.
Transfer restrictions? Gone.
Sitting out after transferring? Gone.
Meaningful amateurism? Gone.
Roster continuity? Hanging by a thread.
And now eligibility itself increasingly seems destined to be decided in courtrooms.
Where does it stop?
If every eligibility decision can potentially become litigation, then we don’t have eligibility rules anymore. We have suggestions.
And you cannot run a national sport that way.
I’ve said before that I believe there are only a couple of realistic ways out of this mess. Congress is going to have to give college athletics some ability to enforce reasonable eligibility rules without every decision becoming another lawsuit, or college football is eventually going to need some form of collective bargaining structure where the rules are negotiated and enforceable.
Because what we’re doing right now isn’t sustainable.
I love college football.
That’s exactly why this makes me so damn angry.
We are taking one of the greatest sports in America and systematically removing everything that made college football college football.
Tradition mattered.
Development mattered.
Commitment mattered.
The locker room mattered.
Earning your position mattered.
If we’re not careful, the only things left that matter will be money, lawyers and which courthouse somebody can get into first.
And when that happens, don’t tell me we’re watching college football.
Because whatever that is, it won’t be the game I fell in love with.
08/23/2026
From AMP to JB’s Game Predictor: I Guess I’ve Been Doing This Longer Than I Thought
I’ve been working on JB’s Game Predictor, a system that uses analytics, matchup evaluation and game simulation to predict college football games.
The more I worked on it, though, the more I realized something.
I’ve actually done this before.
Years ago, when I was training and evaluating football players, I developed a system I called AMP — Agility, Motion and Power.
At the time, I was collecting a lot of testing data on athletes: height, weight, 40-yard dash, shuttle, L-cone, bench press, vertical jump and a Tendo rating that measured the power an athlete generated during the vertical jump.
I had a lot of numbers.
The question was what to do with them.
So I worked with a math professor who helped me develop a formula that took all of those individual measurements and produced what I called an AMP Rating.
That’s when it became really useful.
I had testing data from previous years on some of the top football prospects in the country. That gave me something to compare these athletes against.
Instead of simply saying, “This kid runs a 4.5 forty,” I could look at his complete athletic profile.
How did his combination of speed, change of direction, explosiveness, size and power compare to players who had already gone on to play at the next level?
It even helped me with positional projection.
A kid might be listed as a cornerback, for example, but his AMP profile might compare more favorably to the safeties in my database. Another athlete might be playing one position in high school while his numbers suggested his physical profile projected much better somewhere else at the college level.
The individual number wasn’t the important part. It was what happened when you put all the numbers together.
And that’s exactly what we’re doing now with JB’s Game Predictor.
Instead of evaluating an athlete, we’re evaluating a football game.
We’re feeding the simulator information on team strength, strength of schedule, offensive and defensive efficiency, quarterback play, line-of-scrimmage performance, explosive plays, turnovers, personnel, special teams, injuries and home-field advantage.
But just like AMP, I don’t want this to become a spreadsheet that ignores football.
Numbers need context.
That’s why I’ve added what I’m calling the JB Matchup Adjustment.
If one team’s biggest weakness happens to line up with something its opponent does extremely well, that matters. Personnel matters. Scheme matters. Injuries matter. Matchups matter.
Football isn’t played on a spreadsheet. But a spreadsheet can sometimes tell you where to look.
Then we’re going to take all of that information and simulate the game thousands of times.
That gives us more than a predicted score. We’ll be able to look at win probability, average score, likely scoring ranges and how often different types of games develop.
Then comes the most important part.
We’re going to keep score on ourselves.
After every game, we’ll compare what the model predicted against what actually happened. We’ll look at where we were right, where we were wrong and which variables were most predictive.
As the season progresses, we’ll replace more and more of last year’s information with current-season data. Eventually, we’ll begin building our own historical database.
That’s when this could become really interesting.
Years ago, AMP helped me answer the question:
How does this athlete project at the next level?
Now JB’s Game Predictor is going to try to answer another one:
Given everything we know about these two football teams, what is most likely to happen when they play?
Different application. Better technology. A whole lot more data.
But when I really think about it, it’s the same thing I’ve always enjoyed doing.
Collect the information. Study it. Find the patterns. Trust what the numbers tell you—and then apply what you know about football.
The simulator is already running South Carolina–Kent State. I’ll reveal what it says during game week.
08/22/2026
Two weeks from opening day for the USC football team, head coach Shane Beamer has made a move to add another piece to the secondary. On Saturday afternoon, the Gamecocks announced the signing of free agent CB Ethan Johnson (5-11 195) who played four seasons at Appalachian State.
Because Johnson enrolled in 2022, he is eligible for a fifth year under the ruling out of Colorado. He can begin practicing with the Gamecocks immediately. That is, of course, unless the NCAA is successful in getting that ruling overturned. But for now at least, the Gamecocks are adding a veteran corner who was one of the better players at his position in the Sun Belt Conference.
The two-time All-Sun Belt Conference performer, who entered the transfer portal on Thursday, was one of 16 players granted a TRO against the NCAA in Louisiana on Wednesday, allowing them to return for the 2026 college football season with a fifth year of eligibility. The case’s court date is scheduled for Aug. 31 in Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District Court.
Johnson, who is originally from Huntersville, N.C., spent the last four seasons with App State. Across his four seasons with the Mountaineers, he accounted for 140 total tackles, including 99 solo stops. He had 26 passes defended and two interceptions, as well as a forced fumble.
Johnson attended Hough High in Cornelius, where the Gamecocks have a pair of defensive back commitments for the 2027 class in Josh Dobson and Devin Jones.
08/22/2026
https://jamesbaxtersite.wordpress.com/2026/08/21/jbs-sec-head-coach-rankings-who-would-i-want-running-my-program/
JB’s SEC Head Coach Rankings: Who Would I Want Running My Program?
Everybody ranks coaches differently. Some people count championships. Some look at winning percentage. Some look at recruiting rankings. That’s not exactly how I’m doing this. I’m looking at these …
08/20/2026
THE FINAL NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF AMATEUR SPORTS
I’m sorry, but this has gotten absolutely ridiculous.
We now have football players going to court and getting temporary restraining orders so they can return to college football after they have already played professional football.
Read that again.
Professional. Football.
At what point do we finally admit that the term amateur athletics means absolutely nothing anymore?
I understood NIL. I actually thought for years that players deserved the opportunity to make money off their own name, image and likeness.
I understood the argument for the transfer portal. Coaches could leave whenever they wanted, so I understood giving players more freedom of movement.
I even understand some of the arguments surrounding JUCO eligibility, medical hardships and situations where the NCAA’s rules may have unfairly cost a kid a year.
But professional football back to college football?
Come on, man.
There has to be a line somewhere.
College football used to have a pretty simple progression:
High school → College → Professional football.
Once you crossed that line and became a professional football player, your college career was over.
Now apparently we’re headed toward:
High school → College → NFL → Back to college if the NFL thing doesn’t work out.
And here’s the part nobody seems to want to talk about.
Whose roster spot does that professional player take?
Probably some 18-year-old high school kid who has spent his entire life dreaming about playing college football.
We’re already watching high school recruiting get squeezed by the transfer portal. Coaches would rather take a 21- or 22-year-old proven college player than gamble on developing an 18-year-old freshman.
Now we’re potentially going to throw former professional players into that equation?
Where does it end?
If you can sign a professional contract, go into an NFL organization, compete as a professional football player and then have a judge tell the NCAA that you should be allowed to go back and play college football, then let’s quit pretending.
College football isn’t amateur athletics anymore.
It’s another professional football league that happens to play its games on college campuses.
NIL didn’t kill amateur sports.
The transfer portal didn’t kill amateur sports.
Revenue sharing didn’t kill amateur sports.
But allowing professional football players to return and play college football?
That might just be the final nail in the coffin.
There has to be a point where eligibility ends.
And becoming a professional athlete seems like a pretty damn reasonable place to draw that line.
Come on, man.
:::
08/19/2026
https://jamesbaxtersite.wordpress.com/2026/08/19/gauging-the-hot-seats/
Gauging the Hot Seats
There are two coaches in the state of South Carolina who are going to be under a microscope this season: Shane Beamer and Dabo Swinney. But I don’t think their situations are the same at all. Let’s…
08/23/2026
08/20/2026
08/19/2026