NIL Era Puts Kamario Taylor & Arch Manning in Focus

You have a spot where Lagree saying, hey, I'm going to go back to Oregon State. If we wanted to call that a one-off, right? Oregon State, relatively speaking, are so small compared to the success that Lagree is having. Like, Lagree is actually, as a freshman, going to challenge Jeremiah Smith for the Biletnikoff, despite the fact that Jeremiah Smith is the Heisman favorite. Okay. But then Kalandria announces, I'm coming back to Nebraska. And now, in my opinion, the Mississippi State faithful, Dave, have to be waiting for the official announcement that Kamario Taylor has re-signed. Like, I know it's crazy that that's the landscape we're in, but if we don't get a Kamario Taylor, I'm coming back, you know, before this college football season's over, if I were a Mississippi State fan, I'd start to worry a little bit. Yeah, this is the new landscape of these players signing contracts every single year in the NIL space and the fact that they can actually get just as much money coming back as they can for going to the NFL. We've seen that with the quarterbacks, the quarterback, you know, this year, the quarterback pool for the NFL draft wasn't good because everybody went back to school and it could happen again. And, you know, Camario has two different paths. He could go NFL, or he could go to a better school than Mississippi State. Call it what it is, Mississippi State is a bottom feeder. SEC team, and you want to get to a position where you can contend that I know they were undefeated, and they were top 15 in the country, and you could see the alarms that were yelling fraud alert on it, and their defense is as bad as we expected, and Taylor got injured. These players are looking at college as if it's the NFL, and they're playing for their next contract every single year. I was a Mississippi State fan. I would absolutely be worried because that's the way college football is going. If you're a Vandy or a Mississippi State or you're a Purdue or you're an NC State, you're not going to keep your players because they're going to go and get more money at better schools. That's just what this has turned into with NIL. Yeah, and by the way, I want to be very clear. I'm not sat here rooting. Some people are like, oh, get Kamario out of Mississippi State. No, I actually think the Kamario stuff's awesome. He's from Mississippi. You know, he had, I don't remember, it was after one of their wins. It was like, you know, best kids in the state come to state kind of thing. And the fact that he went and tried to play in the OU game, like, I have every reason to believe that Kamario Taylor will be the Mississippi State quarterback next season. I'm just saying that we're now in this, you know, new landscape where we wait and see. And I guess I should probably mention, I should probably mention that in this game is going to be one of the most fascinating things Every indication is the Manning family wants Arch to go back to school next year because they believe that him being in school for as long as possible is best for his pro development. How is Arch going to thread the needle of playing well enough to keep the Texas job, but not so well that he obviously should leave for the NFL? That is another very interesting thing for us to watch here. And option three, he goes back to college and he doesn't go back to Texas and maybe he goes somewhere else. Maybe, you know. Arch goes to Ole Miss, which has a history with the Mannings, or maybe he goes somewhere else. Obviously, it's tough to find somewhere better than Texas or deeper money than Texas, but Arch isn't in this for the money because he's going to get it in the NFL. But are they working things out in Texas? Is he the right man for that job? And option three would be to go somewhere else, which is also a factor with is Arch going to play well enough that Texas says we need to have him back? Which goes towards the whole threading the needle philosophy of, I think he'll go back, and I think he'll be back in Texas next week.