A three-star high school prospect two years ago out of California, Darian Mensah hit the transfer portal with an eye-popping asking price that perhaps best illustrated what name, image and likeness has turned into within college football.
The Tulane redshirt freshman quarterback had a strong year, throwing for 2,723 yards, 22 touchdowns and six interceptions while leading the Green Wave to a 9-4 record. When he entered the transfer portal Dec. 8, amid rumors his coach, Jon Sumrall, could be on the move to another job, it was understandable to expect considerable interest in the young 6-foot-3, 200-pound quarterback. 247Sports ranked Mensah as the No. 7 quarterback and No. 72 overall prospect in the transfer portal.
What followed, however, speaks to a situation where money has flooded in from all corners and players hitting the market have never benefited more. According to sources around college football, Mensah received a deal from Duke that is believed to pay him $8 million over two years. A $4 million annual average would make him the highest-paid player in college football history, unofficially. A year ago, the going rate for a top-of-the-market quarterback like Cam Ward, who went from Washington State to Miami, or Riley Leonard, who left Duke for Notre Dame, was a little less than half that.
In college basketball, BYU is expected to pay top recruit AJ Dybantsa over $5 million for likely one year of his services in 2025-26. The NCAA was neutered earlier this year in its efforts to curb what has essentially become pay-for-play.
A $4 million annual salary would put Mensah on par or higher than nine base salaries of Power Four head coaches in 2024, according to USA Today's coaching salary database. That includes Big 12-winning Arizona State coach Kenny Dillingham, Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea and the recently-fired West Virginia coach Neal Brown.
Basketball-crazed Duke, which went 9-3 this season under first-year coach Manny Diaz in one of the best years in program history, going this big in the portal and NIL market is a sign of the changing times. Sources have indicated the Blue Devils may have moved on from QB Maalik Murphy, who ended up at Oregon State, a cutthroat move after Murphy delivered one of the best seasons in recent Duke quarterback history -- and a further indication of where college football has arrived.
Mensah was repped by Young Money APAA Sports agents Noah Reisenfeld and Adie von Gontard on the deal. Darren Heitner, a well-known sports law attorney, assisted as legal counsel and called it "groundbreaking Darian Mensah NIL deals" with Duke and the NIL collective Durham Devils Club in a post on social media.
Duke and Mensah are just one example of a market that has exploded this transfer portal cycle. Washington State transfer quarterback John Mateer, the top-ranked QB in the 247Sports portal rankings, is believed to have commanded a deal in a similar neighborhood as Mensah to go to Oklahoma in an intense recruiting battle that included Miami and North Carolina. Mateer is not believed to have used a traditional agent to negotiate his deal.
It's all part of a new money rush in college football this offseason, where the combination of soon-to-potentially-expire collective funds and the influx of revenue-share dollars are creating a market unlike anything we've seen before.
"I'm looking at the books from last year to this year and it's not even close," said a SEC director of player personnel. "You take a contract and you multiply it by two, and that's what you're paying. Everybody thinks they have money now, and they'll figure it out on the backend. So everybody is trying to play fast."
Why the money is way up
College football is in a limbo period between an unregulated present and the enactment of the House settlement, the multi-billion dollar agreement that will see schools share around $20.5 million each year with its athletes.
Collectives can currently raise money and spend with almost no oversight. Those $20 million budgets in places like Ohio State are still in operation. In six months schools will have a new bundle of cash to use -- likely around $15 million for most Power Four football programs -- via the House settlement.
Thus, two things are happening in concert that help explain the spike:
1. Schools that didn't have much NIL money before are using their future rev share allotment to spend big.
2. Schools with large collective budgets are spending their annual allotment now before the House rules on fair market value go into effect. NIL deals in the post-House era will be filtered through a clearinghouse to determine if the contract meets a still-to-be-determined market standard. In other words, players will actually have to earn their NIL money instead of it being used as a pseudo-salary.
"If you want to use that money the way you have in the past, you have to pay a lot of it before July 1," said NIL attorney Mit Winter, who works with several collectives. "Or even all of it."
That's how $5 million budgets become $15 million and $10 million can become $25 million in a few short months. The schools that are double-dipping, particularly, are driving up the market.
They've got cash to burn.
"They're looking to do as much as they can to deplete those budgets between January and June so those dollars won't count towards the cap," said Opendorse President of Collegiate Operations, Blake Lawrence, whose NIL platform works with 100-plus Division I schools.
There is a risk to schools aggressively spending their collective budget or, frankly, rev share money this early in the cycle. The House Settlement could collapse and several schools whose contracts CBS Sports have examined have written contingencies into their rev share agreements that would void the deal if House were to fail. If that happens, those programs that spent their whole collective budget in the winter would be in trouble, too.
"There's more money in the game than ever before with rev sharing," an ACC director of player personnel said. "I think a lot is being promised, but who knows if it'll go through."
But this is college sports. If there's an advantage to be gained -- even if it's just a theoretical tool -- teams will use it.
Where the position spikes have occurred
Outside of quarterback, perhaps no position better explains the spike than the offensive line.
One agent who represents a large number of portal players threw this out when asked about the contract that surprised him the most: "Offensive tackles are getting crazy money. A backup is $200,000-$400,000 a year. One of our guys got $350,000, and he's a swing guy."
For those not inundated in football parlance a "swing guy" is a backup. Starters at tackle are easily at $500,000-plus with the top end of the market pushing seven figures.
But it's not just the offensive line where spikes have occurred. The ACC DPP put it this way:
"It's just gone up a shit ton, to be honest," they said. "It doesn't matter what position. O-line is up. Receivers are up. Running backs up. Tight ends up. Edge is about how it was. Inside backer is up. DBs are all up. Specialists are fu***** up by a s*** ton as well. It's now like $150,000 for the good ones."
Yes, $150,000 a year for a kicker.
Lawrence said he's seen a spike across the board in the Opendorse data. Whether teams have 30% more, as one Big Ten general manager estimated, or 100% more to spend, they're spending it.
A year ago, a Power Four head coach said every player on the roster was asking for at least $100,000. This time around, a source told CBS Sports, that seemingly every player hitting the portal with experience wanted $500,000 or more.
"If a budget is increasing by (two times) across the whole team but a position group is increasing by (five times), offensive lineman is an example of that, wide receiver is an example of that," Lawrence said. "The market is getting better for wide receivers. The defensive line is another one, like you're seeing the average defensive lineman is getting six figures across the entire roster."
Quarterback is of course a singular example in the portal. Only one can play and there are never enough good ones for everybody. But the spike in that market particularly has been extreme.
A year ago, a top-end quarterback in the portal commanded around $1.5 million. This year, several average Power Four additions -- think of players in the 15-30 position range in the 247Sports rankings -- will make over $1 million in NIL, per multiple sources. The top-of-the-market QBs are well over $2 million a year and sometimes much more, like in the case of Mensah.
It's not just positions, by the way. Individual teams are spending big, too.
One Power Four administrator pointed at Auburn as a team that's "crushing it" in the portal. That's in part because they're spending, in the words of one source, "whatever it takes" in what could end up as a stay-or-go-off offseason.
But no team better represents the offseason spike than Texas Tech.
A surprise No. 1 atop the 247Sports Transfer Team rankings, the Red Raiders currently have 17 commitments, including nine of the top 103 transfers. For perspective, Texas Tech ranked 36th in the transfer rankings a season ago. A spike, indeed.
The Red Raiders do a good job recruiting, but NIL is playing a large role in their success. Northern Illinois DT Skyler Gill-Howard, the No. 174 overall prospect in the portal, commanded "one of the largest deals in portal history" for an interior lineman, per a source. Several other Red Raiders have received deals in the seven-figure range, per multiple sources.
"They're running up the market for everyone," the ACC DPP said. "It's insane. It's premium on premium."
Is this sustainable?
The numbers this cycle have exploded but they should level off, if not outright go down moving forward once the House settlement is approved and enacted.
The ability for programs to double-dip in the aggressive manner they've done this portal cycle will be gone. Collectives are still expected to have a place in the marketplace, especially at the well-funded Power Four level, but it'll be additive to what the school is paying in revenue sharing, rather than trying to essentially double the amount.
One SEC director of player personnel predicted "the numbers are going to come down drastically" in a year.
The other factor is the salary floor for programs should level off. While Ohio State's $20 million salary budget for this year's team generated considerable headlines, plenty of schools even within the Big Ten were only spending about a quarter of that this past season. With the football revenue share number expected to land in the $12-15 million range for schools, some programs are getting an infusion of an extra $10 million than they were accustomed to.
That naturally leads to spending sprees as they work to catch up to their better-funded rivals and keep up with the rising player costs.
"The majority had less than $10 million to spend, especially on football, sometimes less than $5 million," Lawrence said. "When they are going from a world where they had $3 to $5 million in their budget to $15 million in their budget, in order to spend $15 million on a football team they have to grossly overpay the current market value for an athlete."
A year from now, Lawrence said, those big jumps in spending won't exist. While the revenue sharing amount is expected to increase in the future as more money pours into the sport, it likely will be gradual and not nearly as drastic as what has unfolded this cycle. There will be better data on what does and doesn't work in a new revenue-sharing world as programs populate their staff with more general managers and personnel with NFL and salary cap experience.
But 2024 has been a perfect storm of old and new money colliding, much to the benefit of this current crop of athletes.