Miami's Carson Beck and Oklahoma's John Mateer head list of prominent players switching schools
Beck made one of the biggest transfer portal moves of the offseason when he left Georgia for Miami. Beck's decision came after he hurt his elbow in Georgia's Southeastern Conference championship game victory over Texas, ending his 2024 season prematurely.
Beck was regarded as a likely first-round pick in the 2025 draft when he began the 2024 season. Beck announced in late December that he would enter the draft, then he changed his mind and opted to return to school at a different campus.
'I think that this decision is one of the better decisions I've made,' Beck told reporters at the Atlantic Coast Conference media days event. 'Since I've been here in January developing the relationships and building the chemistry between me and the wide receivers, the running backs, the tight ends, the o-line and just trying to develop those relationships and that camaraderie, it just reinforced my decision in a positive way.'
Beck's first game with No. 10 Miami will come Aug. 31 in a Sunday night matchup with No. 6 Notre Dame, a team he would have faced in last year's playoff — a 23-10 Georgia loss — if he hadn't hurt his elbow.
Beck follows Cam Ward, who also transferred to Miami and played well enough for the Hurricanes to go to the Tennessee Titans with the No. 1 overall pick in this year's draft. Beck noted that he's accustomed to having big shoes to fill, as he became Georgia's starting quarterback after Stetson Bennett led the Bulldogs to consecutive national championships.
At Georgia last year, Beck completed 64.7% of his passes for 3,485 yards with 28 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. That followed a 2023 season in which he completed 72.4% of his throws for 3,941 yards with 24 touchdowns and six interceptions.
He didn't throw the ball at all during spring practice for Miami but says he is now at full strength.
Other notable players at new schools (former schools in parentheses):
Texas Tech edge rusher David Bailey (Stanford)
Pro Football Focus has Bailey as the highest-rated returning edge rusher in college football. Bailey collected seven sacks and forced five fumbles for Stanford last season. He had 15 sacks, 11 quarterback hits and 65 hurries over the last three seasons. His seven career forced fumbles put him in a tie for second place among all active Football Bowl Subdivision players.
Notre Dame WR Malachi Fields (Virginia)
Notre Dame reached the College Football Playoff championship game last season without anyone having more than 592 yards receiving. Fields should help. He had 55 catches for 808 yards – more than twice as many as any of his teammates – and five touchdowns in 2024. Fields caught 58 passes for 811 yards and five scores in 2023.
UCLA QB Nico Iamaleava (Tennessee)
Iamaleava helped Tennessee get to the playoff last season, then left the Volunteers to join a UCLA program that's coming off a 5-7 season. His transfer was one of the major stories of the offseason amid reports he wanted a bigger payday. Iamaleava said he simply wanted to be closer to Long Beach, California, where he grew up. He completed 63.8% of his passes for 2,616 yards with 19 touchdowns and five interceptions while rushing for 358 yards and three more scores last year.
Oklahoma QB John Mateer (Washington State)
Mateer backed up Ward for his first two seasons at Washington State before passing for 3,139 yards and 29 touchdowns with only seven interceptions last year. His move to Oklahoma allows him to continue working with offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle, who was hired away from Washington State. Oklahoma is looking for Mateer to revitalize an offense that ranked last in the Southeastern Conference in yards passing per game and second-to-last in points per game last season.
Duke QB Darian Mensah (Tulane)
Mensah comes to Duke with three seasons of eligibility remaining after leading American Athletic Conference starting quarterbacks last season in yards per pass attempt (9.49) and completion percentage (.659). He threw for 2,723 yards with 22 touchdown passes and six interceptions last season while helping Tulane reach its conference championship game.
Oregon S Dillon Thieneman (Purdue)
Thieneman had a spectacular freshman season in 2023 that earned him Associated Press All-America third-team honors. He picked off six passes to tie for third among all Bowl Subdivision players and collected 106 tackles that year. He had 104 tackles last season to lead all Big Ten defensive backs.
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
The $62m question: does a high school really need a professional-style stadium?
When the television cameras pan around the US's newest sporting temple to show the cavernous stands, elegant brick exterior, VIP suites and massive video board, viewers might believe they are looking at a professional venue. Yet the occupants of Phillip Beard Stadium, the Buford Wolves, are not a professioanl team or even a college one. They are high-schoolers. In the exorbitant world of high school football, Buford's $62m, 10,000-capacity arena is not the biggest or most expensive taxpayer-funded student stadium in the US. But it may be the most luxurious. The Wolves host the Milton Eagles on Thursday in the stadium's first regular-season game, which will be broadcast nationally on ESPN. With 13 Georgia state championships from 2001 to 2021 and a long record of players progressing to college scholarships and, eventually, the NFL, Buford is a football powerhouse – and the new stadium is a loud statement of the school's desire to keep it that way. Related: 'The stadium is secondary': how US sports teams became real-estate speculators If it feels like half of Buford is at the big game … they probably are. The Atlanta-area city has roughly 19,000 residents and the well-regarded high school (rebuilt in 2019 for $85m) has about 1,900 students. In 2010, another educational institution in the Atlanta region, Kennesaw State University, built a smart 10,200 capacity multi-use stadium for $16.5m. In the past 15 years, however, construction costs have soared, fan expectations have evolved, streaming and social media have changed how we consume sports and college athletes are now allowed to earn significant sums by monetising their personal brands. The trend is clear: newer, fancier, costlier. Phillip Beard Stadium has the typical uncovered benches familiar to anyone who's seen Friday Night Lights. 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Climate-controlled facilities mitigate against extreme weather, and with gargantuan video boards, televisions on concourses, myriad food and drink options and glitzy graphics on LED ribbon displays, fans can go to the stadium, experience the live atmosphere and still gaze at screens. Northwestern University in Illinois is building a privately-funded new stadium guided by the principle of 'premium for everybody,' reports Front Office Sports. At a projected cost of $862m it will be the most expensive college stadium ever, yet with only 35,000 seats it will hold 12,000 fewer people than the venue it is replacing. The theory underpinning the design is that modern fans want a more intimate and luxurious experience, with changing tastes – and a changing climate – rendering even relatively recent venues obsolete. In 2020 Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers quit their open-air 48,000-capacity ballpark, which opened in 1994, for a new 40,000-capacity building with a retractable roof. 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'Corporations see a lot of untapped economic value in high school athletics,' Yaman Salahi, an attorney representing the player named in the suit, said in a statement to Front Office Sports, 'and we want to ensure that value is shared equitably with the athletes that create it.' Like teenaged soccer starlets at professional clubs in other countries, 16- and 17-year old American football players might one day be wealthy and famous, with a status to match the grandeur of their home stadiums. 'The difference here is that it's the local public school that's doing the development,' Matheson points out. For now, stadiums as sizeable and expensive as Buford's remain rare outside Texas, the state that is the epicentre of the high school football infrastructure arms race. In 2017 the independent school district in the Houston-area suburb of Katy opened a $70m, 12,000-capacity stadium adjacent to its existing and still operational 9,800-seat venue. 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New York Times
an hour ago
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8 factors that predict potential underdog College Football Playoff contenders
The AP's preseason poll dropped on Monday afternoon, and tucked inside were a list of the most obvious contenders to make the 2025-26 College Football Playoff — names like Texas, Penn State, Clemson, Georgia and last year's title-game combatants, Ohio State and Notre Dame. The Athletic's own Matt Baker recently disproved the notion that ranked preseason teams have an edge because they're ranked; rather, these squads are ranked highly because they're also the most likely playoff frontrunners, with more talent than anybody else in a sport where that tends to matter a lot (and in an era when it matters more than ever). Advertisement Either way, those 25 teams aren't necessarily going to sneak up on anyone. But we're also interested in teams from outside the preseason ranking who might still crash the playoff party. So I combed back through data since 2000 (the earliest season of turnover-margin data in Sports-Reference/CFB's database) for indicators that might predict an unranked AP preseason team's ability to still finish within the top 12 of the final pre-bowl poll — a general proxy for being in the playoff mix going into the committee's final weekend of decision-making. Many of these elements relate to the concept of regression toward the mean: the idea that teams tend to revert in the direction of longer-term norms over time, especially when we account for more volatile or luck-driven stats. It's useful to be able to create a hierarchy of those types of factors to look at — or regress away — when trying to identify playoff-worthy dark horses. With that in mind, let's run down the key questions to ask around any potential surprise contender — and the potential beneficiaries of those variables in 2025 — in order of predictive importance. 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Newer FBS teams like James Madison (and Delaware, Missouri State, etc.) were excluded from consideration because they lacked a five-year sample of previous seasons. Tulsa and Kent State top the list, but are usually just mediocre and were among the worst teams in FBS last season. They are good candidates to improve, but not to make the CFP. More realistically, Air Force, Oklahoma State and Florida State all have the potential to improve quite a bit through a combination of regression, the portal and recruiting (in the case of OSU and FSU), and the other built-in ways that prevent competitive programs from staying down for too long. Much to the chagrin of mid-major fans across the nation, the college football power structure favors elite teams in elite conferences whenever it can. So it makes sense that a potential dark-horse candidate from a more prestigious conference is going to get the benefit of the doubt in the rankings before a team trying to make their bid from a smaller conference. In terms of our 2025 candidates in the categories we've looked at so far, that big-conference bias is good news for Iowa — who has the best combination of 2024 SRS and the potential to regress toward an even higher rating based on its previous norms — plus Louisville, USC, BYU, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin and the rest of the power-conference teams we've discussed. Meanwhile, the American and, to a lesser extent, Sun Belt are the epicenter of teams that have solid indicators, but their conference might get held against them, barring an automatic bid. Advertisement Though it sometimes gets mentioned in betting circles, one of my favorite semi-hidden stats remains 'yards per point' (YPP). At its core, YPP measures how efficiently a team converts yardage into points on offense — and how inefficiently it forces opponents to do the same on defense. Teams with a lower YPP than their opponents are essentially turning field position into points at a better rate, which translates into a higher scoring margin and, usually, more wins. Like turnover margin (more on that stat later), it can be volatile from year to year, bouncing around with red-zone execution, third-down conversion rates, special teams performance and 'bend-but-don't-break' defense. But when a team consistently posts a strong YPP differential, like the New England Patriots did throughout their dynasty, it's often a sign of something more sustainable. In our historical sample, teams that had lower YPP differentials between offense and defense in the previous season — negative numbers are better because they mean you traded fewer yards for the same points than your opponent did — tended to be more likely to make the leap from unranked to the top 12 after controlling for everything else. Our group of historical surprise teams had an average prior YPP differential of -1.3 and 62 percent of them were negative in the previous season. That's a bit counter to the usual wisdom that YPP is heavily luck-based and likely to regress against teams who relied on it. In this case, it may be picking up on a team's strengths that don't always show up in other conventional stats, like situational execution, special teams efficiency and a general ability to squeeze more points out of opportunities. If that holds true, Army and Iowa stand out among the unranked masses for their efficiency on offense and ability to bend, not break, on defense. In a less contrarian statistical finding, we won't be surprised to learn that teams that won fewer games than we'd expect based on their points scored and allowed — via the Pythagorean Formula — tend to be more likely to bounce back the following season. More importantly for this exercise, they are also prone to being overlooked by the preseason pollsters, who may tend to judge a team off of its standard win-loss record without digging into extenuating stats like its point differential. That could give a boost to teams like UCF and especially Auburn, plus Virginia Tech slightly lower down the list, each of which was unlucky with close games compared to blowouts in 2024. Like with Pythagorean luck, another well-known factor that regresses to the mean for football teams over time tends to be turnovers. Yes, there are some notable exceptions — we go back to Bill Belichick's Patriots for an example from the NFL — but generally speaking, a team with an outlier turnover margin in either direction has a tendency to move toward the middle the following season. That means for breakthrough candidates, we're looking for teams coming off poor turnover differentials in 2024. Most notable here is Florida State, whose uncharacteristically awful 2024 was driven at least some by that minus-16 turnover margin. Plus, lurking just at the periphery of this list are Auburn, UCF, Oklahoma State, Arkansas and West Virginia — all were at minus-eight or worse and have a number of additional factors pointing to better days in 2025. Advertisement One of the interesting philosophical arguments around preseason polls is what exactly they're attempting to rank. Most view them as an accounting of top-to-bottom roster talent on paper going into the season, which incidentally is why their basketball cousin is a good predictor of March Madness results even after controlling for season-long performance. However, they're not necessarily trying to peg where a team will end up by season's end. In theory, the two rankings ought to be correlated, but differences come about because of scheduling, which is an area we can project in our search for surprise playoff contenders. In our historical dataset, teams that went from a harder schedule (in terms of opponent SRS ratings) during one season to an easier projected schedule (based on a weighted multi-year average of SRS for its opponents) in the following preseason tended to be more likely to catch the initial polls by surprise. Factoring in schedules, teams like Virginia Tech, USC, FSU, Kansas and Washington (among others) are being underrated in their playoff potential. This might be the most fascinating result in our entire experiment. In the historical data, there was a real effect where unranked teams whose coaches were in either their third or fourth season at a particular stop (consecutively, not overall) were more likely to finish among the top 12 in the pre-bowl rankings even after controlling for everything else. Why might this be? My theory is that those seasons come in the sweet spot of a coach's tenure. By that point, they've had enough time to install their systems, bring in players who fit their style and establish the culture they want — but at the same time, their message is still fresh, morale is still high and opponents may not have fully adapted to their tendencies yet. Among our common dark-horse candidates from the rest of the factors above, teams with coaches in the third or fourth year with their current program include USC's Lincoln Riley, Jeff Brohm with Louisville, Hugh Freeze with Auburn, Brent Pry with Virginia Tech and Matt Rhule with Nebraska. This is the least important factor. It's not impossible for a newer — or older, in the case of Kirk Ferentz in his 27th year at Iowa — coach to also surprise from unranked territory, but there does seem to be something about that sweet spot that makes a team more primed to break out. Now, we combine all of the predictive factors from above into a single ranking, weighted by the importance of each sub-category: Based on past trends, we would expect USC to be most likely to rise from outside the top 25 to serious playoff contention by the end of the regular season, followed by Louisville, Auburn, Virginia Tech and a bunch of Big Ten and Big 12 schools. Not all of these teams jumped off the page in every category, but most were coming off a decent SRS season and/or had a subpar season by their standards. They're all in power conferences. The highest-ranked non-power candidate was Tulane at No. 27. Advertisement The odds are that at least a few of these teams — or teams like them a bit further down the ranking — will make the jump into the playoff conversation, as an average of 2.75 teams per year started unranked and finished 12th or higher in the pre-bowl AP poll each year in our sample. We've trended toward even more of that chaos in recent years; four teams have done that per season since 2021. So if you're thinking about this week's polls, remember that while the AP's preseason top 25 is stacked with the sport's most obvious playoff threats, history says the field won't be limited to just those hyped-up names. Every season brings a few gate-crashers from outside the group of teams we thought we knew to watch, and our list is full of schools that check the right boxes to be those spoilers in 2025. (Photo of Lincoln Riley: Kirby Lee / Imagn Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
What readers think about Villarreal-Barcelona being played in the U.S.
It is fair to say La Liga's plan to stage Villarreal's home match against Barcelona in Miami has been met with mixed reviews. On Monday, the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) approved the league's request, allowing it to be elevated to UEFA. European football's governing body will initiate the procedures for FIFA to grant authorisation for the fixture, which was initially due to take place at Villarreal's Estadio La Ceramica, to go ahead at Miami Gardens' Hard Rock Stadium in December. Advertisement Real Madrid issued a strong rebuttal on Tuesday, calling on FIFA, which presides over the global game, to prevent the relocation from taking place and calling it an 'unacceptable precedent' that they said clearly affected 'sporting integrity' and risked 'the adulteration of the competition'. Athletic Club goalkeeper Unai Simon, a Spain international, also condemned the plans at a news conference on Wednesday: 'Football always has to belong to the fans and to be about respecting them. It seems like a lack of respect for the fans.' But what do you think about the proposal to play a European league match in the United States? We asked you via a survey this week, so let's analyse your responses. Opinions were fairly conclusive about the U.S. hosting La Liga games — four out of five responders did not think it was a good idea. The answers to the next question reflected that mindset, with a similar number of responders being against the idea of more La Liga matches being hosted anywhere on the continent. Most people agreed with Madrid's argument about the move affecting the integrity of the competition. Three-quarters of respondents said taking the game to the U.S. risked ruining the competition's integrity. However, most responders — more than two-thirds — believe the fixture move would be popular in the States. Barcelona and Real Madrid have regularly attracted significant crowds in recent years when playing pre-season games in the U.S., and Madrid were one of the big draws at the revamped Club World Cup this summer. This would not be the first official European club match to take place outside the country in which a league is based. The Supercopa de Espana has been held in Saudi Arabia for five of the past six years and its Italian equivalent has been hosted by countries including the U.S., China and Libya. But again, four-fifths of people who responded did not think it would be a good idea for other European leagues to follow suit. We had 2,319 responses in total and asked readers to tell us which continent they were answering from. There were roughly equal numbers from Europe (46.5 per cent) and North America (43.8 per cent), with smaller numbers from Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. We also asked readers for their suggestions on how to make the proposed move work or how it could be improved. Many simply replied with variations of 'Don't do it' — some in stronger terms than others. Those who were against the idea referred to the European game being taken away from its roots for financial reasons. One fan from North America said: 'The whole idea is crazy. One of the biggest things I admire about soccer in Europe is the strong local ties. To purposefully degrade that bond with the local community is shameful.' Advertisement Others pointed out the climate concerns and player welfare issues with teams flying across the Atlantic for a one-off match. There was plenty of discussion about sporting integrity and how La Liga would address the loss of home advantage, with one fan asking what would happen if Barca beat Villarreal and won the title by a point but their closest competitors had lost away to Villarreal. Villarreal president Fernando Roig was asked about those questions at a media appearance this week. 'At our ground, we have not beaten Barcelona and at their ground we have beaten them several times in recent years,' he said. 'So maybe we have a better chance.' Villarreal last won a home game against Barca in 2007, before the remodelling of their Ceramica stadium. Some readers drew comparisons with the regular-season NFL and NBA games that are played in Europe. But one respondent argued the reason NFL games abroad worked was due to the 'irregularity of their schedule' — teams do not play every other team in a season — in contrast to the 'standardised and equal' European calendar. 'For it to be considered fair, all teams in the league should have a game played in the States throughout the season,' another respondent said. Villarreal's Roig said this week that supporters would be able to 'fly for free' to the game and that those who did not want to would have a 20 per cent discount on their season ticket — which was one way some readers said the idea could be improved. 'If you make it work for fans financially, then I am OK with it,' one Europe-based fan wrote. Readers also had different suggestions for when the match should take place. Some said it should be a game later in the season, when each team's schedule was less busy, or after the NFL season finishes, to attract maximum exposure. Others said it would make more sense to hold a cup final there or create a 39th matchday to be held overseas, as the Premier League discussed in 2008. Advertisement Many respondents said Major League Soccer should be promoted rather than importing European games. One suggested they should take place as double headers with MLS matches and that the U.S. Soccer Federation should benefit financially. But the majority of those who gave longer answers rejected the idea altogether. 'I'm American and this is a horrible idea,' one said. 'No one is asking for this. We already get to see plenty of football between pre-season tours, the Club World Cup this year, the World Cup next year and MLS/NWSL. This waters down the competition, and I'd much rather travel to Europe to see these teams play.' Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
