Bo Pelini pulled me aside during my redshirt sophomore year and told me I could be ten times better than Glenn Dorsey.
Glenn Dorsey had just helped LSU win a national championship. He was about to be a top-five pick. I looked at Bo like he was selling me something. But then he turned on the film — actual tape, side by side — and started pointing at things. Athleticism. Raw leverage. Upside. He wasn't flattering me. He was making an argument, and he was using evidence I could see. He said, let me mold you, let me teach you how to play this game, and the reason I believed him was he'd already proved it with another player.
I stayed. I didn't transfer, didn't push for early entry, didn't run toward the money. Three years later I was the second overall pick.
The NIL era makes that story sound quaint. Players today are making seven figures in college. Some of them are making NFL-starter money before they've taken an NFL snap. So the question this episode is really asking — the question underneath all the transfer portal talk and bowl game opt-outs and NIL valuations — is this: if the money is there, what possible reason is there to stay?
Here's the answer, and it's uncomfortable: the money was never the reason to leave. It was just the only compelling one we had. And now that it's gone, the conversation that was always the real one has nowhere left to hide.
The NIL bag changes the math, not the readiness
If I had NIL money coming into my senior year, I'm staying. No hesitation. My mom's rule was simple — leave and you finish your degree, on campus, in Lincoln. I told her if I leave, I'm not coming back. She said then you're staying. That was the conversation.
Now, I've told that story before. What I don't say as often is that the rule wasn't really about the degree. It was about whether I was actually ready. My mom's a schoolteacher. My dad's an engineer. They saw something in me that I wasn't seeing in myself yet — that I needed another year, not because the scouts needed more tape but because I needed more time inside the thing before I walked out of it forever.
NIL doesn't change that. What it changes is the pressure that was forcing the conversation in the wrong direction. Before, a kid from a family with real financial need had a legitimate argument for leaving early — the money was waiting, the risk of injury was real, and staying was a genuine sacrifice. NIL neutralizes that. Which means the only remaining argument for leaving early is I'm ready. And that argument is harder to make honestly than most 20-year-olds want to admit.
The players I watch entering the draft this cycle — the ones who opted out of bowl games, who bounced through two or three transfer portals, who were collecting NIL checks at three different programs — some of them are ready. Most of them don't know yet whether they are. That's not an insult. I wasn't sure I was ready the year before I actually left. The year I stayed is the year I found out.
The transfer portal broke the farm system
There's a version of college football that used to function like a farm system — not perfectly, not equitably, but structurally. A freshman arrived, got evaluated, sat behind older players, learned the system, earned snaps, developed. The players ahead of him graduated or got drafted and he moved up. Four years later, or five, he left knowing what he was.
That system had real problems. Some programs were exploitative. Some coaches didn't develop anybody — they just collected talent and ran out the stars. The portal was, in theory, a correction for that. A player stuck behind a guy who was never going to leave, at a program that wasn't going to use him, could move. That's not wrong in principle.
What happened in practice is something different. Oregon went into a game a win away from the national championship with five running backs and came out with one, because the other four had already entered the portal. Mid-season. Before the game.
I can't make that math work no matter how I try. I don't get to leave my team during the playoffs because a better offer showed up. I don't get to opt out of the conference championship because I've already secured what I needed from this season and the upside risk isn't worth it anymore. We signed up for the whole thing. We finished the whole thing. That's not nostalgia talking — that's what the contract means.
The portal, the way it's being used now, isn't just a roster management problem. It's a development problem. You can't build a player across four years if he's only there for eighteen months. You can't build a team that knows how to win hard games in January if half the roster is gone before January starts. And you definitely can't build the habits that transfer to professional football — the ones about showing up when it's not convenient, about finishing what you started, about being accountable to people who are counting on you — in a system that's structurally set up to reward you for leaving.
PULL QUOTE: "Are you ready to go and be a professional? Are you ready to go be in this space? Because it is a true business." — Ndamukong Suh
True development doesn't start until the NFL, and that's the point
Here's the thing I said on the show that I want to be precise about: I didn't really learn how to play football until my second or third year in the league.
That's not false modesty. At Nebraska, I was still a player who could overpower people with size and athleticism. I learned the basics. I learned some moves. My coaches — and I'm genuinely grateful for them — started putting the framework in my head. But the real education started when I got to Detroit and worked with Chris Kocurek, who learned his craft from Jim Washburn, and they started showing me how everything fits together. How a pass rush lane connects to a defensive scheme. How studying an offensive lineman's sets tells you what play is coming before the ball is snapped. How you use your hands at the next level because strength alone stops working the week you arrive.
None of that happens in college. It can't happen in college. The game is too different, the athletes across from you are too different, and the coaching bandwidth simply isn't there in the same way.
Which means there's a real paradox at the center of the NIL stay-or-leave conversation. Staying in college longer doesn't actually complete your development — it just gives you more time inside a system that can only take you so far. The development that matters most doesn't start until you leave. So the question for any individual player isn't "will I be more developed if I stay?" It's something harder: "Am I developed enough to benefit from what comes next?"
Those are completely different questions. The first one is almost always yes. The second one requires honesty most people aren't ready to supply.
What I'd tell my own kids, and what I'd actually make them hear
I'll tell my kids the same thing my mom told me — you're getting your degree, that's settled. But after that, the conversation I want to have is the one that doesn't get had enough: are you mentally prepared for what this business actually is?
Not physically. Physically, these kids are ready. They've been training since they were twelve. The physical preparation has been happening their whole lives. What hasn't been happening is the other part — understanding that an NFL locker room is a professional environment with professional consequences, that the coaches who invested in you in college have no contractual obligation to you anymore, that the team nutritionist who treated you like family and the equipment manager who had your stuff ready before you asked — those people exist at some organizations and not others, and the players who arrive knowing the difference are the ones who assembled real information before they made the decision.
Three things I'd make sure any player I care about has locked in before they declare:
- Get a read on the actual organization, not the marketing version of it. Players talk. The report cards are real — players around the league know which training rooms are exceptional and which ones are sending you home to figure it out yourself. I got to Miami and Mary Ellen, the nutritionist, treated every guy the same, had everything dialed in, ran a real system. That's not universal. Before you sign, you should know whether the infrastructure you're walking into is going to support your development or assume that development already happened. Because for most players, it hasn't.
- Understand that the NIL money and the NFL money are measuring different things. Your NIL value is a market judgment about your brand and your reach and what you mean to a 17-year-old deciding which school to watch on Saturday. Your draft position is a judgment about whether a professional coaching staff believes they can turn what you are right now into what they need in three years. Those two numbers are correlated but they're not the same thing. A player can be worth eight figures in NIL and still be a developmental pick. Confusing the two is how you end up underprepared and overconfident walking into a situation that will expose both.
- Ask yourself the question my mom was really asking. Not whether you're ready to leave school. Whether you're ready for the thing school was preparing you for. The business. The structure. The part where nobody is recruiting you anymore and everything is performance-based from here. The part where you have to learn a new system in a new city, often without the people who knew you before, and still be the version of yourself that justified the draft slot. That readiness isn't physical. It's not even technical. It's about knowing yourself well enough to know what you can handle and what will undo you, and having enough honesty to give a real answer.
My mom knew I needed another year because she knew me. Not my forty time. Me.
That's still the question. NIL just changed how much it costs to answer it honestly.