Stanford's Game-changing Gift; QB List Updates; Quotes of Note

Stanford athletics was staring at a huge financial delta.

To meet the revenue-sharing requirements of the NCAA House Settlement--the baseline to be competitive in the new world of college sports--the department must come up with $20.5 million per year to pay its athletes.

On top of that, Stanford accepted heavily discounted conference media rights when it went on hands and knees to the ACC after the Pac-12's implosion. That sacrifice, roughly $20M annually, will last another six years.

To make matters worse, the Cardinal was late coming to the party on NIL payments and the transfer portal, leaving a talent gap in football that can only be narrowed by coming up with huge paychecks for high school recruits and transfers.

So finding new sources of funding for athletics became a huge priority. And it's not as easy as it might seem for a school with so many resources.

People often ask why Stanford, with billions of dollars in endowment, plus a well-heeled alumni base with more money than God, couldn't tap those resources for NIL? But virtually all of the university endowment is restricted to specific projects or positions or facilities, and a large percentage of rich Stanford alums are based in Silicon Valley, whose denizens typically have no serious connection to sports.  

So it's more challenging than it might seem. And with football coming off four straight 3-9 seasons, and a mostly empty Stanford Stadium generating little revenue, the situation was getting downright dicey.

But everything changed last week when longtime donor Brad Freeman, who endowed the football head coaching position back in 1988, donated $50 million to Stanford football.

Freeman (above), a 1964 Stanford graduate, made his fortune in investment banking and private equity. He was a star football player at his high school in North Dakota and came to Stanford on a football scholarship. In a 2014 interview, he recalled "I went from outstanding player of the year to setting a record at Stanford for the most minutes not played in four years."

Stanford won only 12 games during the time Freeman was on the football team, the same record it has posted over the past four years. That may have inspired his gift to help return the program to prominence.

"I remain grateful for the opportunities that my Stanford football scholarship gave me, and for all the ways that the university impacted the trajectory of my life," Freeman said. "I hope my gift will herald a new era of excellence for Stanford football and help the university address the new financial demands of competitive college athletics."

Hopefully, Freeman's gift--which ironically would only cover the buyout for fired Penn State coach James Franklin--will unlock others from Stanford alums and former football types. It will certainly grab the attention of recruits and potential head coaching candidates.

Whether Stanford can regain the lofty standing it held as recently as 2009-2018, when it averaged 10 wins a year, remains to be seen.

But this is a huge victory for football general manager Andrew Luck, the former Stanford All-American and two-time Heisman Trophy runner-up, and president Jonathan Levin, who has made football success one of his priorities.

It gives the Cardinal a chance. It will be up to Luck and the next head coach to make sure Freeman's gift pays real dividends.

Next Coach: Speaking of Stanford's next coach, who will replace interim Frank Reich in 2026, the Cardinal needs to find the next Curt Cignetti, who has worked a miracle at Indiana.

Cignetti took over a program that was a perennial Big Ten doormat, the losingest school in division 1 (FBS) history, a team with three winning seasons in 28 years. The Hoosiers are 17-2 since Cignetti's arrival, made the College Football Playoff last year, and are a legitimate national championship contender this season after dispatching Illinois, Iowa and Oregon.

Cignetti had previously been a winner at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Elon and James Madison. He didn't get his first big-time coaching job until he was 62.

With the program's future at stake, Stanford must make a wise choice going forward. I believe the Cardinal should hire a proven winner, perhaps from the Group of Five or the lower division FCS, someone who has built a program or turned one around (like John Ralston from Utah State in 1963 and Jim Harbaugh from University of San Diego in 2007), and not some flashy assistant who's never been a head coach before. 

QB List Update: Thanks to all who submitted names of Pac-8/10/12 quarterbacks to be included on my list of great ones the conference has produced.

There were at least 4 obvious omissions: Jared Goff from Cal (really fell asleep on that one); Bob Schloredt and Marques Tuiasosopo from Washington; and John Sciarra from UCLA.

Other strong candidates you noted: Mike Boryla, Guy Benjamin and Don Bunce from Stanford; Mark Harmon from UCLA; Sonny Sixkiller from Washington; and Mike Pawlawski from Cal.

Quotes of the Week: From Texas Tech think tank researcher Derek Cohen: "Since 1906 the NCAA has labored to uphold fairness, amateurism and integrity in collegiate sports. Yet as legal mandates, cultural shifts and market forces have redefined the landscape, the NCAA has become a hollow institution that resists reform, evades responsibility and cedes authority to state legislators and market actors."

From former NLRB counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who believes college athletes are employees. Abruzzo advocates for collective bargaining, which she views as "an opportunity for the athletes' voices to be heard and for them to have a seat at the table and for them to be able to assist with development and application of rules that affect their daily lives. Not only compensation rules, but rules around health and safety, educational opportunities, grievances and arbitration, discrimination and equitable or inequitable  treatment. Everyone talks about the money, but they're not talking about the athletes as a whole, as people who are being controlled in so many ways."

And after the Philadelphia Eagles ran four of their ridiculous "tush push" plays in a row, Green Bay defensive end Micah Parsons wrote, "This is not football."

Couldn't have said it better myself.