Message Board Mania: Will Jackson Cantwell’s Miami Hurricanes Commitment Change College Football Forever?

The Miami Hurricanes sent a shot across the bow of every major college football program on Tuesday afternoon when No. 1 overall prospect Jackson Cantwell picked Miami over Georgia and Oregon. And this morning On3’s Ari Wasserman wrote an interesting column reflecting on the decision titled “NIL Killed the Super Team: Jackson Cantwell committing to Miami is proof”.

Wasserman states that, of course, NIL played a big part in this – Miami is reported to have a $2.5 million deal in place, although Cantwell was quick to say money wasn’t his motivating factor. But the money had to be there to some extent, obviously. Wasserman speculates that considering the Bulldogs and Ducks have become top national teams while Miami’s faltered for the better part of 20 years that this would not have been the recruiting outcome just five or six years ago.

“Ask yourself a question,” Wasserman writes. “Would this recruitment have played out like this in 2020? The answer, like it or not, is no.”

Wasserman also doesn’t belittle this being a huge win for Miami.

“It’s these types of recruitments that help second-tier programs become top-tier programs,” he writes. “And now Georgia, a team that won two recent national titles because it had an embarrassment of riches on its roster, has to move forward without Cantwell.”

Wasserman sums up his argument by saying super teams are going to be hard to create now with so many programs throwing money at recruits and transfers.

“Last year’s Ohio State? It returned a veteran team with players who should’ve been in the NFL last year,” he said. “Sure, Ohio State spent a lot of money in NIL, but that helped the Buckeyes retain players like Jack Sawyer, J.T. Tuimoloau and Denzel Burke, all of whom could have left college for the pros. Those were pre-NIL era recruits combined with a portal luxuries like quarterback Will Howard, safety Caleb Downs and running back Quinshon Judkins. Also add into the equation that Jeremiah Smith may turn out to be the best receiver in the history of college football, and it was a problem.

“Who is going to construct a roster like that? Who is going to return a large bulk of its team, sign a top-five recruiting class and also bring in Howard, Judkins, Downs and Smith? It could conceivably happen again, but there are too many Miamis out there now to make life difficult for the teams who have become so accustomed to excess. Having too many good players isn’t a reality anymore.”

Wasserman’s final lines of his column will probably make a lot of Miami fans very happy.

“Cantwell would have been a Bulldog four years ago,” he says. “And maybe the reason he isn’t a Bulldog now was because Georgia didn’t want to match Miami’s check, even if that reason was less about finances and more about maintaining the order of the salary structure of its roster. But Cantwell is a Hurricane now. Miami, like it or not, is more dangerous now than it has been since the early 2000s. And because teams like Miami exist, teams like 2024 Ohio State and 2022 Georgia won’t anymore.”

Which brings us to today’s Message Board Mania. Because, of course, Hurricane fans have a lot of thoughts on Wasserman’s take. So let’s highlight some of them:

CANESCANESCANESCANES seconds Wasserman’s notion, with the quadruple Cane threat posting “NIL leveled the playing field for Miami, without it Miami doesn’t land Cantwell. Miami can now legally pay for players and we got companies willing to back it up with NIL branding deals.”

Dufour Cane also is on Wasserman’s side, stating “That article is spot on for the most part. The parity of the sport continues, and that can be either good or bad depending on where you previously were in the pecking order (so we should love this). Since our run in the 80’s/90s, we’ve seen the rise and fall of Nebraskas, UF, USC, us again, Bama, Clemson, and now imo UGA (they are where we were in ‘04, not yet realizing that its a new day)…its definitely harder now to sustain such a run, but if the elite talent gets spread even more thin than expected, then who knows, maybe coaching will matter again (lol).”

Dufour also makes an interesting point, stating “I just hope the sport doesn’t turn into college basketball, where you have a bunch of good teams but no great ones, and certainly no mini dynasties.”

Regarding the above, the truth not fleshed out fully inside Wasserman’s column … and Dufour’s post … is the very real possibility that college football will fully turn into a league of haves vs. have-nots. And there may not be a lot of “haves.” There could, for instance, be 20 or 30 teams every single year forever under this system that have the majority of the best players on their rosters. Those would, of course, be the teams with major NIL donors/money sources for years and years to come.

Back to the task at hand: CaneSport poster gabriellet says perhaps Wasserman is undervaluing the job Cristobal did as a recruiter, which he’s proven over the years is one of his major strengths.

“Mario biggest recruiting quality is RELATIONSHIPS!!!” Mr. Let says. “For all the haters, Miami could’ve ALWAYS been great if we began our NIL campaign over the last two decades alike Ohio State GA and Alabama. We finally said F it and put all the resources together!”

289FIA backs that up saying “Apparently Oregon was willing to go to $2.5 as well but the OL coach relationship won out for Miami.”

lyndiola jumps on board as well, saying “My friends from Georgia say the money was essentially the same in GA and OR, They just got outrecruited.”

Insane_Cane? Perhaps not so insane as he says “All four of those hats offered $2+ mil. Fact.”

Then there are those Miami fans that want their 15 minutes back that it took to read Wasserman’s article.

“Not quite sure how anyone can say that was a great article,” Tallcane says. “It was a hack job that totally obfuscated what really occurred. They can cry all they want but NIL simply ended the ability for those few `superteams’ to cheat.”

Some fans see this massive recruiting win as a sign of Cristobal’s strategy to win in the portal and in recruiting at the same time to build the program for now and into the future.

“Mario has a game plan to rebuild the O around certain players; he has a game plan with Coach H and JT to do the same with the D,” Canetogo writes. “Both plans have a play now, back up and play, and season now for future play in place ….. depth plan with recruits andHence the strategy of recruiting and portal/transfers meshing to provide continuity and growth for the program.”

We’ll leave the final word here to the confusingly named JST390-2.

Perhaps Mr. -2 puts it best when he posts, simply, that “All I know is I Love Nil.”