The Homer Hose, the Adley Hug and a perfect clubhouse mix: How the Orioles went from laughingstock to contender
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
KANSAS CITY — Austin Hays debuted for the Baltimore Orioles as a late September call-up in 2017 at 21, a year after Baltimore made its last playoff appearance. The next season, spent by Hays at Double-A, they went 47-115. He returned to the big leagues to play for a 108-loss team in 2019, slogged through the pandemic season (25 wins) and weathered a 110-loss 2021 in hopes of something better. Hope and faith were elemental to everyone in the Orioles’ universe, players and fans alike, because without them, the sort of misery that enmeshed the franchise would be too much.
Hays is now 27, and in the afterglow of another victory Monday, he marveled at what surrounded him. The Orioles, now carrying the third-best record in Major League Baseball at 21-10, are not flukes. Yes, they’ve had an easy schedule, and, certainly tougher days are ahead, with the combined winning percentage of the teams they face in their next eight series .605 — a collective 98-win pace. But their formula — outhit the opponent and withstand middling starting pitching with a bullpen that has the best Fielding Independent Pitching number in all of baseball — is replicable. And the coalescing of the Baltimore clubhouse — a well-balanced mixture of homegrown players with whom he ascended through the minor leagues, survivors of the Orioles’ lowest moments and imports finding the best versions of themselves — heartens Hays.
“The three of those groups have just bonded together so well here,” he said. “And it’s created just a really good atmosphere and culture. The team is good. We have talent, but there’s a lot of teams that have talent in the locker room just doesn’t mesh. It’s just meshed so well. It’s created a really great culture here.”
Catcher Adley Rutschman is quick to point out that culture and winning, though often bedfellows, are not the same thing. Culture, he said, is more about “having a lot of guys on board with the same mindset and the same kind of collective goal. It takes a lot of responsibility off individuals and just makes it more of a teamwide thing, which I really love about our team.”
Even if the Orioles’ whole is greater than the sum of its parts, those parts matter. In addition to Hays (OPSing .848), the survivors include center fielder Cedric Mullins (with a .375 on-base percentage in the leadoff hole), first baseman Ryan Mountcastle (a team-leading eight home runs), outfielder Anthony Santander (coming off a 33-homer season) and right-hander Dean Kremer (the best remaining player acquired in their 2018 trade-deadline purge). “Even though we stunk, I have a ton of fond memories for a lot of players that were here my first couple years,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “Because those guys played their heart out for me.”
Baltimore general manager Mike Elias didn’t just sit around waiting for the prospects to join the burgeoning core. In August 2021, Baltimore placed a waiver claim on shortstop Jorge Mateo, who blossomed last year, broke out this year and is currently eighth among position players in Wins Above Replacement. Standout reliever Bryan Baker came via waivers, too, three months later, and lefty reliever Cionel Perez two weeks after that. Right-hander Yennier Cano, author of 11 hitless, walk-free innings to start the season, arrived in a trade last July in which the Orioles, on the fringes of contention, dealt closer Jorge Lopez to Minnesota.
Though controversial at the time, the Lopez trade did little to affect the Orioles’ ascendancy. It seemed to come down to this: No longer were players coming to the stadium every day with the knowledge a cavernous talent gap existed between them and their opponent. Even if the Orioles’ payroll was embarrassingly low — 30th of 30 teams last season, 29th at an estimated $83 million this year — they were no longer outclassed before the first pitch.
“Being in a game every night where every at-bat the game’s on the line, you have a chance to put the team ahead, it makes the game so much more fun and it just makes it easy to bring energy,” Hays said. “And going through that has just made the game so much more enjoyable for us. There’s nothing to take for granted. We come in every day excited to try to win a game because we know where it can be and how far away we are from that now.”
THE THIRD GROUP inside the Orioles’ clubhouse — the kids — makes them truly interesting. Tanking teams thrive or crumble based on the success of their ability to draft and develop, and Baltimore already has firmly established itself in the former category — and that’s with a farm system that even after a slew of high-profile graduations remains among the best in the game.
The arrival last year of Rutschman, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2019 draft, signaled the beginning of a new era. Since his May 21 debut, the Orioles are 87-64, better than all but five teams, each of which carry championship aspirations: Houston, Toronto, Atlanta, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Mets.
In less than a year, Rutschman has established himself as an archetypal franchise player: wildly talented, willing leader and giver of his now-signature Adley Hug — most of which are delivered to far larger men. No mite at 6-foot-2, 230 pounds, Rutschman often finds himself swallowed up by Felix Bautista (6-8, 285) and Cano (6-4, 245).
“It’s definitely a good hug when a guy of his caliber comes out after pitching a tough ninth, which usually comes with a lot of pressure,” Cano said through Brandon Quinones, the team’s interpreter and baseball communications assistant. “Getting that hug from him is a really nice feeling. I’ve been able to work with several different catchers, but when I get to work with Adley, it’s like he already knows what pitch I want to throw, and he calls them immediately. So it’s great to work with him and I’d be super happy if I got to work with him the rest of my career.”
That sentiment is quickly gaining traction around the major leagues. If he’s not there already, Rutschman is not far off the title of best catcher in all of MLB — and yet still humble enough to express a whit of self-doubt as to the quality of his hugs.
“You can’t say, oh, I’m a good hugger,” Rutschman said. “It’s like someone saying, oh, I’m a really nice guy. Well, no, other people get to decide that for you. You don’t get to decide that. But also Bautista and Cano haven’t given me any feedback, so I don’t know if they’re just being nice.”
They are not. Truth is, everyone around Baltimore’s clubhouse adores Rutschman. Certainly his on-field brilliance — a switch-hitter, he is slashing .315/.429/.472 with four home runs and more walks than strikeouts — helps matters. But it’s more than that.
“He lives up to every expectation,” said veteran right-hander Kyle Gibson, who signed as a free agent with Baltimore over the winter. “He takes pride in his catching. He offensively obviously is switching, so it’s twice the work as most guys. And I haven’t gotten into the weeds with him on it, but my guess is he enjoys the work because if you’re a catcher, you have to really enjoy the work, and he has really high expectations for himself. You can tell.”
And Rutschman represented just the start of the emergence of Baltimore’s young core. Next came third baseman Gunnar Henderson, who had taken over as the top prospect following Rutschman’s promotion. Then outfielder Kyle Stowers, followed by their top pitching prospect, Grayson Rodriguez, and one of their plethora of middle infielders, Joey Ortiz. Still to come, likelier sooner than later: outfielder Colton Cowser and infielder Jordan Westburg, who are raking at Triple-A, and Heston Kjerstad, doing the same at Double-A. Not far behind: Jackson Holliday, the No. 1 overall pick in last year’s draft who’s already in High-A and will play the entire season at 19 years old.
When Gibson signed with Baltimore on a one-year, $10 million deal, he knew of the talent the Orioles’ young players possessed but not the people they were. Throughout the spring, he learned, they’re an almost universally grown-up group, kids in age only, and that whatever the Orioles were doing to develop them, it was working.
“I never would’ve guessed that all these guys had a good head on their shoulders,” Gibson said. “In spring training, there wasn’t any stupid stuff going on. They all took care of it like pros. You just don’t normally have a team of young guys that professional. … They’re never late. Just the mental mistakes that you normally see with young guys aren’t there on or off the field. So it’s got to be internal. It’s just too much of a coincidence not to be.”
TUNE INTO AN Orioles game and you’re likely to be treated to a show. When a Baltimore player hits a single, he looks toward his teammates and twists his wrist — turning on the offensive faucet. A double prompts the runner to do the sprinkler dance — and the dugout obliges, with those on the top step spewing streams of water. For home runs, the Orioles break out a funnel — known officially as the Homer Hose and colloquially as the Dong Bong — and chug water.
The liquid theme came from Rutschman — “Adley is usually our ideas guy,” Stowers said, “he’s our creative”– who earlier this spring debuted it at the team’s annual talent show for rookies. Rutschman wasn’t sure if he technically qualified — for finishing second in the American League Rookie of the Year voting last year, he was awarded a full year of service time — but once he knew his teammates expected participation, he rounded up Henderson, Stowers, Cowser and utilityman Terrin Vavra and prepared for a performance as “Fountain Financial.” It was such a hit, the encore went teamwide.
Rutschman’s ubiquity in the clubhouse is no accident. He takes leadership seriously, understanding his position as the franchise’s fulcrum and giving everyone what they need, whether it’s a celebratory postgame hug or a good-luck pregame embrace. Stowers is typically the recipient of that. After Rutschman goes through his customary hand slaps, he and Stowers raise their right arms, lower their left arms and move in for some love.
“It’s comforting,” Stowers said. “We kind of look at each other before a game. Here we go, got each other’s backs. It’s like, no matter what happens, we’re here for each other.
“I’ve only been in the organization since 2019, but each year you meet the first-round pick of the draft and you go, man, that’s a really good guy, a team-oriented guy who wants to win and help the team win,” Stowers continued. “And we’ve talked about this. I know you say not to talk too much about it, but it starts with the first overall pick. Being someone who’s humble. Works hard and does things the right way. Because if that guy’s humble, then everyone else is going to follow suit.”
Rutschman doesn’t want the Orioles to get too far ahead of themselves. As good as life is now, as promising as the future might be even in a pitiless AL East, baseball is an unrelenting challenge, and the moment Baltimore starts to buy the hype, it’s liable to return to that place no one wants to go.
So he preaches the same things that got the Orioles where they are. In the minor leagues, Rutschman said, he was struck by how the team’s prospects prioritized winning — even at levels where winning doesn’t much matter — over climbing to the major leagues. The balance between individual and team that is so difficult to strike in the minor leagues, he said, is Three Little Bears-level just right.
“Somehow our guys were still focused on that team aspect of caring about the guy next to him and asking guys how they’re doing, what they’re going through,” Rutschman said. “And to me that’s a huge part of the team aspect, and I think you can lose that in the minor leagues and then when you get to big leagues turn that back on. But I don’t think guys are having to turn it back on.”
And so this franchise, a laughingstock for nearly half a decade, witness to far more ughs than hugs, finds itself reckoning with a phenomenon long ago abandoned in Baltimore: relevancy. Losing, Mullins said, helped teach the Orioles to savor winning, and now they’re ever hungrier for it.
“I think we come in with a purpose every single day: winning games,” Mullins said. “And it’s not just feeling like we want to. It’s knowing that we can.”
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Chris Low
In every sport, there are hallowed records, dubious records and records that are seemingly unbreakable.
College football has evolved greatly over the years — everything from rules changes and style of play to the number of games in a season — but there are some records and accomplishments that have stood the test of time.
Some good, some not so good.
We’ve examined the past 75 years in college football, tracing back to the 1950 season, and have ranked the 10 most “unbreakable” records in the sport, listing them in order of least likely to be topped. We also dug up some of the more obscure accomplishments (and failures) during that period.
Again, we’re only considering play since 1950, so iconic records such as Tennessee going the entire 1939 regular season unbeaten, untied and unscored upon under then-Major Robert Neyland, or Georgia Tech’s 222-point margin of victory over Cumberland in 1916 are not on our list.
Undoubtedly, you’ll let us know if we missed anything.
1. Oklahoma’s 47-game winning streak
When surveying the most dominant college football machines in history, the conversation begins and ends with the Bud Wilkinson-led Oklahoma teams of the 1950s. The Sooners bulldozed their way to 47 consecutive wins, a streak that began in 1953 and lasted most of five seasons, producing back-to-back national championships in 1955 and 1956. Oklahoma held its opponents to single digits in 35 of the 47 wins and recorded 22 shutouts.
Unranked Notre Dame, a 19-point underdog, ended the streak on Nov. 16, 1957, with a 7-0 victory in Norman. The Irish scored the winning touchdown inside the final four minutes on a fourth-and-goal play from the 3-yard line, then intercepted a pass in their own end zone in the final seconds to seal the upset, leaving the home crowd stunned. Many of the fans sat in the stands for nearly 30 minutes trying to process the unthinkable — an OU loss.
Nearly 70 years later, nobody has come close to that streak. Toledo won 35 straight from 1969 to 1971. Miami (2000-02) and USC (2003-05) each won 34 in a row. Even those star-studded Georgia teams under Kirby Smart failed to seriously challenge the mark. The Bulldogs won 29 in a row during their run to back-to-back national championships in 2021 and 2022.
With the College Football Playoff era upon us and teams having to play as many as four postseason games to win the national title, not to mention conference championship games, it’s difficult to imagine a team going what would amount to three straight seasons unscathed. This is a record teams will be chasing for a long time, maybe forever.
2. Barry Sanders’ magical season
One of the most electrifying players in the history of the sport, Barry Sanders put up dizzying numbers in 1988, his junior season at Oklahoma State.
Yes, his single-season NCAA record of 2,628 rushing yards was challenged last season by Boise State’s Ashton Jeanty (2,601 yards), but there’s a catch. Sanders’ total came in just 11 games, while Jeanty played in 14. What’s more, bowl statistics didn’t count when Sanders was playing, and he had an additional 222 yards against Wyoming in the Holiday Bowl. So if those yards are added, Sanders’ total jumps to 2,850.
What seems untouchable is Sanders’ NCAA record of 238.9 rushing yards per game. For perspective, Jeanty averaged 185.8 yards last season. In fact, only two other running backs in major college football history have averaged 200 rushing yards per game in a season, USC’s Marcus Allen in 1981 (212.9) and Cornell’s Ed Marinaro (209) in 1971. Sanders had four 300-yard games in 1988, and counting the bowl game, rushed for 43 touchdowns.
3. Florida State’s top-5 finishes
For all the late Bobby Bowden accomplished during his Hall of Fame career, his remarkable consistency could be the most impressive thing. His Florida State teams finished in the top 5 of every final AP poll from 1987 to 2000, an amazing run no matter the era.
Bowden finished his legendary 34-year career at FSU with two national championships (and could have won a few more had it not been for those dreaded missed field goals against Miami), and more importantly, he put Florida State football on the map.
Think about it: Fourteen straight top-5 finishes. Pete Carroll had some dominant teams at USC, and the Trojans’ longest streak was seven straight top-5 finishes (2002-08). The same is true for Oklahoma under Wilkinson (1952-58). And while Alabama won six national titles under Nick Saban, his longest run of top-5 seasons was five in a row (2014-18).
4. Oklahoma’s wishbone onslaught
If an offense is rushing for more than 250 yards per game today (there were four in 2024), that’s considered a punishing running attack. In 1971, with Barry Switzer as offensive coordinator, Oklahoma averaged a staggering 472.4 rushing yards per game.
The Sooners had installed the wishbone the year before, and nobody could slow them down. They averaged 45 points per game and lost only once, to eventual national champion Nebraska 35-31 in what was billed as the “Game of the Century.” Even in that loss, Oklahoma rushed for 279 yards.
The last team to come within 50 yards of the Sooners’ record was the 1987 Oklahoma team, which averaged 428.8 yards per game. No team in the past 30 years has reached even 400 yards. Even triple-option teams haven’t come close. Army was first nationally in rushing last season, averaging 300.5 yards per game.
5. Throwing it to the wrong team
Not all records are enshrined in trophy cases. Florida quarterback John Reaves threw an NCAA-record nine interceptions (on 66 passing attempts) in a 38-12 loss to Auburn in 1969. Reaves was a prolific passer and put up better career numbers than Gators Heisman Trophy winner Steve Spurrier, but Florida’s only loss of the 1969 season was “one of those days.”
When Reaves left Florida in 1971, he was college football’s all-time leading passer with 7,549 yards, and he was selected in the first round of the NFL draft. Reaves died in 2017 at the age of 67. He joked years after that forgettable game that the “safeties were the only guys who were open that day.” In this age of college football, any coach that kept a quarterback in a game long enough to throw nine interceptions probably would be looking for a new job the next week.
6. Derrick Thomas’ sack parade
Derrick Thomas was a generational pass rusher. He once had seven sacks in an NFL game, which is still a record. As a senior linebacker at Alabama in 1988, Thomas gobbled up opposing quarterbacks at an astonishing rate, finishing with 27 sacks (39 tackles for loss) on his way to earning SEC Defensive Player of the Year honors.
Thomas was unblockable that season, but you won’t find his eye-popping numbers in the NCAA record book. At the time, sacks weren’t an official NCAA statistic, meaning Arizona State’s Terrell Suggs has the “official” NCAA sack record with 24 in 2002. While defenders play more games now (Thomas played in 11 games in 1988), no FBS player has reached the 20-sack plateau in the past 20 years. Last season, the FBS sack leader was Marshall’s Mike Green with 17.
Thomas, who finished with 52 career sacks at Alabama, played 11 seasons in the NFL, all with the Kansas City Chiefs. He died in 2000 at the age of 33 following a car accident.
7. Hat trick for Antonio Perkins
If a player returns one kick for a touchdown in a game, he’s probably not going to get a chance to return another one. And if he returns two, the only way he’s going to touch the ball again is after it goes out of bounds. But three punt returns for a touchdown?
Perkins did the unfathomable in 2003 when he became the first player in NCAA history to score on three returns in a game, going 84, 74 and 65 yards, in Oklahoma’s 59-24 rout of UCLA in Norman. So, yes, a valid question is: Why in the name of Boomer Sooner did the Bruins keep kicking to him? Perkins’ final touchdown came with 2:39 to play in the game.
Perkins also broke the NCAA record for punt return yards (277), a mark previously held by the late Golden Richards, who had 219 punt return yards in 1971 against North Texas while playing for BYU. Perkins, a cornerback for Bob Stoops’ OU teams, finished his college career with eight punt returns for touchdowns.
8. Marcus Allen’s amazing run
After coming to USC as a defensive back and playing some as a fullback early in his career, Marcus Allen did things in his 1981 senior year that not even Sanders accomplished in his record-setting 1988 season.
For starters, Allen rushed for more than 200 yards in eight of 11 games (Sanders had seven 200-yard games in ’88) and finished with 2,342 yards on his way to winning the Heisman Trophy. But what really jumps out is that Allen started the season with five straight 200-yard games, a streak that seems surreal 44 years later.
In many ways, Allen is the most accomplished football player ever. He’s the only player to win a national championship, Heisman Trophy, Super Bowl championship, Super Bowl MVP award and NFL MVP award, a distinction that may never be duplicated. He’s also both a Pro Football and College Football Hall of Famer.
9. Patrick Mahomes’ wizardry
Before he started collecting Super Bowl rings with the Kansas City Chiefs, Patrick Mahomes played a starring role in one of the wildest shootouts in college football history. Oklahoma and Baker Mayfield outlasted Texas Tech and Mahomes 66-59 in 2016, an offensive smorgasbord that produced one record after another.
Playing through a separated throwing shoulder and fractured left wrist he suffered in the first half, Mahomes set an FBS record with 819 yards of total offense. He completed 52 of 88 passes for 734 yards and five touchdowns and also rushed for 85 yards and two touchdowns.
Mayfield, who had transferred from Texas Tech to Oklahoma, had the “lesser” of the stats between the two future NFL quarterbacks that day. He threw for only 545 yards and seven touchdowns — but got the win. The teams combined for an FBS-record 1,708 yards of offense. “To have both those guys play the way they did … We’ll never see it again, I don’t think,” said Kliff Kingsbury, who was Texas Tech’s head coach that season.
10. No upsetting Nick Saban
Nick Saban won a slew of games against nationally ranked teams during his career, 104 to be exact, but his streak of beating the teams he was supposed to beat during his 17 seasons at Alabama was unmatched. The Crimson Tide won 100 consecutive games against unranked foes under Saban and went 14 years without losing a game to an unranked opponent, a streak that was snapped by a 41-38 loss to 19-point underdog Texas A&M on Oct. 9, 2021 with a walk-off 28-yard field goal by the Aggies’ Seth Small. It was the longest such streak in the AP poll era, and Saban was 123-4 overall at Alabama against unranked teams.
The A&M game also marked the first time one of Saban’s former assistants (Jimbo Fisher) had beaten him. Saban had been 24-0 against former assistants.
Saban had not lost to an unranked team since his first season at Alabama in 2007, when Louisiana-Monroe upset the Tide 21-14 in Tuscaloosa. The next closest winning streak against unranked teams in the AP poll era (since 1936) is 73 by Florida from 1990 to 2000 under Steve Spurrier. Miami won 72 in a row from 1985 to 1995.
Now that we’ve ranked the top 10, here are some honorable (and dishonorable) mentions:
• Florida has scored in 461 straight games, the longest active streak and the longest in FBS history. The last time the Gators were shut out in a game was on Oct. 29, 1988, a 16-0 loss to Auburn. A distant second is TCU, which has scored in 407 straight games.
• Houston quarterback Andre Ware passed for 517 yards and six touchdowns — all in the first half before sitting out the rest of the game — in a 95-21 battering of NCAA probation-beleaguered SMU in 1989 in the Astrodome. Houston finished with an NCAA-record 1,021 yards of offense. The Mustangs were coming off a two-year NCAA “death penalty” for violating rules and more than half their starters were freshmen. SMU coach Forrest Gregg was furious afterward about Houston running up the score and called it a “sad day for college football.” Houston also was on probation that season and wasn’t allowed to play in a bowl game or appear on live television, but Ware still won the Heisman Trophy.
• Michigan’s Mike Hart had 1,005 consecutive rushing attempts without a losing a fumble from 2004 to 2008. Two of his three career lost fumbles came in his last game, the Capital One Bowl against Florida, which the Wolverines won 41-35.
• Nebraska has sold out every home football game at Memorial Stadium dating back to Nov. 3, 1962, a streak of 403 straight games. The Huskers have suffered through some lean times over the past decade, and while packed stadiums and sellouts aren’t necessarily the same thing, every ticket available to the public has been sold for 60-plus years. Admittedly, Nebraska has been forced to get creative to keep the streak alive, with corporations and donors buying up unused tickets at discount prices. But still… 403 straight sellouts!
• Alabama won a record 27 straight games against SEC opponents from 1976 to 1980, a streak that ended with a 6-3 loss to Mississippi State in Jackson, Mississippi on Nov. 1, 1980. That setback to the Bulldogs was the only loss to an SEC opponent Alabama captains Major Ogilvie and Randy Scott had their entire college careers. The Crimson Tide’s average margin of victory in the streak was 21.6 points, and only three times in 27 games did their opponent score more than 20. Florida won 25 straight against SEC foes under Spurrier from 1994 to 1997.
• East Carolina’s Dominique Davis completed 36 consecutive passes in 2011, completing his last 10 against Memphis and his first 26 the following week against Navy. That broke Aaron Rodgers’ record of 26 in a row in 2004 when Rodgers was at Cal.
• Georgia had an NCAA-record 13 turnovers in a 48-6 loss to rival Georgia Tech and Bobby Dodd in 1951. Zeke Bratkowski threw eight interceptions (in 35 attempts) and the Bulldogs lost five fumbles. Bratkowski still holds the SEC record for career interceptions (68), but as a second-year starter in 1952, he led the nation in passing and earned All-America honors before going on to play for the Green Bay Packers following the 1953 season.
• With Chris Klieman in his third season as coach, North Dakota State allowed just three punt returns in 14 games for a net total of zero yards in 2016. Of North Dakota State’s 61 punts that season, 37 were fair catches.
• Northwestern lost 34 straight games from 1979 to 1982. The closest any school has come to that futility is New Mexico State dropping 27 in a row from 1988 to 1990.
• Vanderbilt went the entire season in 1993 without a single touchdown pass, the last FBS team to do so. The Commodores’ only SEC win that season was 12-7 over Kentucky. They ran the I-bone option offense under Gerry DiNardo and attempted 157 passes with no touchdowns and 13 interceptions. Three different quarterbacks played that season, and the Commodores attempted a total of 17 passes in their four wins.
• Wake Forest’s Nick Sciba holds the NCAA record with 34 consecutive made field goals in the 2018 and 2019 seasons. He made his first 23 attempts in 2019 before missing from 48 yards in the regular-season finale against Syracuse.
• With 6,405 yards in 54 games, San Diego State’s Donnel Pumphrey broke Ron Dayne’s NCAA career rushing record in 2016. Dayne had 6,397 in 43 games at Wisconsin. It’s hard to imagine a player putting up those numbers — and taking the beating a running back does — and staying four years in the current climate of college football to make a run at Pumphrey’s record.
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Adam Rittenberg
CHICAGO — Illinois coach Bret Bielema wants to see the College Football Playoff expand to 16 teams in 2026, but only if all the major conferences, including the SEC, play nine league games per season.
Speaking Tuesday before Illini Night at Wrigley Field, Bielema said the 16-team model doesn’t necessarily need to include four automatic spots for Big Ten teams, as Ohio State coach Ryan Day advocated for earlier this month. But Bielema, who coached in the SEC at Arkansas and has spent most of his career in the Big Ten, said both leagues need to be aligned in the number of conference games. The Big Ten currently plays nine, while the SEC has remained at eight.
“I don’t think there’s any way we can do a 16-team playoff if they’re not at nine,” Bielema said.
He also referred to conversations coming out of the SEC spring meetings in Florida, where LSU coach Brian Kelly suggested in SEC-Big Ten nonleague challenge.
“We voted unanimously as Big Ten coaches to stay at nine league games and actually maybe have an SEC challenge,” Bielema said. “I was told that they voted unanimously to stay at eight and not play the Big Ten. But then some people pop off and say what they want to say because they want to look a certain way.
“I get it, but like, I think until you get to nine for everybody, I don’t think it could work.”
The 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua are meeting this week in Asheville, North Carolina, to discuss the future format and other issues.
Bielema, who has stood up for the Big Ten and taken some playful shots at the SEC on social media, said his wife has told him to “slow my roll.” But as one of the more experienced coaches in the Big Ten, he also remembers what Ohio State’s Jim Tressel and Michigan’s Lloyd Carr told him as a young coach in the league.
“They just said, ‘Hey, you really got to look out for not just your team, but the better of college football,'” Bielema said. “And so I think as I come back, especially this last three or four years at Illinois, I’m in meetings, and there’s a lot of good coaches, but some of these guys are on the younger version of their themselves, and they just don’t understand what’s coming at them. So I’ve really tried to stand up for the game a lot.”
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Eli Lederman
Alabama completed a flip of three-star Iowa State quarterback pledge Jett Thomalla on Tuesday, finishing the Crimson Tide’s efforts to land a passer in the 2026 class this spring.
A record-setting quarterback from Omaha, Nebraska, Thomalla is ESPN’s No. 18 quarterback prospect in the latest cycle. He initially committed to Iowa State in April before receiving a scholarship offer from Alabama on May 15. Thomalla visited the Crimson Tide two weeks later, during which he connected with the quarterback development backgrounds of Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer, offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb and quarterbacks coach Nick Sheridan.
“My dream is to go to the NFL,” Thomalla told ESPN earlier this month. “The resources around the place and all the eyes that are on you, I know I can develop there. Those coaches can be really good for my process of becoming the best quarterback I can be.”
Thomalla’s flip closes a monthslong pursuit of a 2026 quarterback pledge for the Crimson Tide.
After signing five-star, dual-threat Keelon Russell in the 2025 cycle, Alabama had largely stayed away from the top end of the passer market in the 2026 class before stepping up its efforts this spring. Alongside Thomalla, the Crimson Tide offered three-star prospects Matt Ponatoski and Tayden-Evan Kaawa over the past month. Alabama also expressed interest in three-star passer Bryson Beaver, who visited for a throwing session with the program this past weekend.
The 6-foot-4, 200-pound Thomalla is set to enter his senior season at Nebraska Millard South High School this fall. He led Millard South to a 12-1 record and Class A state title as a junior in 2024, setting state classification records for passing yards (3,663) and touchdowns (47).
Thomalla lands as the eight member of DeBoer’s second recruiting class at Alabama. The Crimson Tide’s latest class includes four ESPN 300 pledges, led by top 100 cornerbacks Jorden Edmonds and Zyan Gibson and four-star offensive tackle Sam Utu (No. 77 overall).
Alabama is set to host a cast of high-profile prospects this weekend for a final round of official visits before the recruiting dead period begins Monday. In-state targets Anthony Jones (No. 25), Ezavier Crowell (No. 30) and Cederian Morgan (No. 47) are among the key prospects expected on campus as the program prepares to bolster its 2026 class in the coming months.
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