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EMOTIONS TUG AT Clayton Powell-Lee as he pulls open the doors to the Georgia Tech football team facility a few minutes before noon on Monday. The 21-year-old strong safety has spent some sleep-deprived nights for the past month searching for an answer to perhaps the most consequential choice of his life: Stay put on his current team or transfer in search of a bigger payday.

Decision time has arrived.

If he stays at Georgia Tech for his final season of eligibility, he can build on his 53 tackles as a starter last season, after which he landed a six-figure name, image and likeness contract with the school. But Powell-Lee says he’s worth more. His agents — Jacob Piasecki and Jason Bloom of A&P Sports Agency — and his mother agree.

Earlier that morning, Georgia Tech had declined to negotiate an increase, Powell-Lee’s agents said. But the market for defensive backs is booming, they told him, and chances are good he could double his current payday. Provided, that is, he was willing to set aside his notions of team loyalty, leave his hometown Atlanta and abandon the school where his father, Gary Lee, had caught touchdown passes for the Yellow Jackets in the 1980s.

Sitting outside the team facility moments before entering, Powell-Lee dials into a conference call with Piasecki, Bloom, and his mother, Rometta Powell. All had agreed to let ESPN listen in.

“They need to be shook awake,” Rometta Powell says to the group. “They’re trying to play games. They’ve got the money.”

The pressure is building on Powell-Lee. The next step, they tell him, is to go upstairs and get the paperwork from a compliance officer to enter the transfer portal. Powell-Lee agrees with the others on the call, hangs up and pulls open the doors. But instead of the compliance office, he soon finds himself standing in the doorway of head coach Brent Key.

“I told him I had an offer on the table,” Powell-Lee said. “I have an offer on the table, and it’s sitting there in front of me.”

THE TRANSFER PORTAL — a phrase heard often in the NIL era but perhaps little understood by the general public — is extinguishing any remaining pretenses of amateurism in college football. Twice a year, players are set loose in an untamed, largely opaque marketplace to seek new teams and increasingly large sums of money. There are few, if any, universal truths or safe blanket statements that fully describe how this emerging world operates, but during the 10-day opening of the portal starting April 16, ESPN received an inside look at how some agents and general managers work with athletes and their families to sort through their options.

The player. The agents. The recruiter. All come together at the portal. This is a glimpse of the frenzied new reality of how college football rosters are formed.

The construction of a college football roster has changed dramatically in the past several years thanks to the introduction of NIL deals that serve as de facto salaries and a federal court order that allows players to transfer with almost no restrictions. The portal serves as a formal declaration that athletes are interested in hearing from new suitors.

The transfer market moves with the force of a riptide. Coaches act fast to fill the gaps in their rosters. The waves of players who enter risk losing their spot if they hesitate to pick a new school. To speed things along, the nitty-gritty aspects of deal-making in the portal are often sorted between two relatively new creatures to the college football universe: a team’s general manager and a player’s agent.

Gone are the days of predictable rosters and lengthy recruiting courtships where coaches sat in prospects’ living rooms to make their pitch. While many players will still visit campus and meet the coaching staff before officially signing with a team, most of their decisions are made in a matter of days through an onslaught of text messages, phone tag and two-minute calls that reach ,pitch on the day the portal opens.

JACOB PIASECKI HAS his phone pressed to his ear when he arrives at A&P Agency’s offices in Austin, Texas, shortly after 9 a.m. on April 16. Six of his agency’s roughly 120 clients have already declared their interest in transferring as of the portal’s opening day, and by the sound of the current call, another player is eager to join them.

The SEC player on the other end of the line just finished his post-spring-practice meeting with his coaches. The player has learned he’s not a guaranteed starter and therefore isn’t likely to receive a pay bump from his current $50,000 NIL contract.

Piasecki waves Bloom, A&P’s general manager, into his glass-walled office from across the hall. They both believe the player can command first-stringer money if he decides to transfer, which would mean making between five and 10 times what he currently makes.

The player’s parents have already called the coach to ask for more information. Are the coaches playing games to keep his value down? Parental intervention is exactly what Bloom and Piasecki don’t want. The agents’ goal, they say, is to serve as the sole point of contact with teams and move forward strategically. They coordinate with the player and his parents, setting up a plan to ask his current team for a raise before exploring options. By the end of the day, that player will be in the portal, but for now the morning’s first brushfire has been extinguished.

The corridor leading to Piasecki’s office is lined with boxes of promotional merchandise soon to be mailed to clients. The decor consists of posters and footballs signed by players A&P has represented. On one bookshelf along with memorabilia are two thick textbooks: “Astrophysics” and “Quantum Mechanics.” They are the last vestiges of the physics degree he was wrapping up at Texas A&M when he decided to launch his agency alongside co-founder Stefan Aguilera.

That was 2021, the first year college players could make money from NIL deals.

They have since built a six-person team and partnered with a fellow Texas A&M alum, attorney Tony Buzbee, whose law firm reviews the contracts A&P players sign. The agency says last year it generated roughly $1.25 million in revenue, a number they say should grow this spring as they represent a number of highly ranked players in the transfer portal. Physics class is mostly a distant memory.

“Physics teaches you to take really complicated problems and break them down into smaller pieces to solve one at a time,” Piasecki said. “And that’s pretty much what we’re doing here. It’s just piecing together a ton of small problems.”

POWELL-LEE MET with Piasecki and Bloom in early March to discuss what he wanted to get out of his last season of college football. That’s when the emotional tug became apparent. On the one hand, Powell-Lee said he wanted to finish his career and get his degree at Georgia Tech. On the other, he wanted a showcase to maximize his NFL draft potential.

He told the agents he would consider other schools if he couldn’t get a better deal from Georgia Tech.

“Obviously when you’ve been in a place for so long and coaches know you, you don’t necessarily want to leave,” Powell-Lee told ESPN. “But at this point, college football is a business. Decisions have to be made with money and playing time in mind. … Jacob and Jason have a lot of connections, so it’s about just letting them be my ears in the market.”

A&P’s team spends most of the spring working phones or traveling to meet with general managers from as many teams as possible, the agents said.

In mid-March, Piasecki and Bloom visited the University of Virginia. The Cavaliers’ recruiting director, Justin Speros, told them his coaches’ wish list included one or more defensive backs. The agents mentioned Powell-Lee among others who might be interested in transferring.

Coaches and staff members are prohibited from contacting any player who has not yet formally entered the transfer portal, but there are no rules against contact with agents to register a team’s needs. Schools, generally, won’t make any specific promises before a player is in the portal, but the current system provides ample gray area to make it clear to agents and their athletes what kind of money they could stand to make in the portal. So Powell-Lee’s “offer on the table” would have been more conceptual than literal during his meeting with his coach.

Speros says he did not make any specific offer to Powell-Lee or other players who were not in the portal. The interactions ESPN witnessed appeared to stay within NCAA rules.

“I might say ‘Hey, I need corners, so if you’ve got a guy, call me up once the portal opens,'” Speros told ESPN. “This past winter was really the first year that if you weren’t talking to the agent, you weren’t really recruiting a kid. You’re eight steps behind if you don’t know about a kid before he hits the portal.”

Bloom calls Speros at 12:36 p.m. on April 16, hours after the portal has officially opened. As the phone rings, he and Piasecki scan through lists and spreadsheets. One includes estimates of each client’s potential market value, calculated using their recruiting rankings, college experience, Pro Football Focus rating and current demand at their position, among other factors. Another lists teams and their current needs, based on information the agency gained from contacts earlier this spring.

Every past offer any team has made to one of its players is also recorded, along with contract comparisons organized by position and conference to get a sense of the market. Unlike in the NFL, player contracts are not public in college football. Good data is hard to find.

Using an agent — especially those who represent scores of clients — can help athletes get access to a better picture of the market. But that comes at a cost. A&P takes an 8% cut on most of the deals for Power 4 conference players it represents. That number can go as high as 15%, especially for young players or FCS-level players who won’t generate as much attention in the portal on their own.

It’s not clear how many of the thousands of athletes who entered the transfer portal this year are represented by agents, but several industry experts estimate that more than half have no representation.

Throughout the first day, Bloom and A&P’s director of scouting, Will Scott, constantly monitor online lists of players who have just entered the portal. A new listing is a new potential client. Scott has data on around 200 players he has evaluated ahead of time and A&P would like to represent if they want to transfer.

They reach out to players via direct message on Instagram to gauge their interest. Bloom calls to pitch prospects, usually citing the agency’s relationships with general managers throughout the country and unique brand endorsements its agents have arranged for athletes in the past, such as an arranged visit with celebrity jeweler Johnny Dang.

Most of the agents’ day, though, is consumed in a barrage of brief, unemotional phone calls. Some players receive raises from their current teams. Others jump in the portal and start to generate offers.

By 9 p.m., the A&P team is slouched in chairs around a conference room table covered with takeout trays of barbecue. People scroll through social media and text messages while making a plan for the next day, cracking jokes that are a better fit for locker rooms than boardrooms.

Most of the A&P team is not yet 30 years old. None of them had experience in the sports agent industry before joining A&P. But on just the first day of portal season, the group generated nearly $1 million in new money for clients. That’s the goal, Bloom says: a million dollars a day while the portal remains open.

“It is a little wild,” Piasecki says to the room, “that we’re just six guys in an office in Texas but we’re shaping a market for these institutions that bring in millions and millions.”

IT’S LATE THURSDAY morning and Day 2 of the 10-day sprint. At UVA, recruiting director Speros says he’s happy with his progress hunting for tackles and defensive ends, but defensive backs are proving to be an elusive, rare commodity in this spring’s portal.

Bloom and Piasecki are on the phone pitching Speros with prospects from their growing list of portal-declared clients. The agents offer defensive ends, a tight end and a running back.

Speros cuts them off. “I’m wasting my breath right now if I’m not talking about DBs, guys,” he says.

He tells ESPN that, for any position where he needs one or two players to fill out a depth chart, he knows he’ll need roughly 10 “hooks in the water” to make it work. Sometimes the players scouted will choose another team. Others come with too high of an asking price.

“We prefer not to be transactional, but it just is what it is,” Speros says. “There are things we need to do to keep pressing forward. And what that means is a lot of either just getting to a number or not getting to the number and moving on.”

Speros and Tyler Jones, a deputy athletic director, oversee the budget for building out their roster. For this spring, their total spending power is a somewhat flexible number that combines the money the school is expecting to be able to share with players directly starting this summer along with contributions from the school’s booster collective.

Speros and his staff have done months of scouting hundreds of players across college football to get a sense of what they’re willing to pay. As new players who might fit Virginia’s needs enter the portal, a group of interns creates short film cutups of their highlights so the coaching staff can evaluate the players based on about a dozen plays. Virginia also uses multiple data analytics programs to rate players and get a sense of their market value.

With one of the team’s starting cornerbacks out for the season with an ACL tear and a lot of interest in defensive backfield players, Speros acknowledges he’ll have to act fast and potentially pay high rates to fill that gap on the depth chart.

Bloom tells him that Powell-Lee is scheduled to meet with his coaches at Georgia Tech the following day and will make a decision about the portal soon after. Speros expresses interest. Enough interest, in fact, that he’s willing to sit tight on a few other options at safety until he hears about Powell-Lee’s decision.

A long weekend passes, and Powell-Lee is still unsure of how he wants to proceed. During spring practice, he told reporters he had developed a new sense of chemistry with his fellow defensive backs at Georgia Tech and felt a duty to help the younger players get settled into their new positions.

He hasn’t heard the answers he wants from coaches when he has asked about a raise, but now, with less than a week before the portal window closes, ambivalence sets in as he approaches the team facility to start the portal registration paperwork.

His agents say it would be crazy for Powell-Lee to pass up the money he could get in the portal. His mother, Powell-Lee says, has been supportive throughout the process but also tells him not to shy away from getting what he’s worth.

Still, he says, something doesn’t feel right.

“I was just sitting there, I was just thinking to myself, like, something in my heart and my gut is just telling me not to go grab those papers right now but instead go up there yourself and tell them that you want to talk to them,” Powell-Lee said a few days later.

He said his discussion with Coach Key went well. And later that night he discovered some new information that made his decision much easier: Virginia will accept only up to 60 credit hours of previous coursework for any transfer student. For Powell-Lee, that would mean essentially erasing a year’s worth of credits he has earned at Georgia Tech, making it impossible to graduate in the same academic year that he wraps up his college football career.

“I had to really just sit there and ask myself, is that really worth losing all those credits to make however much money?” Powell-Lee said. “Personally, I was like, no, it’s not fully worth it, honestly.”

Powell-Lee declined to say how much money he was potentially leaving on the table other than to say it was “a lot.”

By Wednesday, Powell-Lee had officially decided he wasn’t going to enter the portal. Virginia and Speros had already moved on to search for new options on defense. Piasecki and Bloom said Georgia Tech agreed to provide Powell-Lee with a relatively small increase in pay after learning about some of his other options — but nothing that compared to what other schools thought they might be willing to pay him.

“It just is what it is,” Bloom said. “That’s the business we’re in.”

Even though the transfer portal often makes it seem as if money trumps all other considerations, sometimes there are refreshing surprises. For Powell-Lee, at least, academics ultimately tipped the balance.

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Astros GM: Alvarez setback not as bad as feared

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Astros GM: Alvarez setback not as bad as feared

DENVER — Houston Astros slugger Yordan Alvarez‘s setback to his recovery from a fractured right hand is not as serious as first feared, general manager Dana Brown said Thursday.

Alvarez, who suffered the injury on May 2, was shut down after experiencing pain in his right hand. He had taken some swings at the team’s spring training complex in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday and when he arrived there Tuesday, the area was sore.

He was examined by a specialist, who determined inflammation was the issue and not a setback with the fracture.

“It had nothing to do with the fracture, or the fracture not being healed,” Brown said before Houston’s game at Colorado. “The fracture at this point is a nonfactor, which we’re very glad about. And so during the process of him being examined by the specialist, we saw the inflammation, and Yordan did receive two shots in that area.”

Alvarez first experienced issues with his hand in late April but stayed in the lineup. He was initially diagnosed with a muscle strain but a small fracture was discovered at the end of May.

Brown said there has not been an update on the timetable for Alvarez’s return but said with the latest update it “could be in the near future.”

“Yordan is going to be in a position where he’s going to let rest and let the shot take effect, and then as long as he’s starting to feel better, we’ll put a bat in his hand before we start hitting, but we’ll just let him feel the bat feels like,” Brown said. “And then we’ll get into some swings in the near future, but I felt like it was encouraging news. Now, with this injection into the area that was inflamed, we feel a lot better.”

Alvarez, who averaged 34 home runs over the previous four seasons, has just three in 29 games this year and is batting .210. He was the 2021 ALCS MVP for the Astros and finished third in the AL MVP voting for 2022.

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Sources: Guardians’ Ortiz faces gambling inquiry

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Sources: Guardians' Ortiz faces gambling inquiry

Cleveland Guardians right-hander Luis Ortiz is under investigation by Major League Baseball after a betting-integrity firm flagged a pair of pitches that had received unusual gambling activity, sources told ESPN on Thursday.

Sources said betting-integrity firm IC360 sent an alert in June to sportsbook operators regarding Ortiz, whom MLB has placed on “non-disciplinary paid leave” through July 17.

The alert, according to sources who reviewed it, referenced action on Ortiz’s first pitches in select innings to be a ball or a hit batsman in two games: June 15 against the Seattle Mariners and June 27 against the St. Louis Cardinals. In both the bottom of the second inning against the Mariners and the top of the third inning against the Cardinals, Ortiz threw a first-pitch slider that was well outside the strike zone.

The alert on Ortiz’s first pitches flagged bets in Ohio, New York and New Jersey. Betting on the result of first pitches is offered by some sportsbooks, with such wagers commonly referred to as microbets.

Ortiz’s paid leave, which ends at the conclusion of the All-Star break, was negotiated between the league and the MLB Players Association. If the investigation remains open, the leave could be extended.

Ortiz had been scheduled to start Thursday night’s game against the Chicago Cubs.

“The Guardians have been notified that Luis Ortiz has been placed on leave per an agreement with the Players Association due to an ongoing league investigation,” the team said in a statement. “The Guardians are not permitted to comment further at this time and will respect the league’s confidential investigative process.”

The investigation into Ortiz’s potential violation of the league’s gambling policy comes a little more than a year after MLB levied a lifetime ban against San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano for placing nearly 400 bets on baseball. Four other players received one-year suspensions for gambling on baseball while in the minor leagues. In February, MLB fired umpire Pat Hoberg — widely recognized as the best ball-strike arbiter in the game — for “sharing” a legal sports betting account with a friend who bet on baseball and later deleting messages key to the investigation.

A 26-year-old starting pitcher, Ortiz was acquired by Cleveland from the Pittsburgh Pirates over the winter as part of the three-team trade in which the Guardians sent second baseman Andres Gimenez to the Toronto Blue Jays. With a 4-9 record and 4.36 ERA, Ortiz has been a staple in a Guardians rotation whose 4.13 ERA ranks 18th in MLB.

Ortiz’s leave comes amid a slide for the Guardians, who have lost six consecutive games to drop to 40-44. While Cleveland remains in second place in the American League Central, it trails first-place Detroit by 12½ games.

Ortiz signed with the Pirates in 2018 at 19 years old, far later than the typical prospect, and didn’t reach full-season ball until 2021. He quickly shot through the Pittsburgh organization and debuted in 2022, eventually throwing 238⅓ innings and posting a 3.93 ERA in his three seasons with the Pirates.

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Nats slugger Wood commits to Home Run Derby

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Nats slugger Wood commits to Home Run Derby

Washington Nationals slugger James Wood will bring his massive power to the big stage, becoming the third player to commit to the July 14 Home Run Derby in Atlanta.

Wood, 22, has delivered 22 home runs in 86 games during his first full major league season. He was acquired by the Nationals in 2022 as part of the package of top prospects Washington received in the trade that sent Juan Soto to the San Diego Padres.

Wood announced the commitment on Instagram, with a video montage of himself, along with video clips of former Atlanta Braves star Hank Aaron hitting his record 714th home run in 1974. The video included the words, “Derby bound.”

Wood has 12 homers that have been hit harder than 110 mph. It’s the second most in the league behind Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani‘s 13. Wood also has four dingers that have been launched longer than 445 feet.

The Seattle MarinersCal Raleigh and the Braves’ Ronald Acuna Jr. also have committed to the event, with five more participants still to be named.

Raleigh, who would become the first catcher to win the event, has a major-league-best 33 home runs. Acuna has nine home runs in 36 games after returning from a torn left ACL that also limited him to 49 games last season.

Defending champion Teoscar Hernandez of the Los Angeles Dodgers already has said he will not defend his Home Run Derby crown.

Field Level Media and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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