Oregon State has named Alabama co-offensive coordinator JaMarcus Shephard as the school’s next head coach, the school announced Friday.

The deal is for five years, per ESPN sources.

Shephard was also Alabama’s assistant head coach and wide receivers coach.

“I’m honored to lead the Oregon State University football program and to join a community that cares so deeply about its student-athletes,” Shephard said in a statement. “We will build a culture rooted in toughness, integrity, and relentless effort, and I’m excited to get to work with our players, staff, and supporters to write the next great chapter of Beaver football.”

Shephard brings significant experience in both the Pacific Northwest and in the Pac-12, as he has worked at both Washington State (2016) and was on Kalen DeBoer’s Washington staff (2022-23) that went to the national title game after the 2023 season.

Shephard replaces Trent Bray, who was fired with a 5-14 record in his second season this October. Oregon State is 2-9 this season, and the athletic department is dealing with the seismic financial shift that came with the traditional Pac-12 fracturing apart.

Alabama has one of the country’s top wide receiving duos in Germie Bernard and Ryan Williams. That group for Shephard comes in the wake of Shephard coaching the best trio of wide receivers in college football in 2023 at Washington: Rome Odunze, Ja’Lynn Polk and Jalen McMillan.

At Purdue, Shephard coached star receivers Rondale Moore, a first-team All-American, and David Bell, who earned first-team All Big Ten honors. At Purdue, he worked as the passing game coordinator and wide receivers coach.

At Washington State in 2016, Shephard coached future NFL receiver River Cracraft. Throughout the years, Shephard has developed a reputation as an elite connector, with an ability to identify and develop talent.

Shephard faces a tough challenge amid the financial uncertainty and roster churn that has come with Oregon State’s new reality outside of a major conference.

STARKVILLE, Miss. — Florida has shifted focus from Lane Kiffin in the school’s coaching search, as the school has sensed through irregular communication that he’s interested in other options, sources told ESPN on Friday.

Florida, which is searching for former coach Billy Napier’s successor, has interviewed roughly a dozen candidates and is optimistic about the process.

Louisville‘s Jeff Brohm, Tulane‘s Jon Sumrall and Washington‘s Jeff Fisch are believed to be among the candidates the Gators are still considering.

Florida targeted Kiffin early in the search and offered him a deal to put him among the highest paid coaches in college football, which included significant incentives.

Ole Miss officials told ESPN ahead of Saturday’s Egg Bowl against Mississippi State in Starkville that Kiffin is expected to provide them with a decision about his future on Friday night or Saturday. He’s also considering a lucrative contract offer from SEC rival LSU.

LSU also wants an answer from Kiffin, as the coaching carousel has intensified the Tigers’ search, as well as a potential one at Ole Miss if Kiffin leaves.

Missouri’s Eli Drinkwitz and Vanderbilt‘s Clark Lea, two of the top candidates believed to be under consideration at either Florida or LSU, signed six-year contract extensions with their respective schools in the past 24 hours.

If the No. 7 Rebels defeat the Bulldogs on Saturday, they’ll finish 11-1 and are expected to reach the College Football Playoff for the first time. They would possibly host a first-round game at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Mississippi, on Dec. 19 or 20.

If Kiffin decides to leave for LSU, the Rebels have an interim plan in place. Sources previously told ESPN that former New York Giants interim coach Joe Judge would likely serve as interim head coach.

Sources told ESPN that all options are still on the table if Kiffin decides to replace Brian Kelly as LSU’s coach-even potentially coaching the Rebels in the CFP. But sources said Kiffin sticking around after agreeing to coach at an SEC rival wasn’t an ideal scenario.

Kiffin, 50, has guided the Rebels to a 54-19 record in his six seasons — only Alabama (66-12) and Georgia (70-8) have more wins in the SEC since the start of the 2020 season. In fact, the Rebels have the eighth-most wins among power-conference teams during that stretch.

While most Americans spent the Thanksgiving holiday eating, visiting with family and tryptophan napping, NASCAR, Michael Jordan and his racing team, and one other racing team were huddled in separate boardrooms and video chats, preparing their plans of attack and defense for Monday. That’s when the two teams join together in litigation and the series will begin a long-anticipated court showdown that will at least alter the business model of stock car racing and at most tear the Cup Series garage to pieces.

Here’s what you need to know about this high-octane legal battle as it takes the green flag in an Uptown Charlotte courtroom.

Who are the combatants?

A pair of race teams — 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports — filed an antitrust lawsuit in October 2024, claiming that NASCAR employs monopoly powers to restrict race team revenues and independence.

Team 23XI is five years old, fielding Toyotas driven by Bubba Wallace, Tyler Reddick and Riley Herbst. Wallace and Reddick have won a combined nine Cup Series races. Herbst made his full-time debut in 2025. The team is co-owned by Denny Hamlin, a future NASCAR Hall of Famer by any measure, who still drives full-time for Joe Gibbs Racing, as well as Jordan — yes, the former NBA megastar — and his longtime business partner Curtis Polk.

“I did it for the smaller teams as well. It’s not just me,” Jordan said last year after the suit was filed. “I think everybody should have an opportunity to be successful in any business. My voice is saying that it hasn’t been happening.”

Front Row Motorsports is owned by fast-food restaurant magnate Bob Jenkins and has fielded cars in the Cup Series since 2005. The longtime midpack organization has won four Cup races over two decades, most notably the 2021 Daytona 500 with driver Michael McDowell and currently fields a trio of Fords, driven by Noah Gragson, Todd Gilliland and Zane Smith. (No, not the former Atlanta Braves pitcher Zane Smith.)

NASCAR was founded in 1948 by a group of stock car racers assembled and steered by Daytona Beach businessman Bill France. France served as chairman of NASCAR until 1972, when he handed the wheel over to his eldest son, Bill Jr., who led the organization until he was succeeded by his son Brian in 2003. Today, NASCAR is still owned by the France family, led by Bill Sr.’s younger son, Jim, and Bill Jr.’s daughter, Lesa France Kennedy, as well as commissioner Steve Phelps and president Steve O’Donnell.

What’s the lawsuit about?

23XI and Front Row believe that the current way of doing stock car business is preventing teams from reaching their full potential.

The teams’ language in the suit says that in order for a “premier stock car racing series” — a pinnacle for regional Late Model and dirt-track drivers to aspire to — to be truly premier, then it must have premier stock car racing teams capable of fielding a premier stock car racing product. NASCAR has responded by pointing to the other “major league” sports, citing that MLB, NFL, NHL and NBA may operate the highest level of their sport, but there are other options — like the UFL or the American Speed Association — if not as lucrative.

23XI and Front Row believe that NASCAR’s one-size-fits-all Next Gen car, rolled out in 2022 as a cost-slashing effort, has stifled creativity and performance as it requires teams to purchase the parts to build those cars from NASCAR-approved suppliers. The series cites recently disclosed financial statements provided by teams, with some of those teams saying that the new car has cut their capital costs by as much as 40%.

The two teams in this legal battle also claim that NASCAR’s ownership of the majority of the racetracks on the schedule — it owns 17, including 11 on the 2025 Cup calendar — and its contract agreements with tracks it does not own, requiring those facilities to seek NASCAR’s approval before hosting other motorsport series, also limits growth for those tracks and potential expansion into other markets. In addition, they say that NASCAR’s control over race teams’ business as well as what they believe is the entirety of American motorsports (NASCAR also owns the ARCA stock car series and IMSA endurance championship) doesn’t allow teams to go stock car racing anywhere else should they want to do so, even if they were to try to start their own rival racing series.

The two teams believe this is all a violation of antitrust law.

But the reality is that all of the above is just the appetizer. The real fight is rooted in the structure of NASCAR’s charter system, where 23XI and Front Row believe the sanctioning body is being unfair when it comes to revenue distribution among its race teams and limiting value potential.

What is the charter system?

Although not a true apples-to-apples comparison, team charters are as close as NASCAR has ever come to the “stick-and-ball” sports business model of franchising.

In 2014, NASCAR team owners, newly represented by a coalition titled the Race Team Alliance (RTA), approached the sanctioning body with a list of concerns, all aimed at creating more value in the teams they owned, including guaranteed starting spots and money for full-time committed teams, cost cutting when it came to car construction and some sort of “medallion” status that would help create true long-term value in what they owned. That led to the 2016 introduction of charters.

NASCAR has always been a high-risk world of independent contracting. Whatever a team owner was willing to invest in cars and personnel, the payoff was winning races and, in theory, growing sponsorship revenue. But even the most successful racers in NASCAR history found that whenever their time at the racetrack was done, whatever they owned was worth pennies on the dollar. When sponsorship supply cratered amid the Great Recession of 2008, NASCAR garages struggled to bring in new investors and new teams.

So in 2016, NASCAR distributed 36 charters that guaranteed a starting spot in and a share of prize money from every 40-car Cup Series event, with a limit of four charters per race team. Those teams can sell or lease those charters to other interested parties, whether it be a new team starting from scratch or an existing team seeking to expand. 23XI began racing via a charter purchased from now-defunct Germain Racing in 2021. Front Row was among the 19 teams that received a charter in 2016 and have since been one of the most active teams in the market, having bought three, sold two and leased three in the past decade.

NASCAR points toward the rising cost of charters as proof that the model is working. In 2018, Spire Motorsports purchased a charter from departing Furniture Row Racing for $6 million. When they purchased another in 2023, it cost them $40 million.

NASCAR also is quick to point out that the charter system was created at the request of the teams, who first approached the sanctioning body with the idea.

What was the breaking point for 23XI and Front Row?

Charters are not permanent but are rather renewed from contract to contract with NASCAR. Polk, who was a partner in Jordan’s ownership of the Charlotte Hornets, has been very open about his displeasure with that fact. NASCAR contends that charters were never intended to be franchise agreements, but rather a contract agreement, and it requires flexibility within those contracts to do the larger business of the sport. The sanctioning body has reiterated that its ability to support teams financially is directly tied to the length of its media rights deals. Simply put, that’s where the money comes from.

When the initial 2016 charter agreement with team owners was nearing its end at the close of the 2024 season, NASCAR and a team of RTA representatives (including Polk) spent two years negotiating an extension that began in 2025 and will run through the 2031 season. The biggest snag in those talks was how to divide up the cash from NASCAR’s new seven-year, $7.7 billion TV deal, signed in November 2023. NASCAR contended that it is already being generous, at 39% to teams, 51% to racetracks and 10% to NASCAR itself. However, teams did eventually receive a 49% share to overtake the tracks as the largest chunk of the TV pie. NASCAR also added an additional $50 million payment to the teams.

But teams were unable to secure what they called “evergreen” charters that would automatically renew every seven years at the owner’s discretion.

On Sept. 6, 2024, teams received the final NASCAR proposal and were told they had until midnight to sign it. 23XI and Front Row refused, still questioning the sizes of the revenue distribution payouts as well as the failure to agree on permanent charters. Multiple team executives outside of 23XI and Front Row have told ESPN that Polk’s promise to them has been to deliver the permanent charter agreements they had failed to negotiate as a group.

Pretrial documents unsealed in mid-November provided unprecedented insight into the finances of NASCAR and its teams. Chartered teams receive a base of around $185,000 per event. The average team earns around $330,000 per race and top teams make just shy of $500,000. The total payout to teams in 2025 was $431 million, up from $333 million in 2024.

Per the 2020-2024 financials provided by a dozen NASCAR teams (23XI and Front Row were not included considering they are on the other side of the courtroom), revenue per car ranged from $43 million down to $8.2 million. However, only three teams in 2024 said they made money, and as a whole owners lost $2.2 million per car on average. NASCAR points to the improvement that those margins have made since the pre-charter era and what they calculate at more than $1.5 billion in equity, based on an estimated $45 million valuation per charter.

On Monday, a new batch of documents were released, including a summation of 23XI’s finances through 2024. From 2021 to ’24, the team saw revenue increase from $27.8 million to $62.2 million, including an increase in NASCAR payments from $6.6 million to $21.1 million. But when it comes to net income, the team peaked at $3.5 million in 2023 and lost $2.1 million in ’24. The teams’ largest source of revenue is sponsorship, at $39.6 million in 2024.

Front Row, going back to the start of the charter system, saw revenues rise from $12.8 million in 2016 to $23.6 in 2024, operating at a loss every year, from $6 million down in ’16 to $9.9 million in ’24.

As the very old racing saying goes: You want to know how to make a small fortune in racing? Start with a big one.

In late October, NASCAR’s financial statements from 2015 to ’24 were made public. In 2024, the sanctioning body’s net income was $103 million. During his State of the Sport address ahead of the season finale race at Phoenix, Phelps explained: “NASCAR’s balance sheet has more than $1.2 billion in invested capital, meaning the vast majority of what we make is invested back into the sport, our race teams and our people.”

Who are the lawyers?

The lead attorney for 23XI and Front Row is Jeffrey Kessler, a name that college sports fans will recognize from his representation of athletes as they fought for revenue vs. the NCAA and their schools. NFL fans know him as the lawyer who repped Tom Brady in the quarterback’s “Deflategate” controversy. Up front for NASCAR is litigator Chris Yates, who has represented everyone from the ACC and UFC to the Hollywood Foreign Press.

These two know each other very well, essentially the Richard Petty vs. David Pearson of sports antitrust legal battles. Kessler has long been the chosen legal counsel of those seeking to break up the powers of sports leagues, and Yates has emerged as the preferred attorney to oppose him.

Over the years, their combined impact on the business of sports and antitrust law in general has been immense. They most recently faced off earlier this year, as Yates helped MLS and the U.S. Soccer Federation prevail in a civil antitrust case filed by the defunct North American Soccer League, which accused the USSF of illegally overstepping its powers to control American professional soccer.

How long will this go on?

The initial trial is slated for 21 days, but whatever the outcome, appeals will be inevitable. So buckle up for more in 2026 and beyond.

How contentious will this become?

Oh, it already is. The Kessler vs. Yates battle alone was going to guarantee that, but there is no community in all of professional sports like the NASCAR garage, a relatively small group of people who travel together every weekend from Valentine’s until nearly Thanksgiving, and when they aren’t on the road, all live within the same Charlotte, North Carolina, metro area.

Hamlin is the perfect representation of it all, living in a neighborhood surrounded by NASCAR colleagues as he drives for one team, owns another and also hosts a wildly popular podcast discussing the sport. Even while he has been in the process of suing the sport, he has also been a member of NASCAR’s exploratory panel for potential changes to its postseason championship format, and less than a month ago he came within two laps of winning the Cup Series title in the season finale.

Among the documents already made public are text message transcripts from the phones of Phelps and O’Donnell that have proved to be embarrassing, including exchanges about the now-shuttered SRX summer short-track series that involved many NASCAR drivers, including Hamlin, and a rather raw description of six-time Cup champion team owner Richard Childress from Phelps.

The texts will not be used in court, but rather were a part of potential exhibits that were unsealed after their removal from trial. So while the jury will not see them, they have certainly done plenty of damage when it comes to the court of public opinion and the close-quarters world of the NASCAR paddock.

“Are there things that Steve [O’Donnell] and I said that we would like not to have made public? Yes,” Phelps confessed in October. “I’m sure there are things that 23XI and Front Row also feel that way. What I do know is this is an amazing sport. We are a very resilient sport. We have asked our employees, all of them, to put their head down and grow this sport. That’s what we’ve done.”

What is the endgame for each side?

The 23XI/Front Row lawsuit doesn’t list much in terms of specifics, other than damages, a restoration of what they see as fair competition, and fundamentally, more transparency from NASCAR. Among the testiest topics throughout the last year of suits, countersuits, hearings and depositions has been the idea of NASCAR and its race teams being forced to open their financial ledgers and even the contents of text messages — as demonstrated by those that have already been revealed. For a garage full of privately owned corporations, that’s uncomfortable.

Charters vs. cash, it’s an either/or scenario: If 23XI and Front Row win and do indeed seek monetary damages, the amount will be determined by a jury and they will not be awarded charters. If they instead choose to pursue charters as their reward, it would supersede damages.

The longer task of determining how to break up a NASCAR monopoly would be determined by the judge, who will likely preside over another round of negotiations between the sanctioning body and owners to sort that out, focusing on a resorting of revenue and likely a more formal representation for owners in the NASCAR boardroom. For NASCAR, the goal is protecting the current model of business, but also using this unasked-for platform to prove that their leadership works. They will argue that it has since 1949, with an approach that has evolved at a much faster pace during the post-2016 charter era, and thus there is no reason not to keep that charter era going.

If NASCAR wins, it is likely that 23XI Racing would cease to exist, refusing to surrender in the fight for permanent charters. Even if 23XI wins but does so without the reward of charters, it would also likely no longer compete.

So no matter the outcome of this trial, a stock car sea change is inevitable. Either NASCAR loses an entire team, co-owned by arguably the biggest star in the history of sports, or its nearly 80-year-old business structure is thrown in the shredder. Or perhaps even both.

“The charter system is a critical part of the sport, something we created with and for the teams,” Phelps said one month ago. “We will continue to defend and preserve it, but make no mistake, the lawsuit puts this at risk.”

“I don’t know. I think both sides probably feel strong about their case,” Hamlin said at Martinsville Speedway in late October, having just spent a week amid his prep for a near-miss Cup Series championship in failed court-ordered negotiations hoping to avoid the trial that is about to begin. “I think one of us is on a suicide mission.”