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Dan Murphy
The University of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit Friday claiming Miami’s football team broke the law by tampering with a Badgers player, a first-of-its-kind legal attempt to enforce the terms of a financial contract between a football player and his school.
The lawsuit refers to the athlete in question as “Student Athlete A,” but details from the complaint line up with the offseason transfer of freshman defensive back Xavier Lucas. Lucas left Wisconsin and enrolled at Miami in January after saying the Badgers staff refused to enter his name in the transfer portal last December.
In the complaint filed Friday, Wisconsin claims that a Miami staff member and a prominent alumnus met with Lucas and his family at a relative’s home in Florida and offered him money to transfer shortly after Lucas signed a two-year contract last December. The lawsuit states that Miami committed tortious interference by knowingly compelling a player to break the terms of his deal with the Badgers.
“While we reluctantly bring this case, we stand by our position that respecting and enforcing contractual obligations is essential to maintaining a level playing field,” the school said in a statement provided to ESPN on Friday.
According to the complaint, Wisconsin decided to file suit in hopes that “during this watershed time for college athletics, this case will advance the overall integrity of the game by holding programs legally accountable when they wrongfully interfere with contractual commitments.”
Representatives from the University of Miami did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The pending case promises to be an interesting test of whether schools can use name, image and likeness (NIL) deals to keep athletes from transferring even though the players aren’t technically employees. Starting July 1, schools will begin paying their athletes directly via NIL deals.
The contracts between Wisconsin and their athletes give the school the nonexclusive rights to use a player’s NIL in promotions. Part of the deal, according to the lawsuit, prohibits an athlete from making any commitments to enroll or play sports at other schools. The lawsuit says Wisconsin had a reasonable expectation that Lucas would “continue to participate as a member of its football program” until the deal ended.
However, according to several contracts between Big Ten schools and their players that ESPN has previously reviewed, these deals explicitly state that athletes are not being paid to play football for the university. Since the school is technically paying only to use the player’s NIL rights, it’s not clear if a judge will consider it fair to enforce a part of the contract that dictates where the player attends school.
The Big Ten said in a statement Friday that it supports Wisconsin’s decision to file the lawsuit and that Miami’s alleged actions “are irreconcilable with a sustainable college sports framework.”
Darren Heitner, a Florida-based attorney who represents Xavier Lucas, told ESPN that Wisconsin did not file any legal claims against Lucas and declined to comment further.
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Eli Lederman
Four-star quarterback Bowe Bentley, No. 261 in the 2026 ESPN 300, announced his commitment to Oklahoma over LSU on Friday, landing with the Sooners less than 24 hours after longtime quarterback pledge Jaden O’Neal pulled his commitment from the program Thursday night.
Bentley, a 6-foot-1, 205-pound prospect from Celina, Texas, is ESPN’s No. 6 dual-threat passer in 2026. His recruitment skyrocketed earlier this year after Bentley broke out for 4,263 all-purpose yards and 63 total touchdowns last fall while leading Celina High School to a Class 4A Texas state title in his junior season. Bentley, who took official visits to Oklahoma and LSU earlier this month, told ESPN this week that the offensive vision of first-year Sooners offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle was among his primary draws to the program.
“Going into depth on the offense with Arbuckle was huge,” Bentley said. “It’s not just what he’s done this spring, but what Coach Arbuckle has done at Washington State and Western Kentucky. I got a strong understanding of where he got this offense from and how he approaches calling it.”
For Oklahoma, Bentley’s commitment marks the close of a drawn out recruiting process that began after the Sooners shifted their 2026 quarterback plan after Arbuckle arrived from Washington State in December in the wake of the Sooners’ disastrous SEC debut last fall.
O’Neal, ESPN’s No. 7 pocket passer, had spent nearly 12 months as the top prospect in the program’s incoming class prior to his decommitment. A frequent visitor on campus over the past year, he relocated from Southern California to Oklahoma’s Mustang High School this spring, where O’Neal will play his senior season roughly 30 miles north of the Sooners’ team facility.
But multiple sources tell ESPN that the relationship between O’Neal and Oklahoma became strained in the early months of 2025 after the Sooners shifted their focus to landing a 2026 quarterback with a similar skill set to John Mateer, the dual-threat transfer who followed Arbuckle to Oklahoma after exploding for 44 touchdowns last fall.
Bentley — who threw for 3,330 yards and rushed for another 933 yards in 2024 — fits that mold, and the Sooners made the fast-rising prospect a top priority this spring before ultimately landing his pledge Friday.
Bentley joins four-star wide receiver Daniel Odom (No. 242 overall) as one of two ESPN 300 prospects in the 2026 class. Behind Mateer, who will be eligible for the NFL draft after the 2025 season, Oklahoma’s current quarterback depth includes second-year passer Michael Hawkins Jr. and three-star 2025 signee Jett Niu.
A new report from global energy think tank Ember says batteries have officially hit the price point that lets solar power deliver affordable electricity almost every hour of the year in the sunniest parts of the world.
The study looked at hourly solar data from 12 cities and found that in sun-soaked places like Las Vegas, you could pair 6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels with 17 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries and get a steady 1 GW of power nearly 24/7. The cost? Just $104 per megawatt-hour (MWh) based on average global prices for solar and batteries in 2024. That’s a 22% drop in a year and cheaper than new coal ($118/MWh) and nuclear ($182/MWh) in many regions.
Ember calls it “24/365 solar generation,” and it’s not just a theoretical model. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year. Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can reach 80–95% of the way there using that same solar-plus-storage setup with some cloud cover. And even cloudier cities like Birmingham in the UK can cover about 62% of hours annually.
“This is a turning point in the clean energy transition,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember. “Around-the-clock solar is no longer a distant dream; it’s an economic reality of the world. It unlocks game-changing opportunities for energy-hungry industries like data centres and manufacturing.”
This is an enormous opportunity for sunny regions in Africa and Latin America. Manufacturers and data centers could also tap into solar-plus-storage and skip long waits (and big bills) for new grid connections.
It’s not a silver bullet for grid-wide reliability, but it lets solar carry much more of the load, especially where sunshine is abundant. Batteries also help avoid costly grid expansions by allowing up to five times more solar to plug into existing connections.
In 2024 alone, global battery prices dropped 40%, which helped drive down solar-plus-storage costs by 22%. Record-low tenders from countries like Saudi Arabia point to even cheaper options coming soon.
Real-world projects are already online: The UAE built the world’s first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar facility. Arizona is already home to solar-powered data centers. And as battery tech keeps improving, round-the-clock solar could become the backbone of clean energy systems in the world’s sunniest places.
Read more: This solar canopy cools wastewater and powers a city utility
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