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Trying to make sense of NIL and the transfer portal, like it or not

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It is the question I get asked most no matter where I go: at a civic club, the barber shop, a tavern, the golf course, the grocery store or just about anywhere else.

Goes like this: So, how do you really feel about name, image and likeness (NIL) and the transfer portal?

Rick Cleveland

Here’s the truth: I hate the combination of the two. I despise what the two, together, have done to college sports, which is rip away the foundation of what the college sports experience was supposed to be about, both for participants and for spectators. Simply put, for me, it is not as much fun as it once was.

I hasten to add, that is not because some athletes are making hundreds of thousands of dollars or that some are becoming rich before they even know what to do with the riches. Ever since college sports became a TV-fueled multi-billion dollar industry, I have believed the athletes should share in the spoils.

Just not this way, with the right to play musical schools on an annual basis depending on who offers the most money. It’s free agency without guidelines and without a salary cap – and really, without any regard for education. The richest schools will get the best players, and the poor will get the hell beat out of them.

I was talking the other day with a wealthy fan of one of our Mississippi universities. He has done really well financially and has always supported his school’s teams and facilities, donating significantly. But he has drawn a line where the NIL is concerned. This is what he told me: “I am not about to donate tens of thousands of dollars to a collective so our star running back can go out and buy himself a Porsche and then drive it off next year to Tuscaloosa or Baton Rouge for a better deal.”

But it’s happening everywhere. In 2019, 6.5% of all Division I football players had transferred at least once. This past season, more than 20% had. More than 2,100 Division I players have entered the portal this year. That figure will continue to rise. To say it doesn’t always work out for those who enter the portal is an understatement. In 2022, of all the college basketball players who entered the portal, nearly 20% wound up without a college scholarship anywhere.

Sports participation teaches many life lessons, one of which is that perseverance and hard work in the face of disappointment will pay off in the end. The portal teaches the opposite. Used to be that if you were a second teamer and weren’t getting on the field or court as much as you desired, you buckled down and worked harder. Now? “Screw this,” they tell the coach, “I’m going in the portal.”

College coaching has changed forever. Tough love is out. Coaching on eggshells is in.

“There’s no holding players accountable,” a retired college basketball coach told me. “Used to, you could use the bench as a motivator. Now, they’ll just leave.”

Here, the biggest news in this football portal season has been Ole Miss running star Quinshon Judkins moving from on to Ohio State after two seasons in Oxford.

Regular readers of this column know how I feel about Judkins’ football abilities and performance. His blend of vision, power, balance, quickness, toughness and speed remind me of my favorite football player ever, Walter Payton. The great linebacker D.D. Lewis once told me Payton was the most difficult to tackle he ever faced. “It hurt to tackle Payton,” D.D. said. “It was like trying to tackle a 215-pound bowling ball.”

Judkins runs like that. When he gets tackled, it hurts the other guy worse than him.

Now, he’s a Buckeye after providing 34 touchdowns and more than 3,000 yards from scrimmage in two seasons at Ole Miss. All indications are that Judkins shopped his availability around the country and that, in the end, he will make less money at Ohio State than he was making at Ole Miss.

Then there’s the case of Will Rogers, the ex-Brandon and Mississippi State quarterback, who had planned to transfer to Washington, this past season’s No. 2 team in the country. But Kalen DeBoer, the Washington coach, has taken the Alabama job and Rogers is back in the transfer portal.

Fans have had to adjust, too. In 2020, Malik Heath caught the only two Mississippi State touchdowns in a 31-14 loss to Ole Miss. A year later, Heath made just one catch in another Egg Bowl loss to Ole Miss. In 2022, Heath entered the portal and switched sides. He played for Ole Miss, making five catches for 80 yards in the Egg Bowl. State got the last laugh, winning 24-22. Heath, 0-3 in Egg Bowls, now plays for the Green Bay Packers.

Such a switch of allegiances would have been unthinkable in the old days. Not now.

It will take some time to adjust. Not sure I ever will.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-27 07:00:00

April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy in 1907 from the National Portrait Gallery.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” 

He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” 

He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914. 

In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.” 

In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.” 

In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness. 

Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget

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mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-04-27 06:00:00

On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.

Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.

Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.

Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.

The fight centers around multiple factors, including:

  • Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
  • Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
  • Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
  • Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.

It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.

But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.

It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.

An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.

According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.

The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.

As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.

But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.

In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-26 07:00:00

April 26, 1964

Aaron Henry testifies before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention. 

The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.” 

In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity. 

In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election. 

The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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