Good morning. Today, my colleague Kevin Draper explains a major change in college football. We're also covering Israel, TikTok and Trump. —David Leonhardt
Managing the chaos
Notre Dame and Ohio State will meet tomorrow in the college football national championship game. After the final whistle, the authors of the victory will be paraded across your television. You will hear from the head coach, the quarterback, maybe the athletic director. Who you probably won't hear from, though, is the person who built the winning team: the general manager. General managers, once purely the domain of professional sports, are taking over college football. In today's newsletter, I'll explain why. Enter the G.M.Managing a roster of over 100 players, and a staff of dozens, was always a difficult job for a coach. Now it is impossible. That's because the sport has changed drastically in the past few years. Players can be paid — for some, more than they would get in the N.F.L. — without sacrificing eligibility. And they can transfer to different schools between each season. "The job is too big for a college coach," said Andrew Luck, the former Stanford quarterback who recently returned to his alma mater as its football general manager. "The role has changed. The system has changed so much and continues to change." Luck, like most general managers, is largely responsible for securing money and signing players, many of whom announce they wish to change schools by entering the sport's so-called transfer portal. The portal was most recently open from Dec. 9 to 28. Not only was that over the holidays, but it was also when dozens of teams were competing in bowl games. Without a general manager, a coach would have to prepare for a big game while also evaluating thousands of potential players to build next year's roster.
"The transfer portal was intense," said Luck, a college football optimist who stayed at Stanford to finish his degree in 2011, even when he was projected to be the first pick in the N.F.L. draft. "If I had any romantic notion of the thing, the business side, it was lost there." On the fieldThe influence of general managers will be apparent tomorrow night: Both teams' starting quarterbacks are transfers. Notre Dame will be led by Riley Leonard, who spent the past three seasons at Duke, and Ohio State will be led by Will Howard, who spent four seasons at Kansas State. Of course, not all players are transfers. A majority of players on both rosters were recruited straight from high school, as they have always been. One big difference for those players, however, is they were paid to be there. Ryan Day, Ohio State's coach, said in 2022 that it would cost $13 million to keep his team together. Four months ago, Ohio State's athletic director revised that figure upward and said $20 million was being spent on the team's roster. Looking to the futureNotre Dame and Ohio State are both powerhouses. But the College Football Playoff — the 12-team tournament that led to the championship game — also included relative upstarts like Boise State, Arizona State and Southern Methodist University. Will the changes to college football further entrench the dominance of the blue bloods, the few programs that can raise and spend $20 million or more on a roster? Or will they allow less prestigious teams to strategically spend the dollars they do have to poach players that otherwise might have gone to the big teams? Luck, whose Stanford Cardinal program hasn't had a winning record for seven seasons, hopes it is the latter. "I still want to believe there is space for a broad college football landscape," he said, "that if you hit enough of the right notes, every program has a chance to succeed and win championships." For more: Read my story about how general managers have made the college game more appealing for some coaches, including Bill Belichick, the new head coach for the University of North Carolina.
Gaza Cease-Fire
TikTok
Trump Transition
Other Big Stories
Should Trump enforce the TikTok law? Yes. If Trump doesn't enforce the law, he'll show weakness in national security. "His duty as President is to enforce the TikTok law, not ignore it in the hope of cutting a deal with China's dictator," The Wall Street Journal's editorial board writes. No. TikTok is too important to our culture and politics. "A ban would dismantle a one-of-a-kind informational and cultural ecosystem, silencing millions in the process," Senator Ed Markey writes for The Boston Globe.
"Hamilton" premiered 10 years ago, during an era of liberal optimism. Watching it now feels like a trip to a distant past, Ezekiel Kweku writes. Pico Iyer lost his home to a wildfire in 1990. It taught him to put less stock in material things, he writes. Here are columns by Maureen Dowd on Trump's return to Washington and Nicholas Kristof on reasons to feel optimistic. Receive free access to handpicked articles via text message. Now you can get Times journalism sent right to your phone. Each article will be accessible for 30 days.
Under the sea: A conversation with the longtime leader of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, who loves giant kelp and the mola mola. The Ethicist: "Can I go to church when I don't believe?" Wedding trends: Some couples are sharing their vows in private. Most clicked: The most popular link in The Morning this week covered 35 wellness tips that health experts swear by. Vows: She was immediately smitten. He took a while to notice. Lives Lived: André Soltner was a chef whose reverence for classic French cooking and the homey specialties of his native Alsace helped place New York's Lutèce among the most celebrated restaurants in the U.S. He died at 92.
"The Residence," by Kate Andersen Brower: On the eve of the inauguration of the 47th president of the United States, why not take a breezy spin through the 132-room, 55,000 square foot building the first family calls home? Brower, who covered the Obama administration for Bloomberg News, takes readers behind the scenes with butlers, chefs, ushers, engineers, electricians, carpenters and florists as guides. One might wonder how, exactly, White House staff manage to switch out the furniture in a mere six hours on the first day of a new administration. They're fueled by a combination of sweat, stress and teamwork, according to Brower, whose sources (gently) spill the tea on past residents and their furry friends. Fans of "The Residence" (2015) can look forward to the Netflix adaptation — a mystery drama starring Uzo Aduba and Giancarlo Esposito — this March. More on books
This week's subject for The Interview is the political blogger and computer engineer Curtis Yarvin. His aggressively antidemocratic ideas have found a receptive audience among powerful conservatives, including Vice President-elect JD Vance. So why is democracy so bad? It's not even that democracy is bad; it's just that it's very weak. And the fact that it's very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. The thing that you have not isolated is why having a strongman would be better for people's lives. Can you answer that? Yes. I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people's lives. When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You're looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. Why do you have such faith in the ability of C.E.O.s? Most start-ups fail. We can all point to C.E.O.s who have been ineffective. It seems like such a simplistic way of thinking. It's not a simplistic way of thinking, and having worked inside the salt mines where C.E.O.s do their C.E.O.ing, and having been a C.E.O. myself, I think I have a better sense of it than most people. If you took any of the Fortune 500 C.E.O.s, just pick one at random and put him or her in charge of Washington. I think you'd get something much, much better than what's there. It doesn't have to be Elon Musk. Read more of the interview here.
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Upgrade work lunches. Improve your sex life with an intimacy retreat. Transform a space with peel-and-stick wallpaper. Use a kitchen product to keep toilets stain free.
In this week's Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein lavishes praise on an affordable dinner warrior: chicken. She suggests making a 15-minute ginger-lime chicken and a sheet-pan fish tikka with spinach.
Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangram was headlamp. Can you put eight historical events — including the revolt of Spartacus, the development of zero, and the creation of Jazzercise — in chronological order? Take this week's Flashback quiz. And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.
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2025/01/19
The Morning: A change in college football
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