Friday Night Notes: An NIL ode to 2021, Roll Tide(?), Lewis gives time to Prime, and Chip is back!
USA TODAY High School Sports' Friday Night Notes is a high school recruiting recap that looks at the latest news from around the country for the Class of 2025 to '26 and beyond.
Time flies when you’re in the NIL Era.
MMQB’s Albert Breer brought up an interesting fact while chatting on the “Rich Eisen Show,” noting that the Class of 2021 will go down in history as the first graduating group to enter colleges with the NIL guidelines set.
Caleb Williams and Marvin Harrison Jr. were two of the notable recruits Breer had mentioned, with Drake Maye also in that conversation.
The term that stood out to me? These are “businessmen.”
Agree?
It’s still hard to look at an 18-year-old athlete as nothing more than a teenager-regardless if he’s wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase-but alas, here we are, now looking at the Class of 2025, 2026 and the next generation after that in the same way some might view the chips being stacked on the roulette table as the pill pangs and pings about.
Good trend or bad progression is subjective at this point, which will only continue to draw lines in the sand from the Charles Barkleys and Nick Sabans of the collegiate cosmos.
Until the next chip falls, let’s empty out the recruiting notebook.