kreed5120

Contest winner has been announced. https://x.com/ZipsFB/status/2092355978884764065

I saw Big Cat partnered with the Wisconsin collective and is offering 2 tickets to 25 winners (50 tickets total). To enter the drawing you have to donate $50 to Wisconsin's collective. An idea that was obviously built off of Akron's promotion. I'm sure these type of promotions are going to become very common in college athletics.

Well that would sure do it.

I'm a bit surprised by those odds. I haven't followed the offseason all that closely, but what I was hearing a month or so ago was that Miami and WMU were the favorites and Toledo was behind them. Wonder what has changed.

Zips must still be holding out hope. This was just posted a few minutes ago.

The announcement I believe should be made today. Anyone hear when or how it will be announced? Are they just going to be sharing it to social media or do they have an actual event planned?

I assume this is the successor to the Hustlebelt, which went out of business in the spring. If that's the case these guys are all part-time writers who do this more as a hobby or side gig. I'm not really trying to knock them as any publicity the MAC can get the better, but I wouldn't treat anything as deep level investigative journalism.

Georgia I think is a decent chunk more than we were getting ~15 years ago. The others might be only slightly higher. I feel there is a several reasons for this. One is there are just simply more FBS teams compared to 15 years ago, 18 to be exact. Secondly, more and more G5 schools are trying to schedule 2 or in some cases 3 P5 paycheck games per year. 15 years ago the standard was for a G5 to only schedule 1 body bag game per season. Lastly, P4 conferences have gone from 8 conference games to 9 meaning they have 1 less OOC game per year to schedule. All of this has led to supply exceeding demand which has given the P4 programs more bargaining power when it comes time to negotiate these deals with the G5. A program like Georgia can offer Akron $1.5 million and if we reject it by asking for $2 million they will just laugh, hang up the phone, and call Kent or whoever else instead.

Any idea when the full OOC schedule is expected? A decent number of programs have released theirs so far and when I come across them I quickly look to see if Akron is listed, but I haven't seen them.

I'm perfectly content with 2 P5 games a year. We desperately need the money in order of having any hope of staying competitive in the MAC. Also, if we can't go 5-3 in MAC we frankly don't deserve to go bowling. The payouts for these P5 seem decent and as @LZIp stated for the most part they're 2nd or bottom tier P5 programs. The type of opponents that an upset, while unlikely, is possible.

TBH I'm in support of his outrage. All these micro transactions in games you pay $70 for is ridiculous.

This would be my guess as well. I'm traveling today so I haven't listened to any podcasts or anything, but based off what I've seen online there is talk about Akron football. Maybe not to the level it was two weeks ago, but much more than what it would have been had they just announced some random winner yesterday.

I think what's getting missed by many is the referrals. Both had millions of viewers and both of their followers fit the demographic of someone who would be interested in this promotion. Someone like Big Cat might have bought 18 tickets, which is probably the most, but he might have had several hundred people that put him down as a referral. The drawing was always going to favor influencers because of the referral piece. They have more reach than Joe from Tallmadge.

I watched the press conference. Two influencers made it as a top 9 finalist (1 finalist declined participation). One a pretty household name in Big Cat from Barstool. The other was Bordeaux who is one of, if not the biggest, EA Sports College Football game influencer out there. I'm sure both had their odds helped by being listed as referrals. Edit: Something worth noting it wasn't mentioned exactly how many season tickets were sold, but it was said that about 50% of all season tickets sold this year were sold within the last two weeks. https://x.com/BarstoolBigCat/status/2090202037057126647

Calls are being made to the finalists. Any of you get get the call? https://x.com/ZipsFB/status/2090124791323799643

Maybe Akron can expand it's law school to add some specialities in NCAA and NIL litigation. It seems to be a growing segment /s

Louisville signed a G League player named London Johnson so I'm not going to pretend to know the rules these days. We're at our roster limit though so we can't sign anymore players anyways.

All I know is the real winners with all this litigation is attorneys and their billable hours.

It ended up being Sam Houston State.

I imagine they will play a lot of 3-guard line-ups. Considering their top 3 guards are all 6'2" and under and not great defenders, I think their success will depend on their 7 footer. They will need rim protection from him to make up for their defensive deficiencies elsewhere.

The max salary for Amani Lyles in the G-League this year would be $130K without a two-way deal. He could probably make around $1 million on a P5 roster, especially after his NCAA Tournament performance. He could be a starting PF on a lot of P5 teams or at least be good enough to be the first big off the bench. That said, Akron has no roster spots available so I don't expect him to return to Akron regardless.

Fairly big pickup for them. They should have one of the best backcourts in the MAC next year and Simmons to accompany them. Definitely a contender for one of those top 4 MAC seeds.

It certainly increases the odds one of the celebrity online personalities makes it to be a finalist. Particularly if they bought a number of season tickets. In that case I'm sure they would spend several segments talking about it. Edit: Big Cat is evidently up to 18 tickets purchased. Eric Sollenberger, his co-host, said on another Barstool podcast he himself bought 10. If you add up all the Barstool employees they probably have 100+ tickets. There is a realistic chance of one of them making it to be a top 10 finalist.

The winner will be announced on August 25. There are more details in the article below. https://gozips.com/news/2026/8/15/football-top-10-finalists-for-oc-of-the-game-to-be-revealed-at-meet-the-zips-event-wednesday I wouldn't be surprised if part of this is so they can make the finalists aware ahead of time that way they're available to be interviewed at the time of announcement. I know I personally don't answer calls from unknown numbers due to countless spam. If they want that NFL draft type call it kind of only works if the recipient is expecting the call. Otherwise they might not answer and it creates an awkward moment.

Not mentioned in the article, but the field naming rights are also set to expire. Summa Health is paying $250K/yr so in total between Infocision and Summa the naming rights were $750K/yr.