After a thrilling and exciting football season, the Michigan Wolverines secured their 12th National Championship Trophy. Following this success, Jim Harbaugh, the head coach at Michigan at the time, took a coaching job in the NFL and named Previous Offensive Coordinator Sherrone Moore to take his place for the following seasons with high hopes that Michigan could make a deep run in the new 12 team playoff. However, Moore knew it would be a challenge with 13 starters drafted to the NFL, including the team quarterback J.J. McCarthy, and star running back Blake Corum. No one expected Michigan to be on pace to have the worst season after winning the national championship.
Angered fans looked towards the new coaching staff to blame. Moore knew he was in the hot seat and needed to make changes so he looked towards recruiting to fix the problems. Bryce Underwood, a Senior Quarterback at Belleville High School, Michigan seemed like the solution to everything. Underwood, currently sitting on top of the 2025 recruiting class in the country, is the perfect dual-threat quarterback who can throw and run the ball. The only problem is, Underwood was already committed to LSU at the time.
With new NIL systems in place, the policy is that you can offer players however much money you want to, which may seem like a good thing, but with no restrictions in place, big college football teams like Ohio State, Georgia and Alabama could essentially buy a national championship by offering the most money to players.
Moore knows how generational Underwood’s talents are, having the highest performance grades in history coming out of football, just passing Justin Fields according to 247 sports. Michigan offered Underwood a record-breaking 4 year 12.5 million contract to switch from LSU to Michigan.
After only a few days of thinking about the life changing money with his family, Underwood made the decision to become a Wolverine.
Even though 12.5 million dollars does not seem like a ton of money for a generational player like Bryce Underwood, it really is for college, especially considering the fact that NFL quarterbacks make anywhere from 30-50 million dollars a year. People have to remember that the NIL system only came out in 2021 and teams are already paying students millions of dollars. With no restrictions set in place, who knows how high student athletes are going to be payed in the future, maybe it could get all the way as high as 20-40 million dollar contracts for athletes to come play at the power-house colleges. Only time will tell.
