ATLANTA — A common colloquialism states that money doesn’t buy happiness. Ohio State fans might beg to differ.

The Buckeyes, who won the College Football Playoff national title against Notre Dame on Monday night by a score of 34–23, used about $20 million in NIL (name, image, and likeness) funds to build their championship-caliber roster. 

Ohio State is believed to have one of the highest NIL “payrolls” in all of college sports this year, offering more money to their football players than most other schools allotted in NIL earnings to their entire athletic departments combined. 

Among their big guns: “THE Foundation,” a collective of boosters and donors that has both a nonprofit and for-profit arm, as well as the 1870 Society. An athletic department representative previously declined a Front Office Sports request for comment on the collective strategy surrounding the school, but head coach Ryan Day was reportedly deeply involved in fundraising.

The combination of an unregulated transfer portal and NIL earnings have created a new era of “unrestricted free agency” in college football this year, which many teams use to completely rebuild their rosters. Ohio State certainly did that: quarterback Will Howard transferred from Kansas State, and star wide receiver Jeremiah Smith arrived fresh out of high school. But the Buckeyes also have plenty of returning players, some of whom opted to stay in Columbus instead of transferring or declaring for the NFL Draft. 

Take defensive end Jack Sawyer, for example. Sawyer was Ryan Day’s first commit in 2019, and has stayed with the team his entire career. As one of the team’s captains, he was reported to be on a mission this past offseason to convince as many of his teammates as possible to return for one more year.

Sawyer, a lifelong Ohio State fan, may not have needed NIL to cement his returnk. But it’s a nice added perk: Sawyer told Front Office Sports over the weekend that the program has provided “great opportunities” all season in terms of NIL.

In addition to what he may be receiving from collective opportunities or other brand deals, he has been earning some passive NIL income this week with a merchandise drop commemorating his “scoop n’ score” play during the Cotton Bowl that helped punch the Buckeyes’ ticket to the national championship. “It’s definitely opened a lot of doors for a lot of us,” Sawyer said Saturday. 

Perhaps a national championship was one of them.

The dream that fans of struggling sports teams often have but typically don’t experience—a new owner buys the franchise and quickly turns it around—is improbably coming true for the Commanders, putting the long-forgotten organization back in the national limelight. 

Washington shocked top-seed Detroit 45-31 in the NFC divisional playoffs Saturday night, marking by far the biggest NFL win for second-year Commanders owner Josh Harris. With that upset victory at the Lions’ Ford Field, the Commanders have achieved key milestones:

• The team’s first appearance in the NFC title game since the 1991 season, when just five current Commanders had even been born. Washington will face Philadelphia on Sunday for a trip to the Super Bowl.
• The second playoff victory of the Harris era, equaling the number of postseason wins in the embattled, 24-year tenure of former team owner Dan Snyder. Both of those Snyder-era wins were in the wild-card round.
• An “it” factor drawing a celebrity fanbase that includes NBA superstar and Washington-area native Kevin Durant, actor Matthew McConaughey, and racing legend Dale Earnhardt Jr., among others. 

There are many key figures involved in the resurgence of the Commanders, including the stellar play of star rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels and the first-year football leadership of head coach Dan Quinn and GM Adam Peters. Harris, however, has helped instill an entirely different tenor to the organization since his record-breaking $6.05 billion purchase of the team in July 2023—departing significantly from the near-constant turbulence and friction that marked the Snyder era. 

“For everybody to put this together, this team, in really a year, it’s phenomenal,” said former Washington coach Joe Gibbs, who led the franchise to all three of its Super Bowl wins in the 1980s and early 1990s, and then had a less successful comeback effort more than a decade later under Snyder. “To get a win like that on the road, it’s really hard, [but] gives you great confidence. [It’s] just fantastic for everybody.”

The Commanders are a 5.5-point underdog to the Eagles in the upcoming conference title game at Lincoln Financial Field, part of a South Philadelphia sports complex being remade, in part through the NBA’s 76ers and Harris, also the lead owner of that team. Ticket demand on the resale markets for the NFC clash, however, is robust, with low-end, get-in pricing beginning at around $600 per seat—roughly twice the comparable figure for the AFC championship game between the Bills and Chiefs.

As an economic divide in MLB continues to grow, the impact of teams’ both spending money and not spending money in preparation for the 2025 season was on full display this past weekend.

The defending champion Dodgers, already aggressively retooling through key offseason acquisitions such as free-agent pitcher Blake Snell and Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki, extended their aggressive ways by signing reliever Tanner Scott to a four-year, $72 million contract, according to multiple reports. Scott was one of the best players available in a significantly slowed free-agent market. 

The latest acquisition raises the Dodgers’ projected 2025 payroll, by luxury-tax calculations, to about $372 million, according to Spotrac. That figure is nearly $75 million clear of the closest team, the Phillies at $299 million, and more than six times the comparable figure for the No. 30 club, the Marlins at $60.5 million. 

The Blue Jays, meanwhile, looked to shed their frequent runner-up status, reportedly completing a five-year deal with slugger Anthony Santander worth more than $90 million. Toronto had lost out on many top free agents in recent years, despite intensive efforts, including Shohei Ohtani and Sasaki. The Blue Jays now rank fifth in MLB in 2025 luxury-tax payroll at $245 million. 

At the Other End …

While some MLB teams were continuing to spend, fan unrest was palpably present for some others as they held their offseason fan fests to help generate excitement for the coming season. 

The 2025 edition of the Cubs Convention, annually one of the top winter events of its type in baseball, was highlighted in no small part by the club publicly reconciling with former star Sammy Sosa, who had been estranged from the team for about 20 years due to steroid allegations. Team owner Tom Ricketts, however, received plenty of criticism from fans for not spending along the lines of the Dodgers, Mets, and Yankees—franchises that, like the Cubs, play in big markets and have their own regional sports networks. The Cubs are currently 14th in luxury-tax payroll at $183 million.

“They think somehow we have all these dollars that the Dodgers have or the Mets have or the Yankees have, and we just keep it, which isn’t true at all,” Ricketts said during a convention appearance on WSCR-AM. “We try to break even every year, and that’s about it.

“I don’t think fans should spend all their time thinking about which team has more money or how much they’re spending. It just becomes a big narrative that’s a distraction,” he said.

A similar sentiment could be found further east in Pittsburgh, where the Pirates have long struggled under Bob Nutting, to the point of “Sell the Team!” chants breaking out at that team’s convention. Pittsburgh currently ranks 26th in luxury-tax payroll at $88 million, and the club’s spending has also become a political lightning rod.

“We know that there is frustration, frustration because we are not winning, with the expectations of winning,” said Pirates CEO Travis Williams. “At the end of the day, that’s not due to lack of commitment to want to win.”