The college football transfer portal is closed. But that does not mean the activity has ended. Next stop is a courtroom near you. In the waning hours before shutting the portal window, Duke quarterback Darian Mensah announced that he was leaving Duke, just days after signing a new revenue agreement with the school. He would be getting into the portal with little time to spare and with a “Do Not Contact” notification, meaning he knew where he was headed next. It would be the Miami Hurricanes. Mensah is not the only player to have tried that during this portal cycle. Only the most recent, and perhaps the most complicated.
Washington
Just a week ago, Washington Huskies quarterback Demond Williams, Jr. indicated he was going into the portal and looking to leave Seattle. But it was not that simple. Williams had, four days earlier, re-upped his revenue agreement with Washington. And the school had put a buyout clause into the contract. The deal is private, but intel from the Pacific Northwest and the Big 10 says the buyout would be roughly $4 million.
That money would be owed by Williams or his new school. But someone was going to pay Washington if its quarterback left. And the university administration made it clear that it was going to have its day in court. The school was prepared to take legal action against the quarterback and his future school.
Looking For Answers
What happened was pretty clear. There was tampering from another school. Even as the ink was barely dry on his new agreement, another college football program was reaching out to Williams to leave. CBS Sports reported that it was Lane Kiffin and LSU. The truth is, it did not matter. Tampering happens all the time, and there is no one to enforce the rules against it. The NCAA takes a pass on anything that resembles decisive action because it just means another loss in federal court. The NCAA gets sued routinely by attorneys who must be making thousands per week for the billable hours they spend on X/Twitter. So now the NCAA pretty much sits out anything that will get them to court. In and of itself, there are no laws against tampering. Some states wrote it into the NIL legislation they created. But it is the universities within those states that are violating the standards, so expect no action. But there is tortious interference, or one party intentionally and wrongfully disrupts another party’s contractual or business relationships.
The look for Williams, leaving right after agreeing to a new UW deal, was so bad that his agent, Doug Hendrickson, publicly dropped him as a client. Williams gained legal counsel from one of those aforementioned social media attorneys, who essentially walked the quarterback back from the ledge. Williams announced he would stay at UW, and all could be forgiven.
Wake Forest
We all prepared to move on from the headline-grabbing story and the potential revolution it would cause in college football.
Except that it happened again this week. And then yet again.
On Thursday, Wake Forest offensive lineman Melvin Siani stunned the school when he announced he was entering the transfer portal. He had not only signed a 2026 financial agreement, but as someone who was seen as one of the foundational elements of next season’s offensive line, he had been vocal about his intentions to return to Winston-Salem.
And then, in the snap of a finger, he too entered the portal with a “Do Not Contact” designation. A mere four hours later, he announced he had signed a new deal with the Texas Longhorns.
The signs of tampering were blatant. But this was different than the Williams/UW storyline. No one familiar with the Wake Forest athletic administration expects athletic director John Currie to pound his fist on the table and demand recompense for the wrongs inflicted upon his football program. It’s just not the way Wake Forest works.
Siani will be at his third school in four years. Such is the day and age of college athletes being more hired mercenaries than players developing and getting their education at the same time.
Duke
And that gets us to the Friday night stunner. Conor O’Neill, who covers Duke football and basketball (along with Wake Forest) for On3, indicated in the afternoon on X/Twitter that there were rumors about Mensah and Duke.
By Friday night, just a few hours before the closing of the portal window, Mensah confirmed the story and acknowledged he would be headed to the University of Miami.
Miami
The role of the Hurricanes in this story is “irony on steroids” (as a certain media-related podcast makes fun of). The University of Miami is already the defendant in a lawsuit brought by the University of Wisconsin over the services of defensive back Xavier Lucas.
The University of Wisconsin claims, in legal documents, that representatives from Miami Hurricanes football made inappropriate contact with Lucas in December of 2024. Lucas eventually announced he would transfer to Miami. But Wisconsin refused to submit his academic paperwork to the portal database, thus not allowing him to enter his name. Lucas did what a student, not an athlete, would do. He academically withdrew from the University of Wisconsin and enrolled at the University of Miami. Lucas will be playing in the national championship game Monday night, although sitting out the first half as a result of a targeting penalty in the semifinals last weekend.
Mensah’s World
That gets us back to Mensah. The object of the finger pointing is again the University of Miami.
The totality of these player contracts is rarely known in fact. “Agents” artificially inflate the revenue in public because it is good for their business. The schools artificially inflate the revenue numbers because it is good for their image and branding. Players artificially inflate the revenue numbers because that is what young athletes do.
And with Duke being a private university, no number of FOIA requests is going to get us the information we want as we grab our popcorn and settle in for the next fight over the future of college football. Reporting from O’Neill and a couple of others seems to indicate that there is no buyout clause in Mensah’s deal, meaning there is no set figure that Miami could pay to get this done. And it seems clear that Duke owns the Name/Image/Likeness rights to Mensah.
Attorneys are already screaming that it is the antithesis of the results of the O’Bannon v. NCAA lawsuit. But whether he was advised by a real agent/attorney, or by his neighbor’s uncle, Mensah signed the agreement that extends through the 2026 season. And Duke has made it clear, much like with UW’s public declaration, that it will fight Mensah’s move to Miami. For the good of Blue Devils football and college football as a whole. These efforts by the players to obfuscate contracts that they signed is bad for the sport.
Miami’s Money
This kind of infighting in the ACC can’t make commissioner Jim Phillips happy. On the other hand, the infighting is made financially possible by the ACC. Partially as a result of the lawsuits with Florida, Clemson, and the conference, the ACC realigned its financial payout structure. Miami is getting to keep all of the roughly $14 million it is making in the current run to the college football national championship game. There is no sharing with the other ACC schools mandated. And it is pretty close to what the school has reportedly earmarked it could take to get Mensah as the quarterback for the Hurricanes for the 2026 season.
Main Image: Bob Donnan-Imagn Images