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Shout out once again to Indianapolis’ incredibly walkable downtown. A city designed by grown-ups.

Grad School: NFL, meet the ATH 

The question of where to line up ATH prospects — the two-way high school football players who have long been listed vaguely in recruiting rankings as “athletes” — is an annual one for college coaches. Now, Travis Hunter is forcing the question onto an unfamiliar league.

As we wait for this week’s new NFL combine GIFs of 300-pound superhumans running sub-5 40s, The Athletic asked a group of pro football players about where to put this different kind of virtually unprecedented superhuman. (“Virtually” is a magic word that means “whichever exception you’re thinking of also happens to be the one I had in mind when I used the word virtually.” 🤝)

Over and over, these NFL DBs marveled about Hunter’s receiver skills equaling those of the receivers he covers. For example, here’s another former Swiss Army knife, Michigan’s Jabrill Peppers (now of the Patriots):

“(Hunter) basically turns into a receiver when the ball is in the air. … That length and size at DB who can move that fluidly and make plays at the top of the breakpoint, that’s very rare.”

If you think Hunter is similarly good at both positions, but you have to pick just one, Peppers’ logic makes sense. Throwing the ball near a DB who might be the best pass-catcher on the field sounds much scarier than having to cover a WR who is good at, like, backpedaling.

Also, in case there’s any doubt about Hunter’s best position, the Browns see him primarily as a receiver. Yes, there’s context, but my point is: haha Browns lol.

(Going forward, I’m also curious about whether Hunter’s fame will inspire upcoming ATH recruits to annoy college coaches about being allowed to try and replicate him. When I chatted about this with recruiting reporter Grace Raynor, she compared the possibility to “Iowa high school coaches having to deal with their kids only wanting to chuck 3s because of Caitlin Clark.”)

Side note: Amid three years of ongoing Hunter hype (I’m doing my part 😃), it’s easy to forget someone besides him might go No. 1 to the Titans or whoever.

BetMGM actually lists Miami QB Cam Ward as the favorite, followed by Penn State DE Abdul Carter, the new leader on the consensus top 100. Our top 10:

Quick Snaps

🥾 Fire some coaches!! Seth Emerson’s SEC hot-seat watch, where Oklahoma’s Brent Venables is No. 3. (And his team is prominent in our next link as well.)

❤️‍🩹 Which teams most desperately need their transfer classes to deliver? To me, Florida State’s top-10 class jumps out of this list.

🙄 Remember last season, when we realized the CFP’s designers had apparently avoided using history to forecast how the first-round-byes thing might play out? This time, history shows the B1G/SEC-autobids thing is a largely pointless irritant.

🎽 Biff “The Sleeveless Wonder” Poggi is headed back to Michigan.

🦡 “It’s not the Big Ten West anymore,” Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell noted in multiple ways during his one-on-one with Jesse Temple.

🐢 The top currently committed five-star in 2026’s 247Sports Composite says he’s 100 percent to … Maryland!

🌎 NIU likely joining both the Mountain West and Horizon League would mean its rivals span from the middle of the Pacific Ocean to Moon Township, Pa. Price of being better at football than Notre Dame.

🥾 Today in non-football: Fire some more coaches!! ACC men’s basketball gets its own hot-seat department.

Oh, Right: It’s spring football season, sort of

Hey, remember spring games?

(I’d actually been planning to write about them today anyway, and then it turned out Sam Khan Jr. was working on a story for this morning that included insights from coaches about the state of spring football, so be sure you read that today.)

About a decade ago, lots of people cared about spring games … or at least we had general spring-football awareness. These things were a legit part of the CFB calendar, no matter how silly it felt to consider Pretend Football In Which Forcing A Three-And-Out Is Worth Four Or Five Points legit.

In the 2010s, the reasonably online college football fan was aware of things like whether Alabama or Ohio State had more people in attendance for their glorified mid-April practices. (Ohio State cracked 100K in 2016.) People argued and gloated about this, which feels hard to believe now, even though people in general remain devoted to arguing and gloating. If you claim, “This is good for recruiting,” you’re usually allowed to gloat about anything.

There were spring moments that resonated far beyond getting looks at new players, though, memories like Auburn’s goodbye to Toomer’s Corner trees or the late Jack Hoffman scoring a Nebraska touchdown at age 7. Fans had “half the big spring games are today, so there will probably be a touchdown pass to somebody like Dawn Staley” levels of awareness.

Maybe it was the wave of 2020 cancellations throughout sports that broke the annual tradition of assessing each team’s health based on whether it had more or fewer fans in the stands for football-like games that do not count. It was an odd tradition, in hindsight. It was also an odd tradition at the time, though. It was April! We were bored!

Either way, these football-esque events might be endangered now, and some of the reasons are extremely mid-2020s CFB. Here’s Matt Rhule from a few weeks ago, on Nebraska canceling this year’s spring game:

“Last year, we were one of the more televised spring games, and I dealt with a lot of people offering our players a lot of opportunities after that. So to go out and bring in a bunch of new players and then showcase them for all the other schools to watch, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

Grain of salt. At this point, I’m pretty sure coaches have used the transfer portal as an explanation for just about every decision imaginable. But still, the portal next opens on April 16, right around the peak of spring-ball season.

Meanwhile, here’s Steve Sarkisian giving Kay Adams a thoroughly valid and modern reason for Texas likewise skipping:

“Over the last two years, we’ve played 30 games. That’s a lot for college football.”

NC State, Ohio State and USC have also canceled for various reasons.

Combine year-round portal uncertainty and the newly extended postseason, and it’s fair to wonder whether spring ball could go away entirely, or at least the “spring” part. Scott Dochterman has proposed rearranging the sport’s bizarre calendar, maybe giving us June showcases instead, which could actually feel like a ramp-up to the regular season, rather than a random burst of semi-football with incomplete rosters.

For now, these things do still sort of matter, as Houston coach Willie Fritz said in Sam’s story, linked here again ICYMI. If nothing else, it’s more substantial than the NBA All-Star Game, right?

Today’s Rabbit Hole

First, here is Bruce Feldman’s combine preview, a Freaks List-minded look at which absurd feats to expect this week. This note on Miami TE Elijah Arroyo …

“The 6-5, 251-pounder had scouts at the Senior Bowl raving over his agility and route-running. He’s expected to run the 40 in the low 4.5s at the combine.”

… made me remember former Maryland TE Vernon Davis’ outrageous 2006 combine. At 254 pounds, he ran a 4.38 and threw 33 bench reps, making him an elite 200-pounder and 300-pounder at the same time.

Also, simply linking to this story about Middlebury College’s Division III All-American offensive lineman Thomas Perry, “arguably the strongest player in the 2025 NFL Draft,” counts as a rabbit hole.

That’s right, today we’ve talked about two leagues of equal power: the NFL and the New England Small College Athletic Conference. If you FWD this email to a NESCAC alum, let me know at untilsaturday@theathletic.com, and you’ll receive 100 newsletter points.

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(Top photo: Jamie Schwaberow/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)