Jeremiah Smith Reportedly Has Offers Up to $5 Million Per Year To Enter the Transfer Portal

On3 — When the Buckeyes arrived back in Columbus on Tuesday following Ryan Day and Ohio State winning the first national title of the 12-team College Football Playoff era, the head coach immediately went to work on retaining top talent, entering negotiations and working with Ohio State’s NIL collective The Foundation. With a five-day transfer portal window set to expire on Saturday night, time for celebrating is on pause as Ohio State works through negotiations with some of the nation’s top talent.

With revenue sharing on pace to kick in on July 1 and booster-led NIL collective still spending dollars, top programs are watching their payrolls soar. A group of college football teams will be spending $27 to $30 million in 2025.

Ohio State is no different. True freshman wide receiver Jeremiah Smith is a generational talent, and keeping him in Columbus comes at a high cost. Sources have told On3 that Smith will make at least $3 million in 2025, but that’s just a starting point. That has not stopped other programs from coming to the table with offers ranging from $4.5 to $5 million, sources told On3.

I could certainly make it work for some of the compensation guys like Ryan Day are rewarded with, but being a college football coach right now has to suck. Even putting aside Day's circumstances of being lambasted by his own fanbase prior to winning a national championship pretty easily, you win a title on Monday night and have to spend the rest of that week working tirelessly to keep your own players from bolting for a bigger bag.

I can't imagine Jeremiah Smith is actually going anywhere, but that isn't going to stop teams from floating offers to his agent that are reportedly in the range of $5 million a year. Maybe the biggest thing in Ohio State's favor is the fact that there are probably only four or five teams in the country who can afford Smith and he's already playing for one of them that just won the national title. But the Buckeyes are certainly going to have to give their star wideout a significant raise from whatever he was making this year.

It would be one of the funniest things in college football history, though, if the Larry Ellison and Dave Portnoy Money Machine just kept spitting out numbers until they got to one Smith would accept. Obviously the football impact for Michigan would be tremendous, but taking Smith would be a victory from which there would be no coming back for OSU. That would completely wipe out the national title. It would also set up one of the most anticipated college football games of all-time next season.

Remember when a guy who's going to leave college with $15-20 million would have been prohibited from making a dime? Weird times.