Has Curt Cignetti created a college football 'Shark Tank?'

Former Duck George Wrighster covers college football with humor and insight, plus the perspective of a six-year NFL veteran. He recently made an important point about Monday's National Championship Game between upstart, No. 1 Indiana and resurgent blueblood Miami, Monday night at 4:30 p.m. PT on ESPN.

First, for so many of the top college football programs in the current landscape, like the Hoosiers, Texas Tech and Oregon, their success is driven by an angel investor, Mark Cuban the IU graduate, Cody Campbell the West Texas oil magnate, and Phil Knight founder of the Nike Sports empire and the driving force behind Oregon's 30-year march to title contention and football relevance.

The other and more dramatic trend is the seismic shift away from high school recruiting as the foundation of team success. Indiana and Miami both shopped heavily and wisely in the portal. As Wrighster points out, Indiana's 22 starters on offense and defense average 4.3 years of college experience.

Miami built their team around veterans also. Their first-unit players average 4.1 years in college football.

In fiercely competitive marketplaces, inefficiencies get corrected quickly. The portal closed at midnight with a massive number of players entering, although there will still be some stragglers, plus the ugly Darian Mensah situation. Hoosier and Hurricane players get an extension.

As many as 10,000 college football players have put themselves up for bidding, and coaches and general managers (It's a seismic shift in itself that college football teams even have general managers.) will be shopping for experience, proven production.

Some will overpay in search of Cignetti's magic elixir of players who can execute and be coached to perform at a high level. Without the brush cut genius' concomitant discipline and organization, the new trend will fall flat on its face, particularly at programs with high expectations but inadequate funding minus Coach Cig's superb evaluation skills.

The era of the Blue-Chip ratio is dead, or appears to be

It used to be that the Blue-Chip Ratio ruled the sport. National championship games belonged to teams that stacked talent at a high level, high school players with speed and size. Alabama, Clemson, Auburn, LSU, Ohio State and Georgia ruled the sport and won nearly all of the titles.

On the way to their first-ever National Championship Game, the Hoo, Hoo, Hoosiers dropped Alabama 38-3 and Oregon 56-22. The Blue-Chip Ratio is officially dead. The new king, for now, appears to be working the portal.

Oregon stumbled on the way to their first-ever national championship with a blue-chip ratio of 74.5 percent. They're achingly close though. In the last three seasons, every one of their losses has been to a team that played or won the national championship.

The smartest coaches and programs will quickly recognize that Cuban's inefficiency is being corrected at Great White speed and savagery. While everyone loves a simple formula that worked for somebody else, the portal feeding frenzy has bred an inefficiency of its own: Teams are paying massively for portal players, even refugees from Oregon's three-deep.

Dan Lanning and his staff are pursuing a strategy that is more nuanced. They mine the portal and find players with character, upside and work ethic, but they also excel at finding future NFL talent in high school football. He's building a program with sound core values and a determination to develop people, which is the best, hardest way.