U Sports can learn something from NCAA's mastery of visibility when marketing its own football product

Shekai Mills-Knight, a freshman running back for Ole Miss, will earn some attention Thursday night when his Rebels take on the Miami Hurricanes in an NCAA semifinal football game in Glendale, Ariz., but he first made news a decade ago as a grade-schooler deemed too big for the local little league.

At 9, Mills-Knight, living Dollard-Des-Ormeaux in suburban Montreal, was listed at 111 pounds, which made him 11 pounds too heavy to carry the ball in a league with rigid weight classes. Officials refused to let him play running back, and forced his team to forfeit four wins. For the record, his family maintained that his official weight was a typo, and that young Shekai actually scaled 101 pounds.

It’s an important distinction. If he’d had a tall glass of OJ at breakfast and then weighed 101, a quick pee break might have put him back below the limit. But if he was a full-fledged 111 then he might as well make like Terence Crawford and find a new weight class.

His family protested the decision as far as they could, but Football Quebec upheld the position restriction, and losses remained on his team’s record.

Clearly, football worked out anyway for Mills-Knight, who wound up starring in five sports as he finished his prep career at Baylor School in Chatanooga, Tenn. He totaled 25 yards on eight carries as a freshman at Ole Miss, but his Derrick Henryesque dimensions – 6-foot-3, 220 pounds – and bulbous muscles hint at his future potential.

At 19, he’s young enough for us all to imagine how much better he’ll be in two years, but 10 years after his youth-league controversy, he’s also old enough to remember when rules mattered. The league said he needed to weigh 100 pounds, and stripped his team of victories to prove they meant it.

Contrast that hardline stance with the current anything-goes ethos governing big-time US college football.

Player contracts?

They might be legally binding, hence the University of Washington’s decision to have star quarterback Demond Williams Jr. sign a deal to return to the team next season. But maybe they’re just suggestions, which is why Williams put pen to paper, then entered the transfer portal anyway.

Loyalty?

It’s conditional. That’s why head coach Lane Kiffin, who left Ole Miss for a higher paying job at LSU in November, has been trying to poach Rebels assistant coaches ever since, even as his old team continues its playoff run.

And amateurism?

Always a charming idea, but never quite the reality. Now, with quarterbacks demanding seven-figure sums in the transfer portal, it’s officially extinct in high-level U.S. college football.

All that upheaval has created opportunities for programs not known for football. Until recently, if I had told you Indiana University was two wins away from a national title in a revenue sport, you’d have assumed I meant men’s basketball. And the idea of Ole Miss surviving the SEC and landing in a national semifinal was a non-starter unless we were talking baseball.