The general manager role in college sports remains in its infancy. Oklahoma took a forward-thinking step by hiring Jim Nagy in early 2025 to model an NFL-style front office, but the evolving position still comes with its share of challenges.

“You don’t want to take a high school kid and pay them more than an All-American player/All-Conference player (on your roster),” Nagy said on the most recent episode of university president Joseph Harroz Jr.’s podcast, Conversations With the President.

On the episode, Nagy and Harroz addressed a number of topics but got into what the Sooner general manager hopes for the future — a freshman salary cap. That belief grew from something he learned early in the job.

“One blind spot I had coming into the job was I didn’t think the players would talk as much, and share the information as much,” Nagy said.

That leaves Nagy trying to balance retention, compensation and recruiting without creating friction in the locker room — concerns that make Nagy believe a freshman salary cap is necessary.

“If you wanted to, ‘fix’ isn’t the right word, but land in a good spot for the greater good of college football is some sort of freshman salary cap,” Nagy said. “That’s one of my biggest challenges. The acquisition costs out of high school is so high.”

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Nagy praised Oklahoma’s culture, noting that a key prerequisite for the job was ensuring he and his staff were in lockstep with Brent Venables’ vision for the program, something he said has come to fruition.

“You have to go after great players, you have to get the top talent,” Nagy said. “But right now, it can be at the expense of your culture, which coach Venables and the coaching staff have worked so hard to develop. If we had some sort of rookie/freshman cap, that would alleviate that issue.”

Despite these challenges, Nagy has integrated himself within Venables’ program and helped accent football’s mission of “adaptive and forward thinking.” He mentioned that during prep for Alabama last December, the front office was busy at work in attempting to retain their roster for the following season — something made easier by Venables’ leadership.

“Our ability to retain our starters, give our coaching staff a ton of credit, because our players want to be here.”

But Nagy understands any changes will take time. Until then, Oklahoma’s front office is building the best Brent Venables-led program it can, with championship aspirations and a clear understanding of how the current landscape works.

Still, he feels that his desired change would benefit the “greater good of the sport.” Oklahoma is prepared if that change comes sooner or later.

“A CBA model, there is a model in place,” Nagy said. “At least for football, I’m not going to speak to the other sports, there is a model out there that has shown to work. We don’t have to completely copy and paste what the NFL does, but if we went to a similar structure, we could find a good spot.”

When asked if that’s where he felt the sport would land — collective bargaining agreements — Nagy said “yes” with confidence.

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Their end is inevitable, but the Los Angeles Lakers (0-3) can stave off elimination when they host the Oklahoma City Thunder for Game 4 of the 2026 Western Conference Semifinals.

At BetMGM, Oklahoma City opened as -500 on the moneyline (Los Angeles at +375) and -10.5 favorites. However, the flood of pro-Thunder money has steamed them up to -11.5 favorites at the time of writing.

THE REFS IN THE OKC-LA SERIES WERE SO BAD, THE LAKERS HAD TO HAVE A POSTGAME MEETING WITH THEM

OKC has won every game this series by 18+ points and has a seven-game winning streak over LA. That’s despite reigning NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander not putting up his typical crazy numbers.

Shai is scoring only 21.0 points per game in this series, slightly behind Thunder big man Chet Holmgren’s 21.3 PPG average, which leads the team.

LeBron James Is Trying To Avoid Another Sweep

LeBron James has only been swept three times in his career: the 2007 NBA Finals by the San Antonio Spurs, the 2018 NBA Finals by the Golden State Warriors and the 2023 Western Conference Finals by the Denver Nuggets.

FLOPPING IS RUINING THE NBA AND LEBRON SHOULD TAKE SOME BLAME FOR THAT

Maybe the sweep is a foregone conclusion, like the New York Knicks vs. Philadelphia 76ers series, but I’m counting on the Lakers dying on their sword and going out with honor.

Los Angeles held a first-half lead in Games 2 and 3 and still lost by 18 and 23 points, respectively. Granted, perhaps that’s just OKC playing with its food more than anything the Lakers are doing right.

Still, it’s something for L.A. to build on.

Lakers Need Oklahoma City’s Role Players To Cool Off

The Lakers are hitting 39.3% of their 3-pointers in this series. Unfortunately for them, the Thunder are shooting 42.3% from behind the arc.

But Oklahoma City’s role players are doing most of the damage from deep. Thunder guards Jared McCain, Cason Wallace and Isaiah Joe, along with big man Jaylin Williams, are a combined 25 for 41 from 3-point range, good for a ridiculous 61.0%.

That’s not sustainable.

If these randoms hit fewer shots in Game 4, the Lakers can cover the spread.

Betting Market Is Overwhelmingly On OKC

Finally, 95% of the money at BetMGM is on Oklahoma City as of Monday morning, according to John Ewing.

While I’m not someone who bows at the altar of betting splits, 95% of people don’t beat the sportsbooks. We all know this.

OUTKICK IS NOW ON THE FOX APP: CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

I know that’s simple logic, but if you blindly fade teams this popular in the betting market, you’ll probably have a positive return on investment.

Best Bet: Los Angeles Lakers +11.5

_____________________________

Follow me on X @Geoffery-Clark, and check out my OutKick Bets Podcast for more betting content and random rants.

NEW YORK (AP) — It wasn’t until his junior year of college that civil rights attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons learned about a devastating massacre that took place in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

His African American studies professor lectured about what is known today as the Tulsa Race Massacre — the days in 1921 when white mobs carried out a scorched-earth campaign against an outnumbered Black militia protecting the fabled Black Wall Street, a prosperous all-Black community.

“I actually told a teacher, ‘I’m from Tulsa. That’s not true,’” Solomon-Simmons recalled. “And of course, I was wrong.”

That day planted a seed for the then-aspiring attorney, who went on to lead a reparations campaign for the living survivors of the massacre and their descendants. Nearly 105 years later, no one has been compensated for what they lost, and none of the culprits have been held accountable.

That fight for reparations is the subject of Solomon-Simmons’ first book, “Redeem a Nation: The Century-Long Battle to Restore the Soul of America,” which is intended as a blueprint for justice in historic atrocities that Black Americans endured but never received reparations for. The book hits shelves Tuesday.

After the massacre, more than 35 city blocks of the neighborhood known as Greenwood were leveled in fires, an estimated 191 businesses were destroyed, and roughly 11,000 Black residents were displaced. The state of Oklahoma declared the death toll to be only 36 people, although many historians and experts who have studied the event put the death toll between 75 and 300.

Greenwood, founded in 1906, had been a bustling city within a city, with Black-owned grocery stores, soda fountains, cafés, barbershops, a movie theater, music venues, cigar and billiard parlors, tailors and dry cleaners, rooming houses and rental properties.

“If you can ignore Greenwood, which was the beacon of Black prosperity and Black progress in the history of this country, then you can ignore Black people in general,” Solomon-Simmons recently told The Associated Press. “I think that’s why people around the nation are so focused on the work that we’re doing, because they understand what it means to all of Black America.”

Solomon-Simmons’s book comes just months before the United States will mark 250 years since its founding in 1776. That was 89 years before the institution of chattel slavery — meaning an enslaved person was held as legal property of another — was abolished. The civil rights attorney questions the idea that Americans can truly celebrate the country’s accomplishments when it has yet to pay reparations, which historians say informs modern day disparities in wealth between Black and white people.

“We cannot talk about what America has been and will be, without making sure that these issues are discussed and we get reparatory justice for both” slavery and the Tulsa massacre, Solomon-Simmons said.

‘America has never had a soul’

In 343 pages, Solomon-Simmons does more than recite the history of the massacre or make a legal thriller out of his reparations campaign. For him, securing justice for the survivors and descendants of the massacre is also about healing a nation whose earliest promises of equality for all rang hollow.

“When I speak of repairing America’s soul, I do not mean restoring something that was once whole,” Solomon-Simmons writes in the book. “America has never had a soul. … There was no moral center to recover.”

He suggests that America’s soul cannot be repaired if it is forced to choose between rebuilding the nation or repairing Black America. They must do both, he says.

“The struggle for justice in Greenwood is not about returning to a mythical past. It is about proving whether America can build a soul at all through truth, through justice, through repair.”

Reparations for slavery and other historical racial injustices has been debated in the U.S. since Reconstruction, through the Civil Rights Movement and for much of the 21st century. Jennifer L. Morgan, a professor of history at New York University, said such debates are complicated by the question of exactly who pays the reparations and exactly who receives the payment.

“I don’t think that we’re talking about individuals who owe anybody else reparations. I think we’re talking about states, about institutions, about the nation,” Morgan said. “America is still grappling with reparations because America is still grappling at the legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, Jim Crow, and violent exclusion of Black people from the body politic.”

Some opponents of reparations argue there are no living culprits or direct victims of enslavement, much less people with verifiable claims of harm that can be presented in a court of law.

Solomon-Simmons disagrees.

“We know who did the massacre — the perpetrators are still living in Tulsa,” he said referring to the city and the chamber of commerce, which plaintiffs alleged had a hand in obstructing Greenwood’s recovery.

There is one remaining massacre survivor involved in the reparations lawsuit: 111-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle.

“If we cannot get her reparations while she’s alive, for the massacre, it’s gonna make it that much harder for us to get reparations for enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining and all those things that we are owed,” Solomon-Simmons said.

Fight for Tulsa reparations continues

In the book, Solomon-Simmons reflects on what committed him to the reparations fight.

While in law school, he was introduced to high profile civil rights attorneys working for the Reparations Coordinating Committee – the late Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree Jr., who mentored Barack and Michelle Obama; and the late Johnnie Cochran, who is widely known for defending O.J. Simpson during his trial for murder of his ex-wife. Solomon-Simmons became a law clerk for the committee.

After witnessing Ogletree argue a Tulsa reparations case in federal court in 2004, Solomon-Simmons said the practice of law stopped being just a credential for speaking, writing, or teaching. It became a calling.

In 2020, Solomon-Simmons led a lawsuit on behalf of 11 plaintiffs, including the last three known living survivors of the massacre, against the City of Tulsa and seven defendants. The suit was the first of its kind in state court and the first to get far enough to see a judge. In 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. In the final days of the Biden administration, the Justice Department released a report saying it had determined there is no longer an avenue for criminal prosecution over the massacre.

But the fight continues, Solomon-Simmons says, for cash payment to Randle and other descendants, as well as the return of land stolen after the massacre and during a period of urban renewal in Tulsa.

In 2025, the city’s first Black mayor, Monroe Nichols, endorsed a broad proposal dubbed Project Greenwood, which calls for financially compensating Randle, funding a scholarship program for descendants of victims, and designating June 1 as Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day.

Solomon-Simmons also runs the nonprofit Justice for Greenwood, which he founded a year before the community marked the centennial of the massacre in 2021.

“One thing I’ve learned from this work, and as a lawyer in general, is that people want justice,” he said. “People want reparations, but people (also) want acknowledgment. They want to be seen. They want people to understand that something happened to them and their family, and they want an apology.”

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Aaron Morrison is the race and ethnicity news editor at AP.