CORAL GABLES, Fla. — New Miami quarterback Carson Beck arrived on campus Saturday afternoon with a smile on his face, a brace on his surgically repaired right elbow and an eager offensive coordinator waiting to shake his hand.

“Nice to finally meet you in person,” Hurricanes offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson told the 6-4, 220-pound gunslinger who led Georgia to the SEC championship and a 24-3 record over the past two seasons as the Bulldogs’ starter before entering the transfer portal.

“So, when are you going to start throwing?”

What’s up coach? New Canes QB Carson Beck meets OC Shannon Dawson for the first time in person. @TheAthleticCFB pic.twitter.com/wLlkVPP6gR

— Manny Navarro (@Manny_Navarro) January 11, 2025

Beck, who walked onto campus flanked by a person affiliated with Miami’s name, image and likeness collective, is reportedly set to make $4 million to start at quarterback for Miami this coming season. But The Athletic has heard through multiple sources briefed on his recruitment the number he’s set to receive from Miami channels is closer to a little over $3 million, roughly double the $1.6 million Heisman Trophy finalist Cam Ward earned through Miami’s collective (not including additional deals with Adidas, Bose and others) when he led the No. 1 scoring offense in college football this past season.

Beck, who won’t start throwing again for a few months due to the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) injury he sustained in Georgia’s SEC title game win against Texas, was the only quarterback Miami’s coaching staff really wanted. Staffers told The Athletic he spent the day Saturday breaking down film with Miami’s coaches while freshmen and other transfers began moving in on campus.

Dawson was not excited about any other quarterback who had entered the portal or was expected to enter the portal this offseason. The Hurricanes liked Texas’ Quinn Ewers, but no one really knew what he was going to do once the Longhorns were eliminated from the College Football Playoff. NFL evaluators have projected Ewers anywhere from the third round to the sixth round. (Ewers told ESPN before Friday’s Cotton Bowl semifinal that he expected to leave for the NFL. Texas lost to Ohio State 28-14.)

Miami, meanwhile, spent time trying to gather as much information as it could about Beck once he declared for the NFL Draft in late December, on the chance he ended up in the transfer portal instead. Studying the film, Dawson felt Beck’s 2023 season was elite. This year, Beck didn’t play as well, but the Bulldogs weren’t as good around him, especially without Brock Bowers or Ladd McConkey catching passes. While Bowers and McConkey starred as rookies in the NFL, Georgia’s receivers led all Power 4 programs with 31 drops. The Bulldogs also dealt with injuries on their offensive line, allowing 1.79 sacks per game (58th among FBS programs).

Dawson also reached out to Baltimore Ravens offensive coordinator Todd Monken, who had been Beck’s coach at Georgia from 2020 to ’22. Monken had nothing but praise for Beck, calling him an elite talent.

Beck doesn’t have the same demeanor as Ward — he’s quieter — but there aren’t many like Ward. The more Miami studied all its options, Dawson believed Beck was by far the best available. His quick release and accuracy stood out, as well as his ability to process. He’d played in a lot of big games and in tough situations. He also moves better than Ewers.

The other compelling factor: Beck, like Ward, is highly motivated to prove himself to NFL teams in his final college season. Miami believes it is putting Beck in a similar situation to flourish as it did with Ward, who also declared for the draft before deciding to return for another season of college football and transfer.

“Watching his success and what he was able to do and the position he’s in now (with the NFL Draft) made (Miami) very attractive to me,” Beck told 247Sports Saturday when he emerged from Miami’s football offices about five hours after arriving on campus.

Adding another experienced receiver to the roster, though, is a priority. Miami has already picked up LSU transfer CJ Daniels, who has started 30 games in his career, and has blue-chip talents in Jojo Trader and Ny Carr entering their second seasons.

Landing Beck could help the Canes attract more talent. Miami coaches can’t count how many times receivers in the portal would ask them, Who’s gonna be your quarterback?

The rest of the offense isn’t in bad shape. Four starters are back on the offensive line, and Miami also picked up TCU starting center James Brockermeyer in the portal. Ex-Tulane tight end Alex Bauman, a big red zone target with seven touchdowns last season, will complement talented freshman Elija Lofton as middle-of-the-field targets. Miami’s backfield, which led the ACC with 5.7 yards per carry, brings back talented sophomore Mark Fletcher and speedy freshman Jordan Lyle.

Miami thought the only negative with Beck was his injury, which will sideline him for spring practice. Dawson talked to a handful of people who have dealt with the injury, including 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy’s private quarterback coach Will Hewlett. Purdy came back from a torn UCL and started throwing again some eight to 10 weeks after his surgery. All of the feedback Miami got said the same thing: Beck’s injury wasn’t that bad, and his recovery outlook is pretty clean. Beck, a Jacksonville, Fla., native, is expected to be around for spring ball to acclimate with his teammates and learn the offensive system.

Miami’s staff is still high on sophomore Emory Williams. In 2023, he beat Clemson in his first career start after an injury to Tyler Van Dyke and almost beat a Florida State team that went 13-1. But he didn’t look ready to take over for Ward when he replaced the Hurricanes’ NFL-bound QB in the second half of the Pop-Tarts Bowl.

After winning 10 games for only the second time since joining the ACC in 2004, Miami couldn’t go into Cristobal’s fourth season without a star at quarterback. But the Hurricanes didn’t want to take a guy just to take a guy.

In Williams, they believe they have a 6-5 prospect who is extremely accurate and made some big-boy throws to beat Clemson in 2023. The question, though, is whether he’ll stick around past the spring. Frank Ponce, the quarterbacks coach who recruited Williams to Miami, is now an assistant down the road at FIU. The Hurricanes have two other scholarship quarterbacks: 2025 blue-chipper Luke Nickel and 2024 three-star Judd Anderson, who both played their high school football in Georgia.

Miami’s personnel people charted dozens of potential QB transfer prospects. The verdict: It was not a good crop, not even as good as last year’s. Dawson probably ended up breaking down about 10 who merited deeper consideration.

South Dakota State’s Mark Gronowski, who had led the Jackrabbits to two FCS national titles, spoke with Miami. Dawson liked him and was going to fly up to Sioux Falls to see him, but the trip was canceled after he heard Gronowski might need surgery. Gronowski ended up signing with Iowa, and the Hawkeyes confirmed he would have surgery in the coming weeks and would not begin on-field workouts until June.

Miami native Fernando Mendoza was another possibility for the Hurricanes. The former Cal starter had committed to Indiana right before Christmas. But even two weeks later, some Miami folks believed Mendoza would come home if the Hurricanes offered him. The Canes staff liked him, but in their eyes, he didn’t have Beck’s talent.

When Beck’s camp let Miami know he was planning on entering the portal, the Canes figured they had a good shot. It helped that they had a track record with Ward, who had gone from a fifth-round draft projection to a potential top-10 pick, and also that Beck’s girlfriend, Hanna Cavinder, plays on Miami’s basketball team.

Saturday, Beck’s transfer journey from Athens to Miami reached its destination.

(Photos: Manny Navarro for The Athletic)

Eli Manning was named one of the semifinalists for the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s modern era ballot two weeks ago as he tries to get to Canton, Ohio, in his first year.

The former New York Giants star has a Hall of Fame worthy resume with two Super Bowl championships – both over Tom Brady and an undefeated New England Patriots team – as well as 57,023 passing yards and 366 touchdown passes. Those statistics were among the highest in the NFL ever when he retired from the sport after the 2019 season.

However, getting into the Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot is an uphill climb as he will have to last as long as Antonio Gates, Torry Holt, Reggie Wayne, Darren Woodson, Fred Taylor and a handful of others who have been on the ballot longer.

Former Patriots head coach Bill Belichick appeared on ESPN’s “ManningCast” on Monday during the Los Angeles Rams’ playoff win over the Minnesota Vikings and threw his support behind the four-time Pro Bowl quarterback.

“Eli, you don’t look that good in that hoodie, but you’re going to look great in a gold jacket,” Belichick told Manning. “I’m sure that’s going to happen, and you deserve it so much to join Peyton in a gold jacket too.”

New York Giants former quarterback Eli Manning on the field before a game against the Cincinnati Bengals at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, on Oct. 13, 2024. (Brad Penner-Imagn Images)

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Manning told the New York Post last week he was not exactly so sure.

“I guess it’s different just because it’s all out of your hands, you’re not campaigning for it, you’re not trying to talk to people about it or prove your point,” he said. “If I get in, it will be an awesome, unbelievable few days down in New Orleans, and if I don’t, it’s not going to ruin it for me. I’m not going to be in a bad mood, I’m not going to be sulking around. 

“Just to be included in the top 15 this year is a great honor, and so I look at all of this as positive and a fun experience.”

New York Giants former quarterback Eli Manning sits courtside during the fourth quarter between the New York Knicks and the Oklahoma City Thunder at Madison Square Garden on Jan. 10, 2025 in New York City. (Brad Penner-Imagn Images)

If he does get in, the announcement ceremony would take place in New Orleans – Manning’s hometown.

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The most valuable piece of real estate for a soccer team isn’t on the pitch, it’s on the front of the players’ jerseys, a foot-wide swath of fabric some companies will pay tens of millions of dollars to rent for a season.

But Bohemian FC, a small but mighty fan-owned club in Dublin, has made its money targeting an area that lies beneath the front of the jersey. Convinced a fan’s beating heart and soul can be worth more than any corporate advertising budget, Bohemian — or Bohs for short — promotes causes, not companies, on its away jerseys. The strategy has turned a club once headed for relegation and financial ruin into the most profitable one in the Irish first division.

“I can’t conceive of any way where Bohs could be in a position that a fan of Bayern Munich in Munich or a fan of Manchester United in Manchester would want to buy a Bohs shirt for football reasons,” Daniel Lambert, the team’s youthful chief operating officer, said last week in a video conference call from Dublin. “But if you bring it to an emotional space, there are people who care. They care about Palestine. They care about the migrant crisis, the climate, could be anything.

“If we can connect with people in different countries and cities around the world on that basis, our potential market is huge.”

How huge? Although Lambert declined to share detailed numbers, he believes most clubs in Ireland’s 10-team Premiership will sell between 100 to 500 away shirts while Bohemian might sell 20,000 or so a season. While other Premiership clubs are lucky to fund 5% of their annual budget through jersey sales, Bohemian is anticipating it will earn about 40% of its revenue from socially conscious shirts that have featured the colors of the Palestinian flag, a tribute to Bob Marley and the slogan “Refugees Welcome” beneath the silhouette of a fleeing family.

“There’s an awful lot of financial logic to this,” said Lambert, 37, whose club funnels much of that profit to migrant-aid groups, charities for the homeless or others providing medical assistant to Palestine.

At a time when many public-facing companies are beating a hasty retreat from anything that smacks of woke culture, Bohemian decided to proudly and defiantly double down on causes from gay marriage and climate change to Palestine and Ireland’s harsh asylum policies. While that has met with some pushback — and has earned the team the nickname “We put any cause on a jersey FC” from some detractors — it might also have saved the 135-year-old club, one of the oldest in Ireland.

A dozen years ago Bohemian entered its worst stretch this century, one that saw it lose more games than it won while finishing in the bottom half of the league table three straight seasons and narrowly escaping relegation. The club’s finances were in worse shape.

“We were bankrupt,” Lambert said. “We had a part-time team; people earning 50 euros a week, 80 euros a week.”

For many games then, Dalymount Park, the team’s 100-plus-year-old stadium in Phibsborough, a diverse neighborhood less than two miles north of Dublin’s center, was two-thirds empty. By 2015, the club’s membership had dropped to 420.

The purpose of the club, an 11-time Irish champion, was to win but, Lambert said, it also had a responsibility to be a force for good. Bohemian was doing neither.

“That led to a bit of introspection, I suppose, in terms of what do we stand for as a football club? What are we about?” said Lambert, who joined the team’s board in 2011, at the start of its slump. “If you’re a club with an awful lot of money, you grow your fan base by winning a lot of trophies. If you don’t have that, what’s another way to appeal to people? The human, emotional level.

“If you engage somebody on a human, emotional level, you’re more likely to get a loyalty from them over a period of time.”

Lambert knows a little bit about marketing since he’s co-owner of Bang Bang Cafe, in the shadow of Dalymount Park — as well as host of an eclectic podcast that emanates from the cafe — and is the manager of the Irish Republican hip-hop band Kneecap. (The Irish Film and Television Academy chose a biopic about the group as its country’s Oscar submission.)

The plan he helped develop for saving Bohemian didn’t depend on the generosity of a deep-pocketed owner but was, like the team itself, a grassroots effort that began about a decade ago when the club began working with street artists and sold its own beer, christened an in-house poet and began doing community work.

“The strength of most football clubs is how wealthy the owner is. Our strength is how many people are a member, how many people are willing to come to a game,” Lambert said. “That’s our real strength.”

Next came the jersey campaign, although that got off to a rocky start in 2019 when the club placed an image of Jamaican singer Bob Marley on a shirt — and promptly received cease-and-desist letters from the late singer’s representatives. They later came to an agreement allowing Bohemian to re-issue the shirt.

“We kind of outlined to them what we’re about, that we’re a not-for-profit entity and I think they really liked that,” Lambert said. “They respected the history, respected who we were.”

A second shirt, released during the coronavirus pandemic, was white with thin red-and-black diagonal lines and the profile and a man, woman and child sandwiched between the words Refugees Welcome. The club’s crest is above the left breast and the understated logo of O’Neills, an Irish sportswear manufacturer and club sponsor, is on the right side.

With that shirt, meant to call attention to Ireland’s controversial “direct provision” system of housing migrants, gaining international news coverage, Bohemian has seen its merchandise sales increase more than 2,000% while average attendance last season was just 260 fans shy of the capacity of Dalymount Park, where the corner flags are rainbow-hued and a large red-and-black antiracism banner hovers above the supporters’ stand.

The club’s membership, which has grown 600% over the last decade, has been capped at 3,000 to ensure there is a seat at the stadium for all the owners. There is a long list of people waiting to join them.

Bohemian, which kicks off their nine-month-long league season on Feb. 16, has revealed the first of its three 2025 road jerseys. It will carry the logo of the Dublin-based punk band Fontaines D.C., which will open a 26-country tour next month. The home shirt, unveiled last fall, is a red-and-black-striped jersey with the emblem of a local furniture store across the chest.

“We exist in a small football market, but when it comes to values and our ownership model and our structure and our potential to derive new fan bases, to raise money and profile for causes and issues, we can be bigger than Man United,” Lambert said. “Clubs very often don’t take a position on anything. They like to be agnostic because they’re making money.”

Bohemian, on the other hand, makes money precisely because that’s not its main goal. Its aim is to make a difference.

“That enables us,” Lambert said, “to have sales that far outstrip our attendance. To become a part of the global football landscape, in a small way, on issues that aren’t directly related to the players on the pitch.”

⚽ You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.