TJ Harden carried the ball twice for Seattle against Dallas on August 15. Four days later he was in the college transfer portal.
A court order made that legal. The money made it worth doing.
The mechanism
The restraining order issued in Louisiana state court on August 19 covers 16 football players. Unlike the earlier Colorado injunction, it reaches players who have already signed NFL contracts, and it opens the transfer portal to them.
What it does is restrain the NCAA. It does not compel an NFL club to release anybody.
The constraint
To take a college roster spot under the order, a player has to be released by his club by September 1. NFL cutdown day is August 30.
The whole thing runs through a narrow window on someone else’s calendar.
The number
Tampa Bay guaranteed Jack Pyburn $115,000 as an undrafted free agent: a $15,000 signing bonus plus $100,000 of his 2026 salary. He started 11 games at LSU last fall, with 52 tackles, 5.5 tackles for loss and 2 sacks.
The NIL Standard’s estimated median for a projected Power 4 starting edge rusher is $879K a year.
Those two figures measure different things. The first is guaranteed money at signing. The second is an estimate of annual market value, taken as a median across 68 programs rather than a read on Pyburn himself.
The roster
- Jack PyburnEDGE - LSU
Tampa Bay. On the roster, in the transfer portal.
The clearest illustration of what the order changed: under contract and in the portal at the same time.
- Anthony HankersonRB - Oregon State
Seattle. On the roster.
- Dae'Quan WrightTE - Ole Miss
Cleveland. On the roster.
- Wydett Williams Jr.DB - Ole Miss
Arizona. On the roster.
- TJ HardenRB - SMU
Seattle. Waived, in the transfer portal.
Carried twice against Dallas on Aug 15 and was in the portal four days later.
- Zxavian HarrisDT - Ole Miss
New Orleans. Released.
The filing covers 16 football players. These six are the ones with a confirmed NFL affiliation and a record in our player data.
All six are marked departed in our data, and none of them carries a valuation. The model registered them as gone the moment they left college football, which until this month was the only direction that traffic ran.
If they come back, they re-enter the population, and we price them again like anyone else.