Why We Started With Reviews

I could have started CFA with a lot of things. A podcast. A forum. Coach ratings. A petition nobody reads. I started with program reviews because I believe most former college football players think their program does a shit job of engaging them after they’re done playing. And I think they’re right.

I’d also love to be wrong. If there are programs doing this well, I want to put them up where the public can see them — and create some reputational risk for the ones that can’t say the same.

The Feedback Problem

Here’s the thing about being a former college football player with opinions: there’s nowhere productive to put them.

You could air it out publicly, but public airing invites noise, not signal. I can’t post “it’s a beautiful day” without somebody reminding me that it wasn’t such a beautiful day in 2013, when Taysom Hill ran for 250 yards and three touchdowns on my defense in Provo. He’s not wrong — it just has nothing to do with the weather.

And a lot of guys don’t want to stick their neck out and get blackballed by their program. I don’t have that hesitation — I live a twenty-minute walk from a stadium I played a lot of football in, and I still waited three years to get back on the season-ticket list for upper-deck seats because I don’t have enough “loyalty points.” But I don’t expect everyone to be that cavalier. So anonymity is built into the site, on top of the verification requirement: only players who actually played can write anything here, and each player decides what the public knows about who said it. Pseudonym or real name — your call.

The Accountability Gap

Universities feel no reputational risk for how they treat former players. That’s the whole problem in one sentence.

Most alumni programs are indefensible, and the people running them know it. But nobody has organized the feedback in a way that forces a conversation. If a hundred former players rate a program’s alumni engagement a 2 out of 5 while the rival down the road sits at a 4, that means something — not because I said so, but because the guys who played there did.

I’m not building an advocacy platform, and I’m not here to tell programs what to do. I’m here to let market forces play out. Former players put organized feedback on the record. Programs can respond or ignore it. What they can’t do anymore is pretend they didn’t know.

Why Reviews First

Coaches change. Facilities change. Academic support changes. Those are tied to a window of time. Alumni engagement — how your program treats you after your eligibility runs out — is the constant. Whether you played in 2004 or 2024, the only call you’re getting from your program is the one asking for a donation.

Reviews also do the most important thing CFA needs right now: they get former players to sign up, verify, and engage. The review is the entry point. Everything else — coach ratings, transfer-portal surveys, NIL, an annual survey on the state of the game — gets built on that foundation of verified former players. So it makes sense to start by asking about the one thing I know you’re uniquely qualified to speak on the moment I know you played: how your program treated you.

The Verification Wall

A lot of platforms would skip verification to grow faster. We made it non-negotiable.

The most valuable thing CFA has is that every piece of content comes from someone who actually played. Let that slide once and the whole thing falls apart. Fans, commentators, reporters, program admins — they all have their own platforms. This one is ours. Verification is how we keep it that way.

What This Is Actually About

There’s no magic moment where one guy posts a review and everything changes. That’s not how this works. The thing I can’t engineer — the thing that only happens if it happens — is a thousand former players doing the same simple thing: showing up and saying what they actually think.

If you played college football and you have a perspective on how your program treats its alumni — good, bad, or complicated — this is where it goes on the record. Not for me. Not for the university. For the guys coming up behind you who deserve to know what they’re walking into, and for the guys next to you who’ve carried the same opinion for years with nowhere to put it.

Our programs have been keeping a tally on our loyalty since the day we left. It’s time we kept one on theirs.