Ten days after leading the University of Nevada at Las Vegas Rebels to an upset victory over the Kansas Jayhawks, and just days before a Mountain West conference rivalry game against the Fresno State Bulldogs, UNLV quarterback Matthew Sluka announced he had played his last game as a Rebel and would be sitting out the rest of the season so he could preserve his final year of college football eligibility to play for a different university.

College football players deciding to end a season early to preserve eligibility isn’t new. Players who suffer some type of injury that hurts their performance do it all the time. But Sluka wasn’t injured. He was embroiled in a contract dispute of sorts with UNLV. Sluka claimed that he had been verbally promised $100,000 to transfer from Holy Cross, where he had been Patriot League Offensive Player of the Year in 2023, to UNLV for his final year of college eligibility, but had so far only received $3,000.