There is a whiteboard in more than one staff room right now with two columns on it: agencies we trust, agencies we don't. Coaches check it before they return a call.

Nobody sold that system. Somebody got burned enough times to build it.

Cody Cater is UpNext's COO. He played safety at Wake Forest through the portal's growth years, and he now sits on calls with programs and agencies nearly every day. Episode 2 of our interview series put him in the chair, and his read picks up where Episode 1 left off. In the spring, an agent told us the market cannot always see who is real. Cater watches what programs did about it.

In the college space, he says, "anybody can be an agent, represent any player tomorrow, or claim to represent said player and end up talking to the general manager at any program." There is no college version of the NFL's agent certification. So the calls keep coming. The line coaches repeat to him most:

The first response is walls. "A program will kind of put up its walls because they don't know what's true," Cater says. "Maybe it's actually legit. But ... they really won't open up and talk ball." The wall punishes the honest agent along with the fakes, and it costs programs players they should be recruiting.

The second response is the one that matters. "A given program will pick one to three agencies or agents that they trust," Cater says, and route the conversations that matter through them. The short list. The whiteboard is its physical form. A market this size started building verification by hand, and by hand is the part that will not last.

How the whole thing clears, why the short list compounds, and what it costs both sides:

The agent bill slips past recess. The Protect College Sports Act, which would require agent certification and public agent registries, will not get a Senate floor vote before the August recess, per late-July reporting out of Washington. ACC commissioner Jim Phillips called federal legislation college sports' "last hope" at ACC Kickoff. So what: the registry everyone says the market needs is still a bill. Programs already run theirs on a whiteboard. The market is not waiting on Washington.

Sarkisian says the cap part out loud. At SEC Media Days, Texas' Steve Sarkisian walked through letting rostered contributors leave to create cap room for incoming transfers. So what: the sport's biggest jobs now describe roster building the way operators describe it privately. In Cater's words, "it's all about [the] cap and managing spend." The cap decides the roster, and it never stops deciding.

Portal prep has left the calendar. On our calls this month, programs were requesting agencies' January portal lists before camp opened. The January window is being decided in July.

How an agency gets on the short list, from the same tape. Three things put a shop in the trusted column:

Next Tuesday, the program side gets its own framework: the four moves the steady staffs run, from the baseline watch list to the process they hold through a bad season. The Window Plan.

Anybody can be an agent tomorrow. The market is organizing itself around the ones who are real today.