Andy & Ari On3 - Transfer fees in college football?

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

We’re excited to announce we’ll be hosting Andy & Ari On3 LIVE from the Draft in Green Bay on Thursday, April 24 and Friday, April 25!•      We’ll be set up right outside the famous Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field at the Culver’s Great Wisconsin Tailgate.•      Born in Wisconsin, Culver’s is the home of the legendary ButterBurger, Fresh Frozen Custard and Wisconsin Cheese Curds—there’s no better representation of America’s Dairyland than that.•      We’ll have some very special guests throughout the Draft that you won’t want to miss, so stay tuned for more details and get ready for a weekend of fun, made fresh with our friends at Culver’s. (0:00-1:01) Intro: Presented by Culver's(1:02-2:43) Introducing Mickey Joseph(2:44-16:22) Grambling coach Mickey Joseph joins(16:23-17:50) Culver's(17:51-28:32) Matt Brown of Extra Points joins(28:33-39:04) What does the future of college football look like?(39:05-54:19) Ari's BYU Theory(54:20-1:02:59) EA Sports College Football '26 Update(1:03:00-1:06:11) Matt Brown's Rules for life(1:06:12-1:08:50) Conclusion Welcome to Andy & Ari On3! On today's show, we are visited by Grambling Head Coach Mickey Jospeh to cipher through his comments that he made that made him somewhat viral last week. We talk to him about transfer fees and more. Later, Matt Brown of Extra Points joins to give us the full rundown on all things going on in the House v. NCAA settlement case. What does the future of college football hold? Also, Ari really gets in depth with his BYU theory with Matt. Would BYU ever seriously buy a national championship?Watch us LIVE on YouTube, M-F at 9:30 am et! https://youtube.com/live/efSGBOl2yIc Interested in partnering with the show? Email [e-mail] Hosts: Andy Staples, Ari WassermanProducer: River Bailey 

Welcome to Andy and Ariane 3 presented by Culver's. We got a good show today. We have a coach with a, an idea that sounds a lot like common sense and also kind of sounds a lot like soccer. And then we've got one of our favorite experts on a lot of things. Matt Brown from Extra Points is going to join us and he's going to talk about the House versus the NCAA case. He's going to talk about a question that you've had about BYU and Matt is very well versed in BYU politics and how everything works there. And then also Matt is also one of the best reporters in the space of the college football video game.

He knows more about the college football video game than probably anybody else in the media business. So we're gonna talk to him about what to expect in the next version of the college football video game. But first, we have Gramley State head coach Mickey Joseph, who went a little viral last week when he said this. We understand, we understand. I think the kids understand if they're here and if they're sophomores and they have a

big year and a group of five or a power five approach them and they have the finances to pull them out of there and I can't match the finances, then you know what? They're going to go. That's part of it. Coach has been doing it for years. So we shouldn't get mad at coaches when these kids make decisions to take care of their family. Like I said, I'm going to say it again, coaches been doing it for years.

But I also think they need to be a buyout. If they move up, if they move up for me and go to group of five and power five, I should get kind of a compensation for that. You know, so NCA be listening to me, I need a buyout. So Mickey Joseph lost some players to group of five schools, power four schools. And his thing is.

You got to pay a buyout when you hire a coach. Why not pay a buyout when you take a player? And Ari, it sounds like the transfer fees you have an international soccer like when Bayern Munich wants to buy a player from Tottenham Otspor, if the players under contract, they pay the club money and then pay the guy whatever his salary is. Yeah, it is an interesting theory and concept. And, you know, we should probably cut to the interview before we dive really into it. But like I see a lot of upside to it. And I don't know if there are some things that could get kind of hairy when it comes to that, which we can get into for a few minutes.

Yeah, I mean, the players have to be employees, which is something the schools have resisted forever. But I do think it's kind of moving that direction anyway. So let's let's talk to Mickey Joseph, though, because he makes so much sense talking about it. And it's like, Oh, okay, what? Just figure out how to do this. Here's Mickey Joseph. We are joined by Grambling Head Coach Mickey Joseph. And Coach, you went viral last week. When you revealed your idea and you were doing some interviews and speaking out of frustration, having lost some guys to bigger schools

in the transfer portal. But when you said that, did you think, oh man, this is going to blow up? Not at the time, but to me, when they came up with the transfer portal and people started expressing how they were losing kids to the bigger universities with a substantial budget more than ours, that's when the idea came in my head, one morning drinking coffee, like we just need to have buyouts. And now it's gonna be like, do you really want the kid to be a starter or you want the kid to be a backup? So if you put a buyout in there now, cuz when you take away from me,

you take away my wins cuz you take away my good and, and of course you taking it because he's, he's ready to go. He's not a, he's not a project. I don't think they come in to get projects. So, um, that's, that's what, when I think about it, you've already done that, that, that part of the work. Exactly. I don't, I don't, they're the developing and you know, the, the getting the football IQ up, up you know so I did all that so you you take a finished product and I think when you take a finished product you know you you get to you need to pay for it I mean if you want a birdhouse and you don't want to put it together you've got somebody to put it together for you got to pay them you just described Ari who I don't

want to pay somebody to put something together. Yeah, I've never once done anything like that. I'm the enemy here. I am. What I think is so interesting about this is, Mickey, you've coached at literally every level. You've coached high school. You coached NAIA. You're the head coach at an HBCU and at the FCS now,

but you've also been at LSU in Nebraska. Uh, you've seen this every way it can go. And how, how hard is it in this environment to build a team and keep a team playing together and cohesive at the FCS level? Well, it's tough. cohesive at the FCS level? Well, it's tough. It's tough because you you know as a coach that as soon as this kid put some numbers up that you're probably going to lose

him because now people start coming at him and you know, give him, you know the money that you know, the going to revenue share right now. So give him the money that they have been usually we can't match the money. So it's hard but I always tell my coaches, you know, keep, keep the try to keep your room loaded and the one thing I did when I was at Nebraska, I kept the room loaded. And it was, it was situations like if one of them left, left and went somewhere

else, you know, I think Trey Palmer was my prime example. People asked me when he went to the league, how come he didn't play a lot? I said, because he played, he played behind Justin thing with Racing McMath. How come? Because he played behind Jamar Chase. But you got to try to keep your rump stacked, but it's hard to keep it stacked. If every time you get a kid out there, you put up some numbers and you lose them. But I advocate for the kids. I think it's a good deal for the kids. Like I said before, coaches been leaving on their own for years and paying buyouts. But with the kids, you know, they deserve this opportunity. The NCAA came up with this rule. And I think if you don't jump in it, you know, you're gonna lose it. So

it's hard keeping a roster together. And we just had a roster meeting this morning and yesterday, you know, about kids, potential kids that we probably can lose and how are we gonna replace them? So, you know, it's hard, but you know, it's part of the game right now and you got to accept it and get in the fight or you're gonna lose. Mickey, playing devil's advocate here, just was wondering,

if you're taking players who are transferring down I'm going to go to the next question. Mickey playing devil's advocate here just was wondering if you're taking players who are transferring down in a world where this came to be where there were buyouts for you being compensated for losing players. How would the perfect world work when you are

taking players from higher levels who are coming down? You know, you're saying how how would you how would it be perfect for me to repeat that again? Because you broke up. Would you pay Georgia if you took a couple guys that they didn't want or that, you know, that were on their roster last year? Well, what you talking about, when a guy, when a kid, you know, transferred down to me is not usually for money. It's usually for playing time so he can go back up and get the money.

So usually he don't come, he don't leave a power of five that come to me for money. He comes to me for playing time because he hadn't been playing. So I can offer him that, but I can't offer him five grand a month. And he knows that, and I make that clear upfront, but I can offer you playing time. So I think that helps. So usually we get them better, and then they go back up. You know, Andrew Jones came from Memphis, came to Grammler now he's at Ole Miss I I think you know, probably the the school will have to figure something out where the

Athletes would be employees and have contracts before you can do something like this But I do think it's interesting and I don't know how many people have said this sounds like soccer Because that's that's what it sounded like to me with the transfer fees that they have in soccer. Yes, and somebody brought that to my attention. I really don't know too much about soccer, but they said that happens all the time that you have to pay buyouts

when kids transfer to other programs or other organizations that they have to pay buyouts. But yeah, it sounds like that, but I think that's the only way that you really can make it fair to the guys like at FCS level. And the big boys, I mean, when you dig down in my pot,

you should know you dig into an FCS kid. So, you know, help us out a little bit. Let's give it, give us the buyout and we'll put it right back in the share revenue. Go ahead. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. I think somebody, you know, said that the money was going to me. No, I don't want the money. I want the money to go back into my, to my revenue. I don't, you know, I would never take away from these kids.

But I think it's fair that these kids get to leave like this. But it's hard for FCS to survive. How do you hold emotions together when you know that holding your roster together is really, really difficult, but then also being excited and happy for the kids that came through your program, developed and got those opportunities. Is that kind of a mixed range of emotions for you? No, because I'm happy for the kids. I'm happy for the kids because, you know, one thing about college football, they have to leave sooner or later because it's graduation. It's

not like the league they can stay for 10 years. So they're going to leave sooner or later, you know, so you're happy for the kids. But I'm just saying like, if we're going to do this and we're going to pay them, you know, I just, I never understood that you pay amateurs, you know. So if you want to pay them, let's treat them like professional athletes. You know, we're already on point with the online classes. So it's not like they're going to in-person classes. So we're already on point with it. So let's say, let's make them employees of the university when you get to share revenue. And you're just like me. If I leave, I got to pay a buyout to Gramlin if I leave. So if we're going to do this with them, let's do it the right way and make them professionals,

because that's what they are when you paint them. They're professionals to me. And I think it'd be interesting because if you became known as the program who developed guys who were diamonds in the rough and sent them to those places, you'd probably get a better class of recruit that would want to come. But also if those places had to pay on the back end, you'd have a pretty good pot to pay from at that point. Absolutely, I have a pretty good pot to play,

but I also can continue to develop them for you because now I can get the nutrition that they need. I can get the more strength coaches that I need. So I can give you a better product than I'm giving you right now. To me, let's all work together. Yeah, that's an interesting thought process of helping people with less resources have more resources because even though it might be painful to pay, you're also doing yourself a service by having a more complete product when you go for it. I never thought of it that way.

Yeah, because if you come once, you're gonna come back twice. It's like McDonald's, you can go to McDonald once you like it, you're gonna go back. So help me out a little bit and I'll send you back a better product. Because you always gonna get those kids at the FCS level that's gonna develop into FBS kids. But along the way, I need the resources to make sure when you get them that they're ready to go. And I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to do that

because that's the game right now. And you can't take anything away from these kids. It's fair. That's what the kids, that's what we're doing for the kids. And that's what the NCA came up with. So let's all get it together, put our heads together and let's let's work together for these kids Can we just make you the commissioner and you just get this done? This is this is the most common sense. I've heard in like a two-minute span Covering this thing for 25 years. Well, I think that some guys sometime guys, you know Don't want to express themselves and they you know, they'll call me and say Mickey. I'm glad you said it I'm like no, I'm not trying to be negative and

I'm not trying to draw attention to myself or the Grammys state. I'm just speaking facts. I mean, I was part of a good recruiting class when I went to Nebraska. So I know about being recruited at a high level. And I coached at a high level at LSU in Nebraska and also coached at a lower level with Langston at the NAIA. So I understand what happens at kids, coaches on this level and at the NAIA level

that we don't have many resources, but it's just common sense to me. And I think that's how we need to approach it. And everybody might not agree with it, but I understand that because everybody has their opinion. But this what I think we should do you know and it's still going to be up to the NCAA and Congress I guess you know but um I I know I have some dudes that you know coaches that that back me on it you know and I also know some guys that you know that's on a power fire level would love to say okay let's give him the

buyout because I'm gonna go back and get this player. I'm gonna go back and get that player and that's okay because that's why I deal with the G League for NBA. That's what we're gonna be. That's what we are. But we're gonna continue to coach at Gremlin. We're gonna continue to develop kids at Gremlin and we're gonna continue to try to get this thing back on track. But we know at the end of the day, once we put those kids out there, we know who's gonna leave and who's not gonna leave. Speaking of just the whole grambling of it all, I gotta ask, what is it like having the same job

as Eddie Robinson, maybe the greatest coach of all time? You know, sometimes I sit there and I pinch myself that I walked the same grounds that he walked on. But I think it was in 84 or 88 when he was with Congress. And he said that the tail is going to wag the dog. And he also said that it's going to come a time when we're going to have to pay these athletes. So for him to foresee that in the 80s, and it's happening now, he's probably one of the

he's a genius to see that, you know, but I think, you know, he said it and it's happening now. But, you know, just to work at Gramlin, you know, it's a prestige program, you know, you had Eddie Roberts, you had Doug Williams, you know, Broadway, you know, Hugh, Roger Fobbs, just guys that, you know, high character guys that's coached here, but, you know, the walk in the shadow of Eddie Robinson, I'm blessed. I'm blessed to be here at Grammys. I'm excited. And we just got to continue to work,

like I told my staff this morning, we just got to continue to work. We got to continue to just grind it out and put the best possible team that we can on the field. And I think we're getting there. You're going into our second year things seem a little different we changed up some of our our mission statements with our team and some of our core values because now we know how to operate. So we're going to continue to grow but to be here at Gremlin is a dream is a dream

and I appreciate it we have some fantastic fans we have a wonderful administration we are working together to get help me get this thing back on track. and I appreciate it. We have some fantastic fans. We have a wonderful administration. We are working together to get, help me get this thing back on track. Well, Mickey, thank you so much. And this has been an absolute pleasure. And I'm telling you, Mickey Joseph for commissioner, let's make it happen.

You can keep coaching. I know you want to coach, but you can keep coaching. We'll just let you run the whole thing too. I appreciate you guys for having me on. Of course, thanks for being here. Thank you. That is Mickey Joseph and Ari. I think this could be doable.

There's probably some ways. We'll talk to Matt Brown about maybe some ways that something like this could happen because he's an expert on this too. But before we get to Matt, I gotta tell you about what we're doing. Mention the shows presented by Culver's. So Culver's is bringing us to the frozen tundra

of Lambeau Field. We'll be up there Thursday, April 24th and Friday, April 25th for the draft. We'll be set up right outside Lambeau Field at the Culver's Great Wisconsin Tailgate, born in Wisconsin, Culver's the home of legendary Butterburger, fresh frozen custard and Wisconsin cheese curds. There is no better representation representation of America's derelien than that, but obviously they're everywhere. I got one right down the street from me in sunny Florida and had a delicious, delicious cookies and cream

frozen custard the other day. So head to Culver's, support them, have a butter burger, have a frozen custard, have some cheese curds. And yeah, Ari, we're gonna be at the draft. I know, can't wait. It's a appropriate place to be in Wisconsin with Culver's, but also the place that we were meant to be. So I can't wait to get out there

and I'm super thankful to Culver's for bringing us out there and it's gonna be a great couple of days. Well, you've got players moving into the NFL at the draft. The way they're paid and the way that's all structured college is getting closer to that not there yet, but took another pretty big step. There was a hearing on Monday for the house versus the NCAA settlement. It sounds like it's going to get approved, but to help us make sense of all that and also to talk about the college football video game because we had to ask

Matt Brown from extra points joins us now We welcome Matt Brown from extra points one of the few people who can explain in plain English exactly what happened in That house versus the NCAA settlement hearing on Monday I I tried my best on Tuesday's show, Matt, but I wanted to bring an expert in. And for those who don't know, Extra Points is a publication that is deeply followed within the industry.

Matt's readers are lots of ADs, lots of college presidents, and then people, because you're the best reporter on the video game, people who love the video game and are like, wait, why am I learning about Sacramento State trying to go to FBS? That's exactly what it is. It wasn't what I intended, I think,

when I started this publication, to have two extremely different groups now learning from each other, but that's where we are. And somebody has to do the antitrust and video game and Foy would beat, so you guys could focus on who's actually gonna win football games and where people are going. I'm happy to take that bullet for everybody.

Well, it's actually great too, Andy, just because Matt is here, this has suddenly become a Good at Math podcast because Matt might be the smartest person we've ever had on the show. He's not good at math. I mean, you gotta be when you're talking about- Better than us.

Yeah, better than us. I was betting it over under the other day in women's basketball and Andy was watching. I'm like, what's the total score here? Like where are we at? I could even add the two scores together. So happy that you're here, Matt, known you for a long time

and have really admired your work from afar. And I'm so glad that you're here. Thanks. Let us talk about the worst pregame show in the history of the National Championship game, a seven-hour hearing in a courthouse in Oakland. Judge Claudia Wilkin, who's presided over all of these cases against the NCAA, all the major ones, basically talking to the lawyers for the plaintiffs,

which are the former players and the lawyers for the NCAA, and trying to decide if she is going to approve this multi-billion dollar settlement that they want to put through, which also purports to create the framework for how schools will pay athletes for the next 10 years. Matt, what did you take away from that hearing? This might make bad sports radio, but my biggest takeaway is that I don't think anything super major has changed here. This industry has been operating on the assumption

at least for the past three months, if not longer. But this settlement will ultimately be approved. And nothing that I've heard over the seven hours where I was kind of dipping in and out and reading what everybody else was doing, nothing I heard there made me think otherwise. If this is approved, I think a good way to explain it would be we have what is functionally

a CBA, a collective bargaining agreement, for how elite athletes for football and basketball and elsewhere are going to be paid. But because it isn't an actual CBA, there could still be other litigation. The NCAA, particularly Charlie Baker, and you've said this over the last year, this is the hope

that once we get the house settlement all approved and finalized and we have these contracts going out, that we're going to be protected from litigation for a while. And that's not going to happen, whether this is approved or what isn't. So I think for everyone else, you know, we'll get a final approval likely in the next two or three weeks, but we will still be continuing to talk about these broader issues of antitrust and Title IX and who's in this particular class and who isn't and who has what kind of litigation relief. That's just going to be part of college football off seasons, I think, for the next couple of years. Like these legal issues are not done. These issues are not done. The thing that I just don't understand as a court layman, um, is why are we in a position where we're not just trying to settle something that actually does

provide litigation relief. So we can just, just, just get to a point where it is what it is. Everybody lives under these rules. Like I feel like that's it. Maybe it's going in the natural progression of what it needs to in terms of the time that it takes minor changes to make big changes, but like why not just hit the home run right now

and just get to a point where everybody can agree and we can stay out of the courtrooms and talk about football on April 8th. Yeah, and I even say this as a guy that makes his living writing about courtrooms and the not football part. I would love to be talking about something else too. And in large part, because of the folks that I talk to, which I think are similar to the people that you guys talk to, whether it's ADs or coaches or administrators or agents, anybody in

this ecosystem, they can live with a bad rule. We can all go to the bar and we can complain about a bad rule and you can try to build systems around that rule. But at least you know what the rule is. And the way I kind of would compare it to is targeting. Nobody likes how targeting is set up. Everyone's gonna complain about it. You wanna tweak it every off season, but you understand what the rule is and you can coach around it and you can build that into how you plan things.

But for NIL, for roster management, for compensation, for contracts, any of these things, we don't really, even now, still know what those rules are. And one of the big reasons why it's so difficult to build something that's lasting is about this legal system. We have a long lasting or longer lasting collective bargaining agreement in the NFL or the NBA, where we know how long a free agency period is, how much somebody can be paid, and what those salaries are, because of a collective bargaining agreement, which you can have because the professional athletes are employees. And then they organize as a union and then they had

this, the, the, the, the bargain, the bargaining. When college athletes, they might be paid like employees, they might be functionally treated like employees in many ways, but they're not legally classified as such right now. And they don't have anything close to that kind of, of kind of labor organization. You've got athletes.org, you've got a couple other smaller groups, none of them have anywhere close to a majority of current football players. So you don't have the people or the law to build a larger ecosystem. So then you kind of have to attack it piecemeal, and that leaves it wide open for trial lawyers

or other activists to continue attacking it in the courtroom. This will be the best next step towards something more holistic and long-term. It's interesting to me, Matt, because the discourse has changed now. It's, oh, these greedy athletes need to, it used to be all these greedy schools need to loosen up, and now it's these greedy athletes

need to stop moving around and have some rules. And my answer to that is always the schools are the ones that don't want to make them employees. Yep. Now as an athlete I wouldn't want anything to change because the system is great for me now but like are you getting a sense because I'm not and I don't understand why like the ADs and the presidents of the schools like don't they understand if they, it's probably better for them if they make them employees at this point?

It's funny. And I'm not the only guy to have made this remark in public. I actually think if you had a system where FBS football players and division one men's and women's basketball players were employees and they created a union and they went to the negotiating table. Be the weakest union in sports. They would get their ass kicked. It wouldn't just be the weakest union in sports. If you're one of the weakest unions

globally because we think about who makes up a college athlete union theoretically it's people under 25 who are changing jobs every two or three years and immediately graduating it would be the youngest and most transient group period. It's part of why like McDonald's doesn't have particularly strong unions, the way things are set up in this country. I think an important thing for us to understand though, we're talking about this,

is I think when you and I, and maybe on the show, when we're talking about college athletes in our head, we think of Ohio State football players, or Duke basketball players, or Purdue basketball players. But there are tens of thousands of college athletes. And there's a lot more schools that are like Ohio Dominican or Abilene Christian than they are Ohio State or Texas.

And while I think this model absolutely is the best case scenario if you are a top 1,000 football recruit or an elite men's or women's basketball player. I think you can make some pretty credible arguments that this system is not as strong as it used to be if you're a swimmer or if you're in anything at Utah Valley or certainly not anybody in Division II or Division III. And figuring out who we're talking about when

we mean college athlete as we're trying to create these kind of labor policies or decide how the law impacts them is really quite complicated because you don't want to disrupt I think that the scholarship program the college access program that comes with college athletics because that this is how tens of thousands of young people in this country go to college it's like the GI bill essentially it's also how Olympic teams get populated and trained and because we'll have to pour more money into that system if we'd like to keep winning if this

works, but it is nobody talks about Andy. Nobody thinks about the Abilene Christian lacrosse player. All they think about is that person doesn't make any. We shouldn't be thinking about them because. The Ohio State football player in the Texas football player should be in a system completely separate from those people because yeah, what the Abilene Christian lacrosse player is doing is taking part in a charitable organization and the other one's taking part in a business.

But it's all in an umbrella. Honestly, I think, you know, not to put Zach on the spot here, I think the people at Abilene Christian would probably tell you the same thing. Like I've heard this from many FCSADs saying like, we like and respect what Ohio State's doing. We understand you know why they have an athletic department that has more staffers

in a Central American country. We understand why they're pushing the things that we are, but that's not our world right? Like we want to be competitive on the baseball field and maybe we could beat Ohio State in baseball, but we're not going to pretend we're doing the same thing. So we don't want to be held to the same rules or the same standards, whether that's for compensation, whether that's for medical, whether that's for any of these other things, because then you'll put Abilene out of business.

And people like me, because of my job, yeah, I probably have to think about the Abilene lacrosse player more than the typical. Do they even have a lacrosse team? Are we making that up? I think we are. They might have a women's team, I'm sorry. Abilene Christian as have a lacrosse team? Are we making that up? I think we are. They might have a women's team. I'm sorry.

I believe Christian as a recovering lacrosse dad, I'm telling you right now, great enrollment driver. Lacrosse parents have money. Lot of Range Rovers in the club lacrosse parking lot. And you don't need a lot of physical infrastructure to start a program. They'll pay tuition. That's why there's so many women's lacrosse programs, right?

Or so many beach volleyball programs. Yeah, but I think that's what makes a lot of the solutions to these general problems legitimately very complicated. And it's a big reason why so many conference commissioners and the NCAA themselves are saying we need the help of Congress to create some kind of national standard or to protect us from some of these lawsuits in part because they're not just about college sports. They're state labor law questions, they're state higher education questions, they impact a bunch of different things. Matt, if I could jump in here, I'm gonna be honest with you. I became a sports

writer because I like sports. OK. And being on the Ohio State beat for as many years as I was, it was a good training that it's very rarely about sports. And it's more about all the things and the craziness that goes on off the field. But I know that there's a lot of minutiae right now, and it's hard to break through.

I think a lot of our listeners are probably in the same boat as me of like, you know, I can't possibly, I don't have enough Stanema or even smarts to like break down the legal documents and try to figure out what each individual case is. So can I just ask you straight up based on what you understand about the litigation and the system that we're headed towards, what does college football look like in 2028 and what does it look like in 2035? Like what's your best guess?

So people that are just trying to figure out like, what's the major issues here? How are we gonna solve it? What's it gonna look like? Can you like break that down for people who don't have the bandwidth to try to keep up with the day-to-day litigation results? Yeah, and I'll say, I have a lot of empathy

for people who feel that way. And I get it too, right? Like, even though this is my job, I still care about what happens on the field. Many people watch college football because they never want to think of the words, Senate Commerce Committee Chair. And so they go to this. And I would just say, Brother, I get it. I do this for a living, but I don't want to think about that. Yeah, it's still part of that world. So like, we can't pretend it doesn't exist. But I understand that's your, that's your

immediate impulse. What I also tell people is like, if I had a really, really functional crystal ball in this stuff, I'd be working for Playfly. I wouldn't be in the newsletter business, right? I'd be making a hell of a lot more money or charging a lot more because there's so many unknowns. But I think broadly, in 10 years, I think we are moving towards

a more explicitly professionalized world where the Ohio States and Penn States and Texases of the world are relying less on car dealers or tech barons or third-party people to bankroll their department and moving towards a system that looks closer to what the NFL or the NBA use, where they're paying for it. And we're going to see this a little bit now, assuming House is approved and schools could do some element of revenue sharing. But there's going to be an increasing incentive

to try and build more control around this system. And the way that you do it is by taking more ownership of the payment system. And the whole bagman economy that used to exist, the more that gets run through a W9 system that the university controls, the more control they're going to have over. And that's, I think, going to take time. And it won't be immediate.

In 10 years, whether that new group is still tied to colleges, whether it's run half by a private equity firm, half by Learfield or Roc Nation or something else, or ESPN, I don't know. But I think we are moving further and further away from the fiction that this is just an extracurricular activity. Yeah, I feel like the tea leaves are getting a little clearer to read about how to because that's what people ask me is like, how does it work? How

could you make them employees? How can you separate the football players from the volleyball players? Here's the simplest way. The next college football playoff contract runs out. Everybody forms Super League Inc. The players are employees of Super League Inc. Just the football players. And that's how you do it. Like, they negotiate with the players who play for these schools of Super League, Inc

their employees of Super League, Inc and they have rules that they set up and I Bet Super League Inc sells its rights to ESPN and Amazon Prime and Netflix and Fox and makes a ton of money That's definitely one way this could go and I've been talking to a couple other industry people. That way does get around some of the onerous labor challenge like issues that come with making employees of schools. You can't have them be employees

of the state of state universities in states that have wildly varying labor laws. Yeah, right. Like, you know, I'm in Chicago. I'm a son of the Midwest. Most of these states have stronger organized labor traditions. You go to South Carolina or Utah, they're Pinkertons.

Like, you're not going to be able to have a state employee collectively bargain in South Carolina the same way or in Texas the same way you can in Illinois or Massachusetts. Moving them into employees of something else the same way they do for the NFL or the NBA is one way to potentially get around that. There are other hurdles. I think it's reasonable to ask at some point, what

is the baseline level that a consumer wants to be tied to a university for them to still care about things. But you can make them employees of state of college football, Super League Inc. and still make them go to class or still make them be enrolled. There's there's you can write whatever you want in the contract. Yeah. The this is this is not really a criticism. I think it's just just a reality. American higher education, I have learned, is a lot of different things.

Many of them, I think, beautiful and tied to what I think it means to be an American, and I feel really great about it. Some of them are enormously frustrating. And one of the enormously frustrating things is American higher ed, not good at doing anything quickly, not good at being especially innovative on the business side.

And so there are things that you and I and some of the people we talk to in the private equity world, or the corporate world, or the legal world could say, just do this and this will solve some of your issues. I'm not even saying like you'll sell 25% equity stake to the Saudi royal family or anything. But there are solutions that exist. And it's politically impossible to do those things quickly when you're involving so many, not just gigantic state schools, but like really huge private schools. You can't move things,

you can't, things don't move quickly at Stanford or BYU either. That's just, I think, a reality of how these organizations are set up. And I think that we lose track too of the fact that like when you talk about the NFL and the NBA that we're talking about 32 teams and here we're talking about thousands of institutions, right? Like, I mean, and they're all different sizes, different locations. Or even if it's Super League Inc, we're talking about, who knows, 50, 80, we don't know. So I'm hoping 80 Andy, I'm speaking that into existence. I am too. I am too. I'm not optimistic. But Matt, I do want to talk about something more immediate, like from that hearing on Monday, the one thing

I thought came out of it that seemed very substantive, and I was glad to hear it, is Claudia Wilkins seemed very adamant about phasing in the roster cap so everybody doesn't have to cut their walk-ons right now. And I know some schools have already started to do it, but this seems like such a common sense solution. They're going to fix this, right? I'd have to hope so.

We were talking about this before we hit record. But I know of a couple of ADs I could call, or people in Indianapolis I could call, who will give a full-throated defense of the Deloitte third-party deal vetting system or some other less popular parts of this settlement. But I've never heard anybody say, by God, we absolutely have to get football rosters down to 105 right now. This whole thing is going to fall apart if we don't jettison walk-ons immediately. And I understand intellectually why those caps are there at all.

But this does seem like a common sense solution. And it's frustrating that it's happening now because, like you said, many schools have already begun to cut those walk-ons. And people's lives have been changed and upended over something that probably should have been addressed months before. But that's also part and parcel of how a lot of this process has worked over the last two months.

I don't think there's an FBS football coach out there who wouldn't love the opportunity to grandfather some of their walk-ons in or slow walk to this level, not just because they'd like to have an injury result, but because a lot of, a lot of programs really depend on those extra, you know, 10, 15 guys for culture setting purposes. It's useful to have somebody who's a no star killing himself in practice next to a five star just to remind them of the people in the locker room of what you're trying to build.

The more you professionalize and make it transactional, the harder it is to build and sustain that culture. Well, also they're just humans. Like they like these people and they don't wanna break their hearts, which maybe you don't have to, which would be great. I hope that's the case. And the, the other piece of the, before we move on, cause Ari has a great question for you on another subject that you're an expert in, but the other thing that seemed, seen that came out to come out of this is scene that came out to come out of this is this idea of the judge was very uncomfortable with this hypothetical 10 year old who's playing streetball right

now. It doesn't have any idea he's gonna be a great college basketball player someday. They have no access to legal counsel to if they have an objection to this nor would they even know why they would have an objection to this, but the future members of the class, how do they register any sort of displeasure with the system once it happens? And you tell me, do you think they're gonna have sort of a rolling thing where each year

the new members get a chance to say, hey, I got a problem with this? I think that's possible. My maybe less popular answer is I think in the case of the 10-year-old, it's going to be moot because I can't see the system lasting that long. I think that there will be other challenges on specifically on antitrust grounds to this settlement a year after it's approved. We may have to do the song and dance every year to satisfy Judge Wilkin, but it's also possible that federal law will change

or that other legal challenges will happen or that the Super League Inc is created that blows this whole thing up to begin with. There's very little administratively, I think in college sports post Board of Regents in 84, where things have been static for that long. What specific legal- That's the TV case, Oklahoma, Georgia,

sued the NCAA, kind of set everything in motion. It said that really kind of supercharged the idea of big money in college football in the early 1980s. So there's so many things I think over a 10 year period that the three of us aren't even foreseeing right now, that I imagine will make this moot. Is the show mine? It's, yes, all right, it's time.

It's show time. Ari's been dying to ask this. He's brought this up on the show a couple of times and I don't have a great answer for him, but you understand this world really well in this particular school very well. And so Ari, the floor is yours. Okay. Well, just so you guys know, I have done a lot of thinking on this and I've actually water boarded Matt and a personal phone call.

It is true. Because I have really gone down the rabbit hole. And again, maybe this will all be moot once the system changes but in a world where high net worth individuals or entities can back a program I've wondered what has stopped BYU and the Mormon Church which is worth billions of dollars from deciding that they want to promote the faith, promote the university, promote LDS people by making the best college football team in America. And I think that would be a really efficient and good way to promote your faith, because people love football and people love watching winners. And, you know, BYU was very good last year without this. So Matt, who is Mormon and understands the church better than I would, why can't that happen? Why won't that happen or can it?

It is a good question. And these are conversations that I mean, if I go on the radio in Metro Salt Lake, I get asked the same thing. These are things that are discussed in LDS circles. The way as I kind of understand it, that the university itself is funded is in large part through church funds. And those church funds help keep BYU's tuition extremely low for the kind of university that it is. They also pay for educational programming in developing countries

for other schools within the BYU university system. There's three, there's two other BYUs that don't have major athletics and other kind of programming. And there's enough money out there between the tithing that that faithful Latter-day Saints pay and investment assets all over the world that if they were liquidated, yes, theoretically, they could have a payroll that would be higher than the Phoenix Suns if they wanted to do it. Part of the challenge from church headquarters is what does it profit us if we have an extremely good football team that wins championships full of people that aren't LDS or that are promoting a value system that they don't necessarily uphold. BYU, this is something I say with love. I did not attend this school. My wife did. Many of our

closest friends did. It's not for everybody because it has a strict honor code that's actually enforced. This is not a place where you can easily have a beer and be a regular college student. It is a place where I wouldn't be able to go take a test right now because I haven't shaved in two days. It is a 95% LDS place. And so if you are not LDS, if you are black, if you're of a different ethnicity or from a different cultural background

than the dominant culture there, it can be difficult. It's not impossible. There are people from all different religions and races at BYU. BYU's quarterbacks are Jewish. One of, I think, three Jewish kids on campus. So it can be done. But if you decide, all right, my payroll is $60 million, I want to go shopping here from the on three five star list, there's probably not going to be a single LDS guy there. And if you build a roster that's 80% not LDS, are you able to effectively use that as a promotional tool when that's not your team anymore? Right? I imagine, you know, to kind of flip this, Notre Dame football's ability

to evangelize for Roman Catholicism is probably different now than it was in 1963 when everybody was a Polish kid who was an altar boy. Now that's not the roster anymore, their student body is not going the same way. I think that's part of it. Also, there's a math part. For basketball, you can have a handful of high net worth guys, not affiliated with the LDS church,

but people that are within Utah's booming tech or banking industry, Silicon slopes. You could pay a couple of guys a lot of money to come play basketball for one year, or maybe less. Which they're doing. Which they are doing to bring you in there. Then it's like, can you go without coffee or pre-marital sex for eight months? Can you go to this difficult academicarital sex for eight months?

Can you go to this difficult academic institution where you might have to drive 40 minutes to go get a good haircut for eight months? And some people will say, yes, especially if you feel that that staff, which I think now they can very credibly say, can prepare you for the NBA, which is something I don't know Bway you could have easily said in the 90s or the early 2000s.

For football, it's a different thing. Then it's like, can you do that for three years? Because you can't be a one and done in football. Or, Amy, can you build a strong enough roster in the transfer portal of guys who are juniors or seniors built around your returned missionary core to build that kind of roster? I think that's much harder to do.

So it's probably easier in a lower roster sport to bag man your way to elite talent in football. I do wonder this. So let me ask just because I don't know the answer to this, Matt, and you do. But if you are a BYU student and you are home for summer break and you drink beer and have free marital sex,

does that still extend to when you're not on campus? Or, and like I also too, like this might sound stupid and maybe we're going too far down the rabbit hole, but like how do you even police whether somebody's had sexual contact with somebody? Like I don't even understand how that works. Well, and also if the payment is enough, I mean there's a lot of married people out there that have to abstain from some of these things unwillingly and they're married. So like I just I don't know if the paycheck is big enough. I do think that you would. And then when you say how do you monetize or promote your faith, think about how many times Kalani Sataki will be on a podium at the CFP and people ask him about the honor code and people

ask him about Mormonism and assembling a roster, seeing the logo people go Google be white. I don't know. Like, I think that like even like their quarterback last year was Jewish and he is a man of Shevitz and I'll deal with it doesn't mean that we're not talking about BYU on the show every week because they're awesome. Like, I don't know. I think that like, and also too, there are really good players like the number what what's Ryder Lyons ranked? He's a top five quarterback in the 2025 class. Why isn't he just going to BYU, no questions asked? I feel like they could definitely do it.

It's right there. Yeah, so I think you raised some interesting points, right? And I'm not saying this right or wrong. A lot of it is going to depend on the person because there's going to be some individuals who either were raised LDS or maybe in a more conservative religious environment. What we're describing is no problem at all. If you were a vacation Bible school kid in Georgia and you were really

involved in Protestant churches and you check out Mormonism, I think you're going to find that the music's worse, but culturally a lot of the stuff's very similar and then it's no problem. And there's going to be some people that are going to say, it doesn't matter about the money because I might take it, but I might not be able to stay eligible or I would be really unhappy. It wouldn't work out, right? I got into BYU as an undergrad. It wasn't the place for me and I was still an active Latter-day Saint at that point. I decided not to go. Some people, they'll pick BYU over Yale because this is the most important thing to them. I don't know if you can get 70 people to accept that kind of deal

to build a truly elite football roster. And when BYU was at their most elite in the late 70s, early 80s, their roster was not nearly as actively Latter-day Saint as it is now. But you could still, you could still have a very good team and they've been a very good team. I think it's probably easier to do in basketball or potentially some women's sports where the roster is just not as large. Well, the number one hang up here, Andy, I think is BYU has the ability to do it and maybe even a willingness to do it to certain extent because they've shown in basketball, maybe third party, whatever,

but is that I think BYU wants to win with LDS players. And that's the biggest thing because I think they could win without them. But if the majority of their roster isn't, then you can't get around that. But you can get around lifestyle and all these other things. Because I did a quick Google search. You know what got this started? There was a 60 minutes segment about the LDS church like two years ago or 18 months ago.

You might've even seen it Matt about like how much the church is worth. And because it's a church, there's no actual public record of how, but like the estimation is anywhere between $350 billion and a trillion dollars. Like there's enough money there. Like if they want it, it doesn't have to be everybody gets.

But I think this comes back to everything else. Everybody since all this stuff started. Well, somebody's just going to buy a national championship. Okay, when's it going to happen? Phil Knight hadn't been able to do it. He's worth billions. Like the Mormon church, maybe they could do it, but maybe they can't.

I think that we're talking about the extent of the national title. Is the Saudi public investment funding to try to buy a national title? I mean, put it, yeah. But listen, there's not gonna be a national title. The big 12 is there for the taking, and there's multiple programs that are trying to take it.

I think BYU could own the big 12 in football if they decided they wanted to write the checks. But you also think Colorado could own the big 12 in football if Dion would just go on high school visits. Yeah, I also think that you just got convinced over the weekend that Houston could do it, with their talent and I'm saying it's there for the taking, somebody could do it.

And I honestly, like if you stacked up all these, if everything went right for Dion and everything went right for Houston and everything went right for BYU in my perfect world. BYU has got the fattest checks. Texas Tech has some checks too so maybe that's that but like BYU has the most off the field challenges which is assimilation into a culture that you might not fit into or you might not want to live. assimilation into a culture that you might not fit into or you might not want to live. But they also might, I don't know, we'll have to do a comparison between oil baron and, and, and also too, like are there tax benefits? If you're taking, if you're an employee of a, of a religion, like I, I don't know, like if you really go down the rabbit hole, like it seems to me that if they decided to turn on the water hose, they could do it. I, I, I mean, if we're being honest here, I think if somebody in Salt Lake decided to turn on the water hose for they could do it. I mean, if we're being honest here, I think if somebody in Salt Lake decided to turn on the water hose for a lot of different things,

they could do it. I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here. If LDS Church decided we want to start two other BYUs, we're going to start one in Texas, and we're going to start one in Illinois, and we're going to fund them to conquer three different leagues over a 10-year period if they wanted to. Yeah, I think they could. We could have six other liberties that were residential on campus if...

It's more Loyola. This is the Loyola model. Sure. The Loyola model, the Franciscan model, they're right. There is the money there. I think the one thing I would very gently push back on, especially so I don't get some phone calls from Provo about this, I don't think it's necessarily that they want to win just with LDS players, which is hard because there's just not that many of them. But they want to win with individuals

that are very comfortable sharing values associated with the LDS church. Like the last couple of years, like BYU I think has had multiple Muslim players, sharing values associated with the LDS Church. The last couple of years, BYU I think has had multiple Muslim players, guys that were fasting during Ramadan during high level basketball games. And I think only the most hardcore orthodox person

in Salt Lake would be upset about that. And there's a non-trivial number of Muslim students at BYU because, hey, you gotta go to some place where you can't drink, and that's in a more conservative, traditional religious format. There's a lot of similarities, even if some of the cultural differences might be unfamiliar. The school's thrilled to have a Jewish quarterback, but also a Jewish quarterback who's comfortable talking about that faith and talking about religious traditions and sharing that with people I think if it was we have the money to drop to get 70 more secular people Who are just really good at football and are isolated from our campus community and don't fit in and don't want to fit in I think I think that would be a challenge the same way that they don't do that with With professors or research staffers or at any other church institution.

They wanna do it very well. But I also feel like that also opens up a wider net of people. Well, sure, I mean, there's what? 14 million Latter-day Saints across the world. Is that right, or Lyons? Yeah, half of them are active. Yeah, and it's like, even if you wanna change,

and we don't have to, we could do that. I'll do this to you all day. So I know we have time. But even if you want to change the conversation from winning a national title or owning the big 12, the one thing I'll never understand is why doesn't BYU back up the branch truck for the Mormon players? That is also a good question. And I want to try to answer this in a way that's not gonna get me yelled at. I can say this, I think, and no one can yell at me, but like, I was born and raised LDS, I was active for 36 years.

My people are cheap. We are a minivan people. The Rift is just drilled into you as like a defining LDS characteristic. And there's a reason that so many of them go to BYU which costs like $6,000 a year. You've got six kids in a minivan and you're shopping at Costco. It's like fundamentally, culturally not the same kind of world as SEC football recruiting is. And like this is a challenge to get those people to donate to BYU's traditional like, you know, scholarship support funds or to buy minor league baseball tickets or anything.

And there's gonna be some, there's gonna be some section of LDS kids that no matter how much money you throw at them are never ever gonna wanna go there. Whether the way, cause I mean, shoot, probably half of Utah's fan base is very active LDS. There's a lot of LDS people in metropolitan Phoenix, as I'm sure you know, in Orange County,

who may root for other places. I don't think BYU could have paid me enough money to get me to go there as an undergrad, because I wanted to have a beer and do things a little bit differently. And Utah's super far away from Columbus, right? Like, yeah. I bet you would have gone if there were two commas attached to it.

Honestly, I don't think I would have, because I wouldn't have graduated. I think I knew about myself that even as a relatively active and committed and went on a mission, I was not going to be happy at this place. My mom was a Brazilian political feminist. My people don't live in Utah County. I would have been really unhappy.

And those kind of folks exist, just like not every altar boy wants to go to another day. Some of them want to go to Boston College. Some of them want to go to Arizona State. Like our people, like your people, like all people, contain multitudes. Yep, yep. Okay.

And you contain multitudes professionally, Matt. We're gonna talk about your other area of expertise before we let you go, because I think our bosses would just be really mad if we did not take the opportunity to have a video game conversation. You report better on EA Sports College football than any other reporter out there

because you have the power of the FOIA and you find out what schools are sending to the fine folks at EA and this creates some very interesting back and forth. What are we hearing about the 26 game? I think people are gonna like it, right? I think that I've heard a lot from developers

over the course of like the last year from people around the company was like, we had a bunch of other ideas we wanted to do for the first game, but it turns out making a video game is really complicated, expensive, and time consuming. And we had fun ideas that we weren't able to completely get into this edition, but we might want to try and revisit for future editions.

I think the one I'm allowed to say, and this is not me saying it's going to be in Football 26, but one of the ideas that was originally in the pipeline for the last game and that kind of had to get moved around are ways of how can we incorporate fan and message board culture into the video game? Whether that's a tie in with a company like yours

or in a dynasty mode where if you get upset and then now here's like the digital version of like Hogville or tiger dropping screaming at you. Like that's part of the culture I think we want to celebrate too. Didn't work out. Maybe it's something you move on a little bit down the line. I would look at the first game, which destroyed

every commercial expectation. And I think for most of us, we would say, that was really fun, is that that is kind of the proof of concept. And now we have a year of data and realize, OK, here are some of the gameplay wrinkles and issues that we had that we can try to fix. We spent a gillion dollars in all of these hours making the stadiums.

Now that those are in a better place, we don't have to redo that again every year. Now we could spend more time on marching band uniforms, which were procedurally generated last year, and now they're trying to get information to maybe make that more realistic. Or now we have more money that we could potentially spend on in-game audio,

because there weren't that many licensed songs in the last one. So I would expect a similar product, but one that I think you're going to be able to see that there was more time and attention put into what happens after the game actually starts, rather than just what it looks like on the sidelines. Yeah, I actually thought the game was great

for what they did. I play it regularly, and I think they did an amazing job. And I think they found a good way to thread the needle of making it what it used to be. Because the kids who grew up playing it, it felt like we were playing it again. At the same time, making it modern. I give them a round of applause for what they did,

and I can't wait to see how it evolves from there. I remember having the conversation with some of the folks who make the game last year, you're talking about the licensed music because the in-game atmosphere is something they pride themselves on. They want you to feel like you're at that stadium. And I'd asked about,

one of the first things I did when they let me test it was I made the team take the high team. Yup, I wanna see Enter Sandman. And then I'm hearing the music and team. Yep, I wanna see Enter Sandman. And then I'm hearing the music and I'm like, that's not Enter Sandman. And they said, we had to be pretty judicious because at that point they don't know how well it's gonna sell.

And some of these songs are incredibly expensive to license. So they got the Zombie Nation song which can be useful everywhere. Like they didn't have Seven Nation Army which would be useful in a lot of places. Like if you get Mr. Brightside, you could use that in Michigan, but these would be incredibly expensive songs to license.

But now that is a. Multi billion dollar franchise. I think they probably could. I would say you're probably not going to see next year's game. sell as many units as this year's game did. Yeah. Unless it's ported to PC, which is not something I've heard anything about over the past couple of months. But even if it does 80 percent of the numbers, that's still an enormously successful commercial product,

especially because the annual development costs will be a little bit lower. So you're right. That is one place where you can do it. One thing that I would expect, and this was something that was kind of mentioned to me a couple of times last year is they want to get more NFL stadiums into the game and make it easier to do neutral site events because EA already has those assets and has some of that stuff done. What else can we use that format in that makes sense to share and to hear? The other thing that I'll mention,

just because I get asked about it every time I do any kind of show, is people ask, well, are we going to get a basketball game now? And what I used to tell people is probably not, because EA doesn't really make a high-level basketball game at the moment. And the previous college basketball games were discontinued because they weren't super commercially successful and you had the litigation problems. And I'm not

saying that there's going to be a college basketball game next year produced by either EA or 2k or anybody else, but I will say that in the licensing world and in the video game industry there is more excitement and interest in finding ways to utilize college athlete IP beyond just this specific type, whether that's basketball, whether that's baseball. We sell this a little bit on the school IP side with MLB the show this year with 10 schools, whether that's hockey or whether that's potentially completely different titles. These are things that were fun hypotheticals two years ago. Once there's a little bit more hard and fast math, it makes those much easier conversations

to just do like NFL blitz with college uniforms for all we know it could be anything. It could be another is 2k error is basketball harder to do because like EA doesn't have the basketball engine like EA had a football engine with Madden. Yeah, to that has the basketball engine. That is on a high level what video game people have said, but that doesn't necessarily mean that EA can't do it or that another, a third company or a fourth company can't do it. And there's lots of different ways to make a game, right?

Ari, I don't know if you played this when you were little, like when I had a Sega Genesis, I had college slam, which was not a actual good like, like basketball simulation like NBA live was it was NBA Jam reskinned for college basketball and you can play with Georgetown and do a nine point dunk from from half court. We could do that for college football and make it a five on five or a seven on seven game and I think people would like

it. There's not a football manager for college football but major studio. There's a couple of indie games out on steam that do that But a lot of people play football manager think yeah, I don't know if you guys do it I'm sure I know a lot of your colleagues do or play out of the park baseball Fellas that's just a gentrified spreadsheet and it sells two copies every game Now that there's like an ecosystem to more easily acquire and pay for licenses for athletes and for schools It makes designing these other kind of projects like legitimately possible. Whereas in 2022, if you had pitched that to

somebody they go, well, that's fun, but like we can't even get to the drawing board for it because of the licensing. I can't wait for this next game. It actually was such a good bonding experience with my son because it immediately became his favorite video game. And I obviously love it because I'm in this world all the time. So to our friend, Ben Howmiller in Maitland, Florida at EA Sports, Godspeed.

Cannot wait to see it. I haven't been able to bust your kid because I've been wanting to do it. I haven't done it yet, but I wanna welcome him to the real world with a nice ass kicking in the video game. It's the best part of fatherhood whether your children are boys or girls or however old they are. This is one of the sacred traditions that's passed down to us right? Like helping our kids ride a bike for the first time, walking them to school in the beginning and then just

beating the tar out of them in Mario Kart or in this. My girls aren't super interested in football. They have hopped on the sticks with me a couple of times and I'm not ashamed to admit, I've hung a hundred on my 10 year old. That's part of my right. See, my 15 year old destroys me at this point. So he plays a lot more,

he has a lot more time to play. It will happen to all of us. Just like eventually we beat our dads in arm wrestling. Eventually our children will do this to us. Yeah. Unfortunately, he also squats more than me now too. So that's it's going badly. Talking about this because I took my daughter to Dave and Buster's over the weekend and I was trying to get tickets and I was like taking the things out of her hand and playing. Um, we're gambling and we're gonna win. And you gotta ask Matt who is a multifaceted human being. Yes.

Our patented question, I'll let you do it, but we didn't prep him for it, we'll see what we get. This could be it. I'm excited about this and I'm glad we didn't prep him for it. We end most of our interviews with this question. What is your rule for life? Or it could be several rules for life. Like how, it can be serious, it can be fun.

However you wanna do it, we'll give you some examples. I have three rules. Never complain about free beer, never complain about free food, never skip leg day. Ari has a very, very important rule. Yeah, my rule is never eat at a restaurant that specializes in multiple types of cuisine. I don't know if you have the picture that I sent to Ari. Yeah,

sushi and barbecue. Marquis. And just so you know, I don't know if you've seen the major successful motion picture Teen Wolf. But these are coach finstock's rules from this movie. Never get less than 12 hours of sleep. Never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city. Never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body.

And if you stick to that, everything else is cream cheese. So I don't know if you have something. I know it's hard to spring up on you, but it could be wholesome. It could be funny. Is there something that you live by or something that you think? Or is your North Star?

You know, it's fine. I'm trying to imagine like the the my version of the Ron Swanson pyramid of greatness. Right? Um, I listen, those are those are good rules. In my neighborhood in Chicago, we call them everything stores, and they're which are which are pretty common where it's you know seafood and Pizza and hot dogs and steak and it's just just frying everything and at two o'clock in the morning Perhaps potentially after an adult beverage or something that might be great But not a place you want to eat at one o'clock in the afternoon because you forgot to eat lunch But especially not at our age. It's a good it is a good a good rule when I was working at SB nation That's like a professional North Star. There's a lesson that my old editor Jason Kirk taught me he's now at the New York Times. And he said, there's just two rules

to being a good college football writer. Always blog the realignment thing and always blog the video game. And I followed those two things and that's part of why I have a nice job because that ends up being 60% of what extra points has become on some level. When I'm done with you guys, I'll

make some phone calls about what Sacramento State's doing. And by God, people are going to read it. I think for a more personal one, though, maybe it's not as funny, but do something for a living where you feel good about how you spent your day when you go home. Like when I talk to my wife who does not care about sports in the least, which I love about her

and talk about what I did, I don't feel like I have to be embarrassed about anything because I'm not doing any like weird SEO black magic or clickbait stuff or anything. Like, no, I wrote about anti-clickbait today. I wrote about antitrust law. I wrote about labor, butbait today. I wrote about antitrust law. I wrote about labor. But I can feel good about it.

Even if 200 million people aren't necessarily going to read it, I know that the people that help run this industry or are teaching this industry or participate in it do. And I'm able to buy Lunchables for my kids and pay my mortgage. And I think of, no matter what it is that we're doing, if like I'm gonna go take pride in it

and I'm going to be proud of how I've spent my time and what I've accomplished, I think we'll have a better internet. I think we'll have a better lot of other things too. Love it. Everybody. Even if you don't wanna sign up for Extra Points, get the newsletter. You'll be a much smarter sports fan every single day. I read Matt's

newsletter every day, but extra points also if you want to go very in-depth into college sports, it is spectacular. It is one of the greatest sources of information. And pioneer of a newsletter faction of people out there, right? Like you were one of the, he was one of the first, or we've had some, you know, journalism is a hard place to be these days. And you, I think, were one of the first, or we've had some, you know, journalism is a hard place to be these days. And you, I think, were one of the first journalists that I know that had a successful newsletter that has shown people who are looking for jobs or looking for ways to use their reporting

and their ability to make a living, that they can do it in other ways besides counting on some big conglomerate to pay them. So congrats to you on that, Matt. It's been awesome to see your career flourish. Thank you very much, fellas. I appreciate the, I really appreciate the kind words. I've been a lucky guy, which isn't something

I thought I would say after being laid off or struggling to find footing here for a little while. Cause I came into this business a little bit differently. But if you pick a niche and do it, do what you do well or do your best at it, least, and are honest about it. I've been lucky that people are willing to support it. And you do it very, very well. Thank you so much, Matt.

It's my pleasure, thanks fellas. That's Matt Brown and Ari, I'm even more excited about the video game now. I'm ready to go. You wanna talk about a guy who knows a lot about a lot. That Matt Brown, he's a character, it was really awesome'm ready to go. You want to talk about a guy who knows a lot about a lot that that Matt Brown is a he's a character was really awesome to talk to him and I am still kind of semi hopeful that BYU will figure it out and you know, create a national championship roster, but it seems

more dire than I thought it was. But I'm ready for the satellite campuses for them to just take over every conference. BYU Texas sounded pretty electric. I'm not going to lie. BYU Houston. No, but that was an interesting thought. And it's always good to talk to people who are really plugged in in those areas and try to see through theories and thoughts.

And I do think that there are probably some roadblocks there that I didn't consider enough. And it was good to hear his perspective on that. It was great. And then, of course, the video game. If anybody wants it, I'll hand you an L anytime you want. So it's good to have both of those guys here. And it was a hell of a show.

A lot of our favorite people joining us this week. Got another one coming on Friday. Our friends T Bob a bear former LSU Center lecture here on the radio in Baton Rouge. He is one of the one of my favorite people. Just the ultimate combination of football guy and complete nerd. He's the best. but one of my favorite people, just the ultimate combination of football guy and complete nerd. He's the best. Talk to him tomorrow and we'll talk to you tomorrow.