Shutdown Fullcast - Dan Carlin Needs This Computer To Defeat Mussolini

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Dan Carlin of Hardcore History lore joins Spencer, Jason, and Holly for a wide-ranging discussion:   - Just how much history can be blamed on Texas? - Which football rivalry is King Arthur and Mordred?  - Systemic failure in large organizations, no reason!! - Player buyouts and a workable trickle-down economics model!  - And of course, which two historical empires would you put in a Cotton Bowl? - Visit sunny preownedairboats.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

POMAYOR. AHA MINOWSKI-HOWSKI-Y- AND ALEANI-A-BOR-A-BOR-BOR-A-BOR-BOR-BOR-BOR-BOR-BOR-BOR. Welcome to the shutdown You are listening to the shutdown full cast. You are listening to the internet's only college football podcast. I am Spencer Hall. I am joined as I am every week by Jason Kirk.

Say hello, Jason. I'll say, the figures. Ooh. The events. Ooh. There's a whole other thing, but that's enough for now. And Holly Anderson. Hello, Holly.

Hello. That's a historical hello. Hello. It sounds full of portent. Portent and mystery and cheese fries, folks. Do you hear a great rumbling? In the east? In my chest.

Jason, how did you make this happen? How did you get the one and only hardcore histories, Dan Carlin, on the shutdown forecast? Yeah, let's give our credit where it's due, because you may have seen a lot of this take place via the shutdown fullcast Twitter account, but Jason did land this fish. I just tweeted at him. Bird catches fish. I tweeted at Dan.

I'm trying to hype you off. Come on. I understand. I understand the understatement is the comedy for me because here's what happened. I tweeted at Dan, knowing full well what would happen, knowing that our overlapped audience would pounce on it and that there would be so many replies that Dan would definitely see it. But all I did was I tweeted at Dan. Thank you to everybody who piled upon that tweet and told the illustrious, marvelously voiced Dan Carlin to come on our show. Because guess what?

Dan Carlin came on our show. Dan Carlin came on our show. He's right here. Yeah, we should listen to it right now. This is crazy. He's going to look at us weird if we don't throw to him soon. Yeah, they were all, our listeners were very excited about the idea of you coming on, so they'll love pretty much whatever you have to say.

Well, that's called we should have lowered the expectations, shouldn't we, and then overperformed. Oh, listen, our expectations. We have a high quotient of war dads in our audience, so. What is a war dad? The dads with the books about war. Yeah, we can explain the concept of war dad to you at length, So we drive the point home because it's a core

It's a core constituency for us. We're probably the only college football show That's ever had a halftime quiz Where we had the listeners name all the aircraft carriers At Midway in alphabetical order And someone nailed it? And a kid did it Like a 10 year old child did it

Are you sure that they didn't have a book in front of them though? How's the quality control on those kind of questions? We were at a library But there were no books within that room It was in Ann Arbor If that that does seem like more of a likely place for someone to pull off that fee maybe maybe i was there not that long ago it looks very smart on campus yes uh jason i'll let you i'll let you intro here well we are joined today by uh

one of the i think in the podcast universe one of the people that you the full cast reader have long most wanted to hear on this program uh we are joined by dan carlin of hardcore history and many other find shows, Dan, a Colorado Buffalo's fan, if I have that right? Graduate, yeah, alumni, yeah. Dan, you, your years, if I have the math right, your years at Colorado, they sort of happen to coincide with one of the peaks of historical Colorado football. Not when I got there. When I got there, the fumes of a one in ten season were still lingering and a horrible, you

know, all kinds of coaching problems and everything else. And the year I got there, it started sort of, you know, trending upward a little bit. But I don't think anybody was getting too excited, you know, with the Freedom Bowl or whatever the bowls. We were just happy to have any bowls. And then while I was there, we got darn good. And then the year after I graduated, that's when the national championship happened. Okay. So that's still nice timing, though.

You were able to buy a low. Perfect. I think perfect timing, actually. Yeah. Yeah. The Peyton Manning. Yeah. He did my thing.

He did 94-9. eight at Florida, basically, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's like a highly fortunate time to become deeply invested in Colorado football as, you know, the late 80s, the early 90s, right around there, the McCartney era. Since then, I think, you know, Colorado, the thing, at least right now, that most people are discussing Colorado in relation to concerns realignment, which I think was something that you were talking about on Twitter that I think, led to people saying, Dan, go on the forecast, Dan go on the forecast. How are you feeling

as an alumni and a fan of a school that's sort of caught up in the middle of all this and has been for, you know, decades now? What is your feeling on the national landscape? Well, I mean, you know, I feel like anything that I could say is obvious and we're all talking about it already. I mean, you know, and you don't want to come off like some person who's resistant to change and all that kind of thing. At the same time, certain sports lend themselves to the idea of tradition. And if it's not the opposite of change, it's definitely still somewhere on the opposite side of the ledger. And I feel like, and I think, you know, I'm echoing what a lot of college football fans say, if you get rid of the tradition in order to create a better climate for

high profile games or that kind of stuff, I think you're tampering. with what makes college football a sport that stands apart from, say, pro football. Because if you eliminate the things that make them different, well, then you just have an inferior version of pro football, don't you? With worse players, less time spent on plays. I mean, you know, and I'm not saying that that wouldn't be enjoyable because I go to minor league baseball games, but it's a very different animal. And I think you, I think baseball is a wonderful example of what can happen to a sport. Because if you're a baseball player professionally, it's never been better to be a baseball player. If you are baseball itself, and when I was a kid,

it was the number one sport. The entire country stopped during the World Series and even during the playoffs. And that's seven games sometimes. You can't imagine that to see what's happened to the sport. It's destroyed the sport in that sort of sense. So you can make the case that the sports better for owners, players, and TV networks than it's ever been. But from a baseball fan standpoint, you don't have that kind of white-hot intensity across the country like you used to. And many of the changes that led to where we are today is what led to the drop-off, I think, in fan enthusiasm, general fan enthusiasm.

Minor League Baseball almost doesn't even work as an analog for college football there because what makes minor league baseball great and what makes college football great is the regional specificity, which is what we're looking. losing again with these, you know, with these games that get moved to, one of our biggest gripes is moving these big high profile games off of campus and into these soulless NFL stadiums where, you know, you're not getting a tiger in a cage wheeled around the perimeter of the field. You're not having tortillas being thrown in the stands. And that's like that to me, and I know to a lot of our audience is where, where you really feel the losses in these,

like it's almost the higher profile you get the more all the interest in curves get machined out of it well and not just that i mean look i think maybe it's tough to talk to the next generation of college football fans and use tradition as something as as as you know that you should worry about losing those kinds of things if they're not already deeply invested in your soul you know um part of the things that makes college football great to me are the rivalries and not the contrived rivalries that the TV networks. I mean, look, Georgia, Florida is a national game any way you look at it. But, I mean, the kind of rivalries between like, oh, I don't know, you know, Missouri and Kansas. I mean, rivalries that really matter locally, but that the TV networks aren't that interested in because

California doesn't care, right? So, I mean, I think those are the things you lose when you don't realize how much someone in Colorado hates the University of Nebraska football. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, sure, Michigan and Ohio State hate each other, and that's famous, but lots of little schools or not big power houses hate their rivals, too. And that doesn't translate necessarily into the national game of the week. But I can guarantee you that in these communities, they matter more than the national game of the week in many cases. Yeah, this is like one thing I think that college football always needs, Dan, is you need an agricultural conference. this to me is why on the list of great conferences of all time Colorado's old chums in the big eight were like that was the coolest conference because pretty much everybody in that conference could be tied to a major agricultural export right like everybody in that conference it was like that's the cow university that's the soybean university right and it was always like I loved that particular brand of Colorado football one because Colorado was the only team that was not scared of Nebraska.

Up until K-State and Bill Snyder started bowing up to him, Colorado was the only school that consistently punched them in the mouth and went in with zero fear. And two, every single Colorado-Nabraska game looked like it was being played in Stalingrad. It was gray. It was miserable. It was usually on turf that I knew, like, if you, if you, it was like as hard as this table with concrete underneath it.

We need Stalingrad during. Yeah, Stalingrad during. Yeah, during. Yeah, not pre. or not post. But like I love that mystique and I feel like that to me gets lost in the translation to national television property. Well, let me correct you because Colorado was not the big Nebraska killer. It was Oklahoma. Colorado was, I mean, I remember, I don't remember, but I mean, I look at the standing. So in 1971 to back up your big eight statements, and this is typical of a history nut to be going back, you know, into the stats. like this in 1971 the number one number two and number three team in the country were all

from the big eight um and the only so colorado was i believe number three in the nation but had two losses one to oklahoma and one to nebraska i mean that's sort of the the big eight's heyday nineteen seventy one but i love the schools that i also love i mean the old southwest conference Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's basically Texas plus Arkansas, right? And I mean, to me, so the regionalism, I mean, I'm trying to think when we start dating the beginnings of the loss of the regionalism. Do we describe it as the disintegration of the old Southwest conference, in which case you can blame, as I have a friend who will blame Texas for all of this. Everything we're going to do. That's correct. No, it's all Texas as well. Yes. Absolutely right.

In other words, we would still have everything including the old Southwest Conference, if not for Texas. I agree with you in the sense. So, for example, you know, you had talked about the agricultural conference or all this. But within those conferences, there were individual self-images, for lack of a better word. So take Colorado. Colorado was the hippie liberal school in the agricultural conference, right? So when you have Iowa State, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, and then Colorado, Colorado is their version of the West Coast, right? They came to our school and we're all in tie-dye and dreadlocks

and all that. But then when Colorado moves to the PAC 12, well, then we're like, I mean, we're the conservative school almost compared. I mean, Washington State obviously, but I mean, we lose that identity as well. So, I mean, I feel like these things take decades to build up. And then when you rip the foundation out from under them, the schools become somewhat ruthless. And you lose, I mean, if we're not playing Nebraska every year, I just can't get up for Utah the same way. I like Utah. I don't even know I like most of the schools in the PAC 12. I had some real hatreds in the big 12 and the big eight. But I think that's something that, you know, it takes years of losses and ripoffs and last minute, you know, ref decisions to to build up that

foundation that makes you so passionate about college football. Dan, you mentioned dreadlocks. Did you take? I had, I had, I had very long hair. It was always, I never had dreadlocks, but I had very long hair. What was your game day outfit? Did you have a, did you have a look? Oh, it was the same look I wore every day. There was no dressing up back in those days.

It was the same look, probably black jeans, some sort of a leather jacket. I didn't look very tie-dye, but, but there was long hair for sure. Sorry, Jason, please continue. No, that's, Dan Carlin had long hair. That was a very valuable information. Oh, yeah. Had hair. How about that back in the day, right?

Hey, while you got it, let it rock. I think in terms of, like, dating when the regionalism started to fall away, like, I mean, you could throw around a lot of theories like the 80s when the nationalized TV deals kicked in. But you could also, hey, we could, we could pander a little bit. We could blame it all on Nebraska when the Big Ten, you know, the Big Ten adding Penn State. Sure, that makes sense. Those borders touch. The Big Ten going all the way to Nebraska.

Like, okay, Nebraska has some things in common with Iowa and so forth, but at that point, that's stretched the map so far and it broke into arguably an entirely different region. I think we could blame it all in Nebraska. I'd be fine with that. Dan, I guess you would be. As much as I'd love to blame Nebraska, I think it's Texas. I think it's, and here's the thing. Texas is, you know, there are certain schools that are tough to be in a conference with because they have an overarching. dominance. And I don't mean on the field as much as I mean administratively, booster-wise and all those kinds of things. And I think a lot of conferences have that that big juggernaut in it. In that whole region, though, that we played in at Colorado, Texas was that school. And when Texas wasn't happy, problems happened, conferences dissolved, and those kinds of things. So I think, you know, I'd love to blame Nebraska,

but I think that's a Texas thing with the Longhorn Network and a bunch of other deals. I mean, one of the things they're talking about in the PAC 12 now is something like unequal revenue sharing between schools. And that's the kind of thing that, you know, I'm sure a bunch of Texas fans are going to be angry. But that's the kind of thing that is sort of a Texas school in our conference would have been making noise about in a way that disrupted this sense of permanence and satisfaction. Like, we're fine. Nothing's going to, you know, undermine our conference. And then somebody starts talking about things like unequal revenue sharing, moving the conference offices to Dallas, whatever it might be. be. And some schools, you know, Nebraska is a proud football program. They can walk away from

deals like that if they're not happy. And I think you could make the case that from a financial standpoint, Nebraska made the right move. I think from a traditional standpoint, though, and Nebraska being what it was. And look, I can go into the weeds about how Nebraska had a program set up with an offense that was very specific where they could recruit people from all over the country who played in an offense like that and get them to go to Link. but I won't and just say that I don't think it was Nebraska's fault. Okay. That's very kind of you.

Peacemaking. I mean, they beat my team 62-24 in front of my own horrified eyes. Are you Nebraska guy? No, I'm Florida. I don't want to talk about Nebraska. I'm Florida. Oh, so did you have a bet? Did you have a bet on Nebraska?

Oh, no. No, no, no. I sat there and I watched that machine that you were talking about, absolutely chew up the Florida Gators. Oh, got you. Okay, okay. I thought we were talking about the 2001. victory that we had over Nebraska.

No, but if you want to, if you want to talk about, by the way, drop-ins, you know, because like if you're, I'm primarily an SEC fan, but sometimes you just managed to drop into a great moment in history. And that to me felt like, like, to use a historical comparison, that's the fall of the Berlin wall for me, football-wise, is when you flip over and you go, oh, my God, what happened to Nebraska? No, is this the car, are you talking about the Florida game now or the Colorado game? I'm talking about the Colorado-Nabrash game.

Okay, so let me set the historical stage for everybody. Yeah, let's go. Let's go. So the historical stage is you develop a hatred of a school like Nebraska, frankly, by losing to them a lot, right? And not just losing to them a lot, but like heartbreak losses, right? Things like when I got to, the Nebraska guys are going to love me at the end of this. I apologize. But when I got to the school, they had, somebody had Xerox, this is how long ago it was,

hundreds of flyers and posted them all over the school. And the flyers were a photograph from the. Nebraska game the year before, and it showed two monstrous Nebraska players who both went to the NFL, if I recall, laughing over a Colorado player at their feet whose leg is broken. And the Colorado player looks like he's about five foot five, about a buck oh five, and these giants are like. And this was supposed to motivate the hate, right? And it did. I mean, but every year there was something like that. So in 2001, we're not supposed to be very good. And Nebraska comes in number one in the nation. And we've had the whole 90s, even when we were riding high, Nebraska had a way to derail our seasons.

And if you recall the game, go look at it on YouTube if you don't. I think it was ABC and it's all Nebraska, right? The pregame show, the hype, nothing's about it. And then Colorado destroys them in that game. that is the greatest college football, by the way, moment of my life, even better than the national championship, the 2001 Nebraska game. And when you watch it, not only did we beat number one Nebraska, but they've never been the same. And the only thing that makes me feel bad about that is we've never been the same either. It's like one of those King Arthur moments where King Arthur

kills Mordred, but Mordred fatally wounds Arthur, and neither team has been the same. But to me, that's part of the, it's Gandalf and the ballrog, right? I mean, we, that this is where this is this is i don't know if you're going to say if we had to go out that's how i want to go out okay there we go there we go it was it was worth it just to take down big husk did did you know uh Nebraska hasn't finished a season ranked in the top 20 since 2010 but colorado has so arguably colorado is the superior program at the moment well we've beaten them last two times we played i'm going to go i'm going to i'm going to stay that until we have another game is it um like seeing nebraska you know in the big 10 where they are uh far from a bully and seeing

texas go to the cc where they will not really have any particular weight to throw around like they have is that satisfying at all like seeing them sort of go from high atop the pecking order to they're no longer going to be you know top dog well this is going to get into the weeds here but in a college football podcast your audience can certainly handle it so so this is my theories on all this because I've and I think the Nebraska fans I have a feeling that we're going to be absolutely in sync on that but the way Nebraska was able to pull off what they did and I was starting to allude to this earlier was they had a real connection between a kind of an offense that most people didn't run very much anymore and players around the country who were very gifted

in that kind of an offense right so they could go let's let's Nebraska's offense was more complicated than just calling it the option. But let's play with the option for a minute here. So if you're in Nebraska and you're considered to be one of, let's say, top three major option programs in the country, and you have a great athlete in Florida or California or Ohio who runs that offense as a quarterback or a running back or a lineman, right? Although Nebraska could recruit homegrown linemen fantastically. But you were going to look at the University of Nebraska as a place to go because it was perfectly suited to your skill set, right? And so all of a sudden, Nebraska is grabbing people from Florida.

Well, you get someone like Bill Callahan into Nebraska as a coach, comes in with a pro, and I know they love that name in Lincoln, comes in with a pro idea. We're going to upgrade this offense. We're going to modernize it and all these things. The problem is, though, when you take Nebraska's offense and you try to make it West Coasty, for example, well, all of a sudden now you're competing for these West Coast quarterbacks with a thousand other really. top schools because they play that kind of game. All of a sudden, you don't have your direct line to the top three option quarterbacks in America anymore. You're in Lincoln trying to recruit people that could be going to school in, you know, Florida or Los Angeles or a bunch of other places. I think they broke the machine. Nebraska had a machine. And you know how recruiting is. I mean,

once you sort of lose your step, it takes a lot to get back to where you were. And I don't think they've ever recovered from the Callahan era. And if I was Nebraska, here's the funny thing. This how you know I'm a old big eight guy. Not only would I tell Nebraska to go back to their old offense, I'd have Colorado go back to the, I'd have the eyebone going again. And I'd just, you say, we got to have a gimmick. We've got to have a thing that works for us. We've got to be tough to prepare for. We've got to be able to go after players that 10,000 other schools aren't competing against. I mean, you know, if you're, if you're Notre Dame, you don't have to be that way. But I think other schools had an image and an approach and a machine. And Nebraska's machine,

and this is coming from an enemy, was as impressive as anything that, that, I mean, and the big question for a guy like me is, can something like that work again? Because a lot of the people would say, you can't work in the modern era. Well, let's see. Let's put some top flight athletes in that offense and see how they can do. Nebraska should run the option is like, that's probably been one of our favorite takes for the last decade or so. So delighted to hear your own point. Well, go to Lincoln during a home game.

And I'm sorry if I'm yelling. I get excited about these things. Go to Lincoln in December and try to run a wide open passing speed offense. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. That's a home field advantage, isn't it? You said this might be a hard sell to younger generations of fans, but there is a wide streak of reject modernity going through at least our audience. Yeah.

Additionally, Dan, you should know this. A lot of people who came up on college football grew up playing a video game where they figured out the most annoying thing you could do to your opponent was run the option because it will make them cry and quit so it was a glitch in the game no accurately rendered the option has always been difficult to present in the EA sports games some some years it's like this you know because like you can a running play they can set it up so this should work 50% of the time you know a passing play they could set it up they could balance it realistically but the option is just very very difficult to balance and it's you know from year to year it's really uh it just takes a few weeks for players

to figure out like oh this this is unstoppable so like yeah so let my west virginia head take over you get pat white and steve slayton you start running that you start running that early rich rod west virginia offense and no one can touch you yeah and those are variation of the old power options and stuff but but look i mean stanford was making power football work not that long ago there are teams that still make power football work uh you know i would argue it's a little like warfare uh in the sense that there's offenses always evolving then defense is always evolving and there's this ebb and flow between the two and then sometimes when you when you've moved completely into the opposite direction going back to

maybe a more power game you know it's like you guys know this um if you're going to recruit i remember when we moved to the pack 12 and all of a sudden colorado had to recruit different kinds of linebackers right because you're facing different kinds of offenses more speed more spreads, whereas if all of a sudden you ran into that Stanford team that Jim Harbaugh was running and the strength and conditioning coach is awesome. He's at Colorado now. I'm hoping for miracles. But you could see that all of a sudden these schools with these 210, 215 pound speedy linebackers were getting chewed up by fullback. So in my opinion, when you go too far in one direction, it creates opportunities to move in the other. And after a while, having a fullback

becomes as hard to prepare for as playing Georgia Tech or Air Force, and their option game becomes as hard to prepare for. So I can safely say Dan Carlin is on team fullback, right? Team fullback? Yeah, I want a fullback and one, maybe two tight ends. Wow. That's burly. Yeah, can I talk you to an H-back?

Because I think this is the thing that the thing that fascinates me is that a lot of the time we're just remixing this. Mike Leach is fond of saying that they just run the triple, they just run it a different way. You know, they just run it with the handoff happens to be 10 yards. So the handoff happens to be eight yards downfield. He really doesn't view it as being any different right down to the distribution. And what I wonder is for a team like Colorado is once recruiting is done, that's a big given, right, that you can compete in recruiting.

Because Colorado historically, there's an issue. It's just not that many people. But once you get that done strategically, do you, want to be that innovator that takes the chance on that that might not work out or do you want to do something more conservative given you know okay well we've got decent talent maybe if we play it tight to the vest you know which what would you rather be like as a fan would you rather jump feet first into the deep end and say okay let's try something new or would you rather just say okay maybe we'd try to win 1917 I think it depends on where you are when you make that

decision. So if you, let's, if you go back to Nebraska again and it's 1999 and your offense is kicking butt and then you don't mess with it, right? You don't take care with what's working. If you haven't had success in 20 years, which is the Colorado formula right now, well, then in my opinion, if you're not taking chances, you're not trying. I mean, you know, you know, what do you have to lose, right? Go in there and try a four year experiment and say, because that's how, that's how the team that eventually won the national championship right after I left, that's how they did it. They came in and said, because they were running, I don't know if you call it pro style, but they were throwing the ball. And then Bill McCartney came in and said, we got to build an

identity and we've got to have equalizers. And then so every year it was, it was building off of something that was trying to create an advantage, right? Leverage and edge, things like that. And I think you do that when you need to. And so I would argue that for a team like Colorado now, okay, We're predicted to finish last in the Pac-12. So what the heck do you have to lose? I wouldn't play the game the way that everyone's expecting you to now because that's the same game they're playing and beating us with, right? And it also calls for a level of administrative patience

that I'm just not sure we see anymore. Yeah. That's now you're opening up a different window, which is, which is, you know, I mean, how much like a pro-operation? Like a four-year experiment, who gets that anymore, right? Yeah. Well, but see, I would argue that the four-year experiment that we're talking about here is a conservative one, so it's easier to pull off. I mean, you don't, you're essentially saying we need to do this because we're not getting

the top flight players. And we need to do this because we aren't, you know, massively outspending our opponents. And these are the things you do that may be a school that doesn't want to become, what do we used to say, a tiny school with a large football program attached to it. I think that's what schools like that do. And to be honest, and this dovetails back into how we started, This is one of the things I love about college football that's different than the pros. I mean, the pros have a limited number of teams. They all run, you know, slight variations on what they do. College has more than a hundred teams in Division I, right?

I mean, there's a lot of different offenses. There's a lot of different experiments. That's how sometimes, I mean, the funny thing is that the pro offenses used to migrate to college. But now because there's so much tinkering and experimentation, the college football offenses are tested at the college level. and then the pros experiment with them. So, I mean, in my mind, this is part of what you have with college football, the ability to say, screw that, we can't compete with this. Let's try the triple option for a while, right, and see what happens.

That's the spirit. It's diversity. Yeah, that is one of the things that people love about college football, or at least, it was this way, I think, through most of the 2010s where like every NFL team ran the same offense, whereas every, you know, college football, you could see a total variety. And now, in some ways, that has almost flipped, like, you know, Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen, you know, there's so many different kinds of quarterbacking in the NFL now, whereas college, you know, we've seen the triple option all but either go away as a mainstay offense or just be absorbed into sort of just this generic thing a lot of teams do. So I definitely think there is a case for just being the team that just goes back and tries the pure thing. Well, yeah. I mean, listen, I'm up for it. I would definitely like to just see how that plays out. Look, here's the thing. McCartney's era buffs got to an opinion that at a certain point, you couldn't get over the hump without offense. So the offense's job was to take you from one win in a season and get you up to five. And then you can recruit some better players. You can tweak that offense and now you're up to seven wins. But McCartney opened it up in the middle 1990s because to get

to the national champion level when you're playing a lot of teams that, you know, Florida, for example, throwing the ball a lot in that era. He felt like, okay, those extra one or two wins at the end of the season, that's where you really need to have an offense that can do more than what was limiting us in a triple option or an eyebone or any of those kind of things. But it was the triple option in the eye bone that got you from one to four or one to five or one to six wins that allowed your recruiting to step up. So it was all part of a plan, right? Building up to a better program. When you're predicted to come last in the PAC 12 and maybe win one or two or three games, to me, that's exactly why you take a route like that.

It's about building yourself back up to a level of competency where you can start to dream bigger, you know, open up the offense, get better players, better assistant coaches, keep players, which I think is going to be the biggest thing in the era of, you know, transfer portals that let you transfer all the time or NILs. I mean, in a Colorado situation, if we coach up a good player or a player that wasn't supposed to be good and we coach them up to a good player, they leave for a better program. So, I mean, the incentive in order to build a program from scratch or build one backup to rebuild a program is really undercut by this idea that if you start getting players who are better, you become a farm system for the higher profile schools at this point. They got to fix the transfer portal somehow. I have a question that you feel free to invoice us for a Davos or TED Talk fee after I asked this for you.

I don't think they paid TED Talk fees. I'm just saying. Okay, yeah, I was going to say put on your little wireless headset for this question because I wanted to ask, we now have two big new federations. And if you just sort of blackbox it and say this isn't college football, you have two very large new leagues that might not necessarily have a lot in common. with someone with a history brain who has done as much work looking at history as you have when you have these very large organizations that are can't fail type organizations how does that go wrong because i know there's a lot of people who can see how this is going to go right there's more money there's more teams there's more eyeballs involved but how do these very large groups that might not necessarily have a whole lot in common how can they go wrong in

terms of function and in terms of looking down the road they kill the golden goose right so it becomes so so it part of the problem here is is what is incentivized so if the tv networks control this and apparently they do um then then what is their incentive here if i said to them if you're not careful you're going to do to baseball what happened to baseball they're going to say what happened to baseball, right? The owners make more money. The networks make more money. Baseball's great. I said, yeah, but no one's, well, it's a very small group. We all used to be fanatical about baseball. I can't explain to people what like the 1975 World Series was like. The country stopped. It stopped. Okay, that hasn't, that doesn't happen anymore. So I think the problem would be that

college football fans have a different definition of success in terms of whether college football's healthy or not than the TV networks do or maybe even the big leagues because once again, if you're an Ohio state fan, I think there's things that you're going to hate about these changes, but there's things you're going to love about it too. But if you're an Iowa state fan, there's things you're going to hate about these changes and there's almost nothing you're going to love about this. So that's the difference is that when you talk about these super conferences, there's like my brothers both went to USC and I remember telling them about the SC leaving and They hadn't even heard about it, you know, the day it happened.

So I called them the next day and say, okay, now that you've had some time to let it sink in, what do you think? And I would argue that in typical USC fashion, they said, well, you know, what are you going to do? They forced our hand. We have to go, it's relevancy or not relevancy, which I get. But they're not happy about losing the rivalries. They don't want. So they have the same feelings we all do, but it's easier for them to go, well, you know, progress or adapt or die. But for everyone else, I mean, if you're a Washington state fan,

Okay. Well, what does this have for you? Right? And so I guess what's sad is that we've been able to break the schools up individually and say, well, what's good for your school and what's bad for your school, as opposed to them all being able to stick together and say, well, what's good for all of us and the health of the sport long term. But remember, the guys who are making the decisions at the TV networks get promoted or fired based on what happens in the next three years, four years, five years. They have no incentive at all to care. about the down-the-road thing. And if you wanted to make so, so like I was wondering about, and this is totally stupid and I'm sure I'm missing major aspects of it, but like on the NIL thing, I totally think the players should get paid for name, image likeness, but who said they had to be paid individually on an individual level? I mean, couldn't you just throw all the money into a pool and say division one players split this equally?

Everybody gets money as opposed to saying, hey, this quarterback coming out of Florida at a high school, he's going to get NIL money and we're going to use this as a recruiting tool and who can and you know, you get into the highest bidder thing. I don't know whether NIL means you have to let players get into an auction for their talents or if it's more fair to say, hey, that poor offensive lineman playing left tackle at Iowa is not going to get his own NIL deal, but in a in a, in a whole pooling of the resources, that guy could get, you know, a good NIL deal, just as good is the guy next to it? And it doesn't become something where Iowa's recruiting using NIL against Oregon State. I mean, so I don't know that maybe, but with no, again, with no NCAA or no one

to coordinate all this, it becomes a survival of the fittest, you know, no holds barred kind of deal. I was going to, I was going to step in, Dan, and say, the linemen at Iowa, they get a nice deal because I'm pretty sure they're compensated for the hay bale toss at the Iowa State Fair that they do. every year. Go look at it. Honestly, they win it every year. There's some gigantic Iowa lineman with a name that's like 27 letters long. All right. Some Dutch farm line in Kugel stat. And they end up winning like a hundred bucks off of the hay bale toss, which inevitably is like a right guard. Some right guard throws a hay bale like 20 feet in the air because he's been doing that his whole life. I think they're played in tractors just like blue chips. Pay it in tractors? Okay. There we go.

I got no problem with that. In the old days at Oklahoma, they used to have all these kids on construction jobs in the off-season driving like Maseratis and never showing up to work. So, I mean, a lot of this stuff has always gone on when we talk about free-for-alls, but one way or another, somehow it worked, right? So I used to argue about corruption in government and talk about how every government has some level of corruption. But it's when you reach a tipping point that it becomes a problem. And I think you could argue that at a certain point, rather than slap an SMU with the death penalty or something, it just maybe became easier to just throw the doors open and say, okay, if you're not cheating, you're not trying and we'll put it. It's like gambling. We're going to make it above board now. And here's the new world. And good luck out there. Yeah. I just love that the NCAA had literally more than a century to prepare for this. And their best idea was, oh, whatever. That's the solution they commit. There's going to be some good books written because it is almost. lost. If you zoom out and look at this, it is a historic dropping of the ball. It is, it is, nothing has taken over in a real sense. And so, you know, I did an interview, and I've told

this story before, so I apologize. I did an interview years ago with Charlie Steiner, who was at ESPN at the time. And I was complaining about boxing and how there was no overarching authority to make sure that the best people fought each other or that there was only one belt per weight category and all this. And he laughed at me and said, what do you have a problem with capitalism he said this is the last true vestige of pure capitalism in any sport we have he goes this is how it runs when it runs exactly like the people in the in the sport want it to run and i feel like that's what's happened here is that the whatever the fig leaf of of accountability that the ncdb a was providing has disappeared it's created a vacuum and now these schools are

quite correctly trying to look out for their own interests but it means that nobody's looking out for everyone's interest collectively. And that's what I mean about, you know, now, I mean, if Colorado takes a two-star recruit and strength trains him and technique trains him to a point where he's a four-star recruit, he's going somewhere else. In other words, why would you even try? So that's where you kill the Golden Goose, I think. What if this is, I guess, my other, my other question in that vein in terms of killing the Golden Goose, how long do you think something this big can hold because I don't like just personally I look down the road and I don't see this arrangement lasting I don't oh no this so so the foundation's unstable and the instability so

one of two things is going to happen at least from my vantage point here either some overarching authority that has some power and control probably something put together collectively via the athletic directors in this in what's going to be the two top conferences or or it stays this free for all Without some sort of foundation in place that stabilizes all this, we're going to have realignment every couple of years. We're going to have changes to the championship formula every couple of years. We're going to have people come. So here's the problem maybe that no one's ever been thought about.

But if you don't even have the fig leaf of the NCAA, what do you do when somebody else is breaking the rules? And what are the rules, right? So if you say, well, this is not like I remember, was it Nick Sabin saying something like, well, this isn't what NIL was supposed to be. Well, who says what it's supposed to be? And who enforces what it's supposed to be? And who enacts penalties if you violate how it's supposed to be.

I mean, so what I would argue is exactly what you've argued, that without some sort of foundation, the underpinnings of this sport are unstable. And if they're unstable, well, then how does anything ever solidify so we can get back to games where you have rivalries and care, predictability, rules that apply to the big schools and the small? I mean, without any of that, I think you're too fluid to exist in a stasis ever.

So things are going to be continually changing because there's no one enforcing any sort of rules, any sort of framework. So the NCAA's decades of focusing on preserving amateurism as the end-all be-all, as opposed to preserving the sport, right? Like their focus was on, let's find a way to keep this not paying the player's system legal, when they could have spent that entire time establishing like a framework of rules and functions and agreements and treaties and contracts. It's their favorite thing. They could have been in a committee meeting this entire time. They could have had a century-long committee meeting that resolved all this, but they chose to spend the entire time defending amateurism and accomplishing nothing else. It's pretty great.

I think the other problem was it was a the rules seemed enforced in a sort of unfair and precarious and, and, I mean, sometimes schools would violate things and you go, this is really terrible and they'd get nothing or a slap on the wrist. Other times, schools would do these tiny little things and get huge penalties. I mean, I think the NCAA helped work itself out of existence. And then I think a lot of schools who just would rather not have any breaks at all, you know, any of the schools from the old Southwest Conference come to mind, where their attitude is, why can't we just spend a ton of money, have a lot of boosters? And you just don't like it because you can't compete. I mean, I remember hearing that sometimes when you go to these Texas places that they'd be like, hey, if we were allowed to compete the way we want to compete, you all never stand a chance.

I mean, I heard that. That's the old if you're not cheating, you're not trying thing. What was that? The old ball coach said that? Was that Spurrier? No, I think if you're not cheating, you're not trying. That's like the entire Southwest Conference. I know, but wasn't that the same?

I think Spurrier actually said that as a joke, didn't he? I will check. That doesn't sound like Spurrier, but I will. This is, I know it was an Eddie Guerrero quote. This is the, this is the Florida fan looking this up, right? Do we trust him? No, don't trust. No, I will tell you straight up, unreliable narrator here.

But it looks like it's been attributed to a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is funny. Eddie Guerrero is the one that most often comes up. You know what? That's, that's cool. Eddie's like, RIP, Eddie. You deserve the credit for if you're not cheating and you're not trying.

I wanted to, I also wanted to ask, if you're looking at this from where it might go, like eventually I do think I think that there is a future for this where because if you don't know Greg Sankey is the commissioner of the SEC Oh yeah I do well I don't know who he is Like I've met the commissioner of the Pact 12 But I've never met Sankey or anything

Yeah but I know who he is Okay so Sankey's model Was reading a book on it Has followed the roadmap pretty closely Is the EPL Is the English Premier League That they really want to to have like a 20 or 30 team mega league and everyone else is going to tear down from that and I wonder what

you thought about that as a model for the sport because like I'm pretty optimistic about that model if that's how it settles out because the second tier and third tier teams in England they're fairly sorted to me like they're that we don't we wouldn't have like right now college football is a highway with no lanes and you have Alabama which is a big lifted truck. going 140 miles an hour straight down the road and occasionally they run into something that's their size

but a lot of the time they're just running over much smaller vehicles right like Charleston Southern is a bike that they get to run over one game a year and they pay them for the privilege but something like the EPL

you have teams that can move up and down there's relegation does that seem like something that the sport could probably live with if we can even talk about the sport I don't know and I think anybody who says as they know are crazy. But I do think that there's going to become a sort of a separation. And I think I'm the 10,000th person to say this. So let me not, let me not act as though I've come up with any

great revelations. But there are schools, I don't want to say that they take the idea of the student athlete more seriously, but they take the idea of the academic institution in a way that won't let them go past a certain point. I mean, there's a lot of people in academia that are, and I'm not sure if they're wrong, upset with the fact that the football coach at a lot of these universities is the top paid state employee with millions and millions of dollars due to them after they're gone as part of the state public employees pension plans, right? So I mean, I think Mike Bellotti here in the state of Oregon is that I could be wrong, but I think if he's not the top, he's one of the top recipients of the public employees retirement system. Right. So there's

a lot of people in academia that go, look, this is just out of hand. We're an academic institution that plays football, not a football institution that has some academics as a fig leaf. And some schools are going to have more problems with that than others. I think you can see this in the two LA schools that are moving to the Big 12. Those are two very different schools from each other. USC is a private institution. UCLA is a proud public institution that is part of a group of institutions, the University of California system that is run by the regions of the University of California system. USC doesn't have to worry about that at all. And if you said you're going to have to change a lot of things in the academic side in order to continue to

compete in football, I imagine SC is going to go, well, we're going to go to our boosters and we're going to tell them what it takes and we're going to make it work. Whereas UCLA is going to go, oh, God, how much money are we talking about? Well, we're going to have to go to the governor and we're going to have to add and fan supports a problem. And I mean, I guess what I'm saying is there's a couple of, when you take more than a hundred institutions across the country and essentially say you're all in the same pool playing college football, that's a lot of different kind of institutions. I mean, even the service academies are included in that, right? Religious schools are included in that. They're all going to have a whole

different group of priorities that matter to them individually that aren't winning football championships. But we all know that there are schools. Alabama is one of them, certainly. Ohio state's one of them. The University of Oregon is probably one of them. Texas is one of the. them. Oklahoma is one of them, where this is really important, LSU and Michigan, where people there are going to be really upset. I think in some other schools, people are going to be really upset if the schools do too much away from their academic side to continue to be players at the football side. So Colorado is a perfect example. I have no insider information, but if they went too far down the road in trying to compete and trying to play with the big boys, there'll be a pushback

from the academic side in a way that would not carry the same kind of weight at a school where football is really, really, really important. Does that make sense? Yeah, well, yeah, this is the ACC example where you have a conference that somehow has Boston College and Florida State. Clemson, which has a good reputation also, but football is hugely important, right? Boston College. I mean, there's a whole different example, right? Yeah. Not a lot of Jesuits in Tallahassee.

Not a lot of Jesuits who are going to stand up to the football program, at least successfully. Yeah, but you guys see the point. I mean, and then there's like a Notre Dame, which is its own animal, completely, right? One of the fine academic institutions across the country, well, what happens if it's, I don't know, Notre Dame's got its own kind of deal? My point is that you're going to, if you wanted to talk about football conferences or football levels, division one versus division two, as we used to say, it might end up being division two or the kind that won't go past this line. of support and Division I of the people that will go past this line of support but here's what makes college football different

and I think the networks don't get this or don't care is that if you keep intact as what you were talking about, the regionalism of the sport and the rivalries Division 2 could be just as viable because I can tell you right now a lot of people in my neck of the woods didn't care that much

about what was going on in the SEC for exactly those regionalism questions that you brought up and if they were playing a different brand of football somewhere between the NFL and the rest of college football. They might watch if there's nothing on on the Sunday, but it won't affect the fact that their team's playing Nebraska this week, right? So, I mean, I think that's what's different than the NFL.

If the NFL created an NFL light, I don't know how many people watch that compared to the, you know, the NFL full spectrum. So maybe there's an avenue there that naturally works its way out. I don't know. Maybe one that has a spending cap that just says we recognize that these are educational institutions. therefore no one is going to spend more than this but again without an NCAA who enforces those rules who who who puts penalties in place and those kinds of things listen all i all i want is the sunbelt with the spending cap that's my ideal college football league that's the one that's the one area that won't have a spending cap i guarantee i know i know but that's what i want i want these guys competing like for the pride of jonesboro on a salary cap that's all i want out of this sport dan the sunbelt striving to hit a salary cap right

right? It's driving to get there. Well, it just, you know, listen, maybe I'm not enough of a lawyer to understand the problems with the idea of sharing the NIL money equally. But I think something like that preserves the viability of smaller programs. In other words, I don't, I'm not sure in this game of musical chairs where everyone is so afraid of being left out with the, of a viable conference when the music stops. I'm not sure anyone's paying enough attention to the programs that, you know, don't matter in air quotes. but I have a feeling that Iowa State is going to suffer if Northwestern goes under, right? I mean, whether they know it or not. And I feel like you need those kinds of programs for all sorts of reasons.

And that's where sort of a revenue, they don't want revenue sharing. But you know what I mean? Where you keep the sport healthier if you actually protect those programs that cannot go out in a free market system and compete effectively. I think I have a solution or an answer to that question, which is this. We cheat. every time there's a rule in college football, we cheat. Like if there's revenue sharing, that, I mean, that's a fine idea, we'll still cheat. If I go to Auburn and I say, well, you're going to share revenue.

I know what Auburn's going to do to get a recruit. They're going to pay them more because that's what they've always done. That's what Florida will do. That's what Alabama will do. So I think that's probably the issue with revenue sharing that, yeah, overall, it would create a kind of incentive, but I think you would get something that looks like what we have. have already because no one's listening. There will always be a Southwest conference somewhere buried in the fabric of college football, even though it doesn't exist anymore.

I call it the fig leaf, right? What do you think about, let's compare it to something like the drug war, right, where you had laws and penalties and people went to jail and people got in all kinds of trouble, but you knew you were being able to enforce 1% of the activity that was going on, right? But you wouldn't, somebody said to me once, you know, know, we have laws against murder, but people still get murdered. Does that mean you want to take away murder laws? And I think you could make the case that back in the day, 1980s, 1970s, there were certainly teams that were cheating. And sometimes you even knew their names. Sometimes it was an open secret. But some teams got the death penalty anyway, right? And some

teams got scholarships revoked anyway. And some teams couldn't go to bowl games or had championships vacated anyway. One can make the case that even partial enforcement is at times better than nothing. just for the foundation like you said or or to create you know they have a a line to create something that you don't you don't want the perception of impropriety right so even if it's going on you know there's some level of info I don't know I think when you take take it something like the NCAA away and you don't replace them with anything you're asking for instability I think we might as well lean into the impropriety just just end the war in the war on paying players entirely yeah but that's where we're going yeah that's exactly we're going

let's do it yeah yeah that's well that's that's fine but then the rich get richer the rich just get richer that's true it's it's true unless or unless you create a high dollar unless you create a high dollar piece of intellectual property centered around talented athletes all going to the same super conference under the ages of a large tv contract that then funnels money which could be put into salary caps which would be this is where by the way we don't fix all of our issues at the same time because I think you can get to players sharing revenue once they're classified as employees under something like a Super League. And if you want that traditional college football experience, I think eventually, for better or worse, you'll find that at the second

tier, right? Like, I don't think, I'm not being prescriptive in any of this. I just think this is what could happen down the road where you see, say, the Big Ten and SEC both doing something like a salary cap across the board for players and being regulated on that. by the peers in that group right like i don't think al like alabama has no interest in letting michigan pay players more than their salary cap that's a really odd example but i just used it um it probably be the other way yeah but you know there's actually there's an avenue here and you open up the door to talking about it that maybe and maybe this this goes where you were saying about just sort of leaning in to this new approach but if you if you want to make the

and I know there's a lot of talk about this, if you want to make the college football athletes, employees of the institution, well, then there are things that come with being an employee that didn't come with being. In other words, if you want the pluses of that situation, then you may have to live with the minuses. And certain minuses, I mean, for example, you want to fix the transfer portal or at least slow it down, well, then tell these people that when you sign a contract to come to this school as opposed to a letter of intent or a contract, you're an employee now. Well, we're investing significant resources in your development, assuming that there's going to be a payoff down the road. If you leave this institution two years into your contract,

right, a four-year contract or a five-year contract, and you go to a school that's offering you more money or a higher profile or a better offense or whatever it might be, well, then wait a minute, you owe me because I spent two years, you know, this would help like a Colorado who's coaching up that two-star into a four-star who's then going to leave from Michigan. You may say to the two-star, you owe me reimbursement, right? And if Michigan wants you bad enough, they pay me to let you go, because I invested when you were nothing. Now they like you enough. Well, if you're in the private sector, those kind of contracts are not uncommon at all, right? So you sign a four-year with my and with me. I expect you there the four years. If you break the

contract early, there's ramifications and the school gets compensated. So if Alabama wants to go poach players from other schools, well, maybe they have to take their unlimited money that they can get, you know, for boosters and spread it around to the smaller schools who develop those players you now want to poach. The school being the one, the destination school being the one to compensate is an argument. I haven't actually heard being thrown around. I'm here to create new arguments. And it's interesting, it's interesting to me because in, and first of all, let me say, I accept the idea of a Super League because at least I'm more in the loss of the regionality, even since, you know, I started becoming conscious of college football in like

1992. I think it's an interesting argument to float because one of the, one of the biggest drop-offs that you're going to have in terms of revenue in this, in a separated era, is when a Charleston Southern that relies upon Bama's $900,000 check to go in and get beat up by Bama once a year in August, you know, how are, how are they going to make up that lost revenue? Well, being compensated for these players that end up that end up going up when you see this argument out in the wild a lot it's well the payers are going to have to play that money back to which we say okay now do coaches but yeah having the having the schools compensate is is a wrinkle that may actually work yeah it's essentially buyouts for players and then this is transfer fees correct transfer fees

we've just reinvented we're back to the EPL yeah we've just reinvented the transfer fee which by the way, as somebody who watches a fair amount of English and, you know, like La Liga, I am thrilled by the notion of saying something like Cam Newton transferred from Florida to Auburn for a $4 million transfer fee. Bring it. I'm totally here for this. Well, and it acts as an inhibitor, right, to keep things from getting too crazy. And believe me, I mean, there are going to be schools that still have relatively unlimited budgets and something like that might actually make the rich get richer. But at the same time, the richer getting richer, at least they're paying.

I mean, for some of these schools, can you imagine, wouldn't that be a fun way to siphon off? Because I blame the TV networks for a lot of this. Wouldn't that be a wonderful way to take ESPN and CBS's money and say, oh, I know you thought you were paying Ohio State for this, but they're going to pay Washington State and they're going to pay Texas Tech your money as a pass-through because they want that quarterback that those other schools have. I mean, we'll call that trickle-down economics post-NC-WA's time. The first successful trickle-down economics. It finally happened. We have created an alternate realm in which it actually works. I love the idea of the player buyout. You sign a five-star quarterback.

He's not working out. He doesn't go to class. We're just inventing a guy who's actually not into it. Yeah. And to cut, quote-unquote cut, we don't quote-unquote cut players, but of course, the Cup players. You do that, you owe him three years on his contract. You do it exactly the same as you do coaches. You want to fire a coach? Okay, you got to pay the last three years of his deal. There's 17 new Claussen siblings that I just found out. Yeah, like I love the idea of a place like Charleston Southern, which, or a place like the Chanticleers, right? Coastal, like Coastal Carolina. Coastal Carolina is an innovative school that finds new ways to do things and takes flyers on one to two-to-two-star players and makes them into two-to-four-star players. I love the idea of giving

them a business model so that if a defensive end from Coastal, who has come in and said, hey, listen, I'm betting on myself, I'm going to go to you guys, and I get a portion of that transfer fee, right? Like, I get a cut just like an EPL player does or can. That to me is thrilling. Like, I love that notion because then you get places that are well-known little well-springs of innovation that actually get rewarded for it instead of just getting their coaches stolen and just getting all their administrators stolen. You can actually create sort of a viable business model there. It also puts like a bold underline to, and this is something I started to say earlier. The reason that I, you know, I, I don't like the direction that we're going.

I'm grumpy. I, you know, I want to, I long for the days of the SWC. But one thing that a super league system would do is force us to stop pretending that Ohio University and Ohio State play the same kind of football or playing the same game. They're not. Yeah. having a financial structure in place would only serve to highlight. Yeah, well, when we pretend that these two games are that these two schools are playing

the same brand of football, it actually hurts everybody. You know, it doesn't, nobody actually benefits there. So I like anything that will point a pin spot at, you know, the game that Charleston Southern is playing and the game that Alabama is playing is almost as marked as the difference. And I'm not saying about quality of players. I'm talking about resources. it's like putting a, you know, maybe a good-sized high school budget, but there are high schools that have better budgets than Charleston Southern.

I'm sorry for Charleston Southern. We're beating up on you a lot this episode. Well, but, you know, think about something else, and this will be interesting, and I have no idea where this is going to go. And I think for the fans, it'll be different than for the coaches. Because one of the noises that these new big super conferences are making is eliminating those kind of games, right? The Cupcake Games is used to call them, right?

They're playing, you know, the Sisters of the Poor, right? But there's a reason that those games are scheduled. Yeah. And I remember, I don't know if it was Nick Saban, but somebody talking about how the conference schedule that they play is already so terribly tough that the injuries that they would get if they scheduled people instead of those cupcakes, the fact that they'd have to leave starters in longer, all these kinds of things. Well, I mean, if you really want to play in this high profile level, guess what? You're going to probably have to pay schools that every week ESPN or CBS wants to show to an audience. audience that's interested as opposed to, we'll show the Nebraska against the Charleston game because, you know, it's on, right? And the people in Lincoln want to see it. But you make that game illegal now. You're right. The small schools lose out on the payday. And the big schools, all of a sudden, instead of having eight tough games on their schedule, have 11 tough games on their schedule. And over the course of a season, how does that play out with injuries, fatigue, attrition. We'll see. But there's a reason they play those games and there are a reason that

they're happy to pay those teams to come and play those games. I would think that that reason's still going to be there, even if you say that that can't happen anymore. This is where I'm wondering if, and you know, as the season encroaches longer and longer, I wonder how close, this is one NFL edition that I wouldn't mind, how close we're getting to adding another buy week. Well, here's the funny thing about that. And this is an old time big eight way to look at it. But you end up, if you end another, there's two ways of a game. One is at the beginning of the year and one is at the end of the year. You add another biweek at the beginning and then you're talking about playing games in the heat of summer even more.

If you add one at the back end, then you're talking about playing in Lansing, East Lansing in late December or something. And I think that actually favors certain kinds of schools and certain kinds of offenses over other ones, right? I mean, the great equalizer for those Florida schools back in the 1980s used to be, Go up to Big Ten country in December and see how that, you know, wide open fun and gun offense works in the snow against people who are built for that kind of weather. That's another part of the college football thing that I always liked was building to your environment. And, you know, Nebraska might be a different animal when it comes down to the bowl game in sunny Florida, but go play them in Lincoln on December 5th, right, or November 27th and see what that's like, right?

You know, that some horses in horse racing are mudders, right? So the big eight, a lot of those schools were snow weather teams, the big 10, snow weather teams. You bring a Southern California team in there in late November, and it's a different ballgame, right? And I love that. To me, that's part of the joy of the sport also. And again, you can build a team for that. You know, you build teams for your conference opponents.

You build teams for the weather. You build team for the environment. I mean, when I was a kid, they used to talk all the time about the Minnesota Vikings and the pros and they played in an outdoor stadium in the winter in Minnesota and they would come out without you know undershirts on just to freak out the teams that I mean those are psychological things that are a fun part of the game and the coaches can play into that and to me anything that homogenizes that makes us lose part of the fun of this of this league that has more than a hundred teams more than a hundred different kinds of offenses more than a hundred different situations and to and to

reduce it down to sort of the cream of the crop you don't realize what you're losing and how much you're damaging the sport overall. The rest, you know, those are not deadweight programs. Those are the programs that round off a wonderful sort of system. And I feel like if you're not paying attention that you're going to ruin the wonderful sort of system. Dan, before we let you go, we should probably ask you a couple of history questions because like a lot of our listeners are history people. That's how, you know. I think we've been talking about that. It's true. It's very true. We've been talking about 150, 153 years of history. in college football terms we you know we talk a lot about overrated underrated they're ranked at four we should be ranked at four this kind of thing like this is the ESPN devotes hundreds of hours a season to this if you were to look at historical empires and declare one to be underrated in terms of the amount of attention we've paid to it the amount of regard we have for it for whether for its accomplishments or achievements is there an empire that stands out for you as

the most underrated? Well, you have to put a qualifier on that. We'll say most underrated by us here because it's not underrated everywhere. But if you look at the history of China and you look at the amazing dynasties they've had over the eras, it's top notch. It is, you know, it compares with Imperial Rome at its height. It compares with all those ones that we do talk about. And so I would say that it's all of the various Chinese dynasties, the Han, the Jin, the Tang, all these wonderful dynasties that they had where those would, if you could travel back in time, be the most advanced societies in the world. And I think people who study history know that sort of, but we don't pay enough attention to exactly how outrageously advanced and ahead of their time they were.

And if you could have, you know, if we're doing this like a college football comparison, China throughout most of his history plays in a different conference than Rome and Greece and you know they're in the other side of the world but if you could have a bowl game with let's just say Han China against imperial Rome you would see I think that they would play very competitively against them and then you would see the sort of respect that they deserve and not just the the countries and what they were capable of and the militaries and what they were capable of but they had great generals and leaders that don't get their due because we don't pay enough attention to them in the west there was a guy named pan chow who conquered so far to the west

that at one point he was very close to the imperial romans who had conquered so far to the east and what a link up that would have been if they could have both just gotten a little farther so they so china's my answer we could have just put a cotton bowl right there and they could exactly exactly that's the national championship imperial rome against han china and everyone raised in the western world we say oh they they can't hang with our speed or whatever you know you You make up some attribute that you imagine they don't have. China ain't played nobody. I'm sorry, I'm much more interested in how Vegas handicaps that.

You know, if we're going to get the gambling in on the, is it Han China minus four? I don't know what we're dealing with here. No, I got a, I got home field advantage or is that a neutral site? I got Han China by a full score, Dan. I actually want to know if like the lack of time spent on Persia and the Byzantine Empire in schools would adversely affect the accuracy of wagers in, like, empire bedding. in Vegas. Our Rome and Greece is going to be unfairly weighted due to American educational biases. I love it.

Oh, people, but you know, gamblers make a killing off of that. All you have to know is oh, this team's betting with their heart instead of their head. I'm going to Hunter Thompson used to take the late writer Hunter Thompson used to take great advantage of people who would come to his house and bet, and he

always would find out what their favorite team was first. And then he'd go in there and start betting that way. And he had no qualms. He had no favorite teams other than whoever's going to win this bet i think he liked the raiders though but but other than that he'd find out who you liked and then have you bet your heartstrings and be holding all the money at the end of the night so if you're a if you're a fan of china and you go to vegas and you put all your money on china what'd you say minus seven yeah oh then you got a point shave it a little bit

and go well they're going to win but they're not going to win by seven six and a half i'll go six and a half it's a key number very risky i it depends on injuries too nobody's allowed to conceal their injuries. That's true. The Greeks and Romans are definitely the Dallas Cowboys here in terms of like if that team's favored by a big number, jump on it. They never cover, right? Dan, you have talked about your history as doing like war games, like playing war games with friends in college and whatever, like advanced stuff with lots of numbers and, and you've turned that into like, you use it a lot as a storytelling element when you're talking about like comparing one era to another. Do you play like current like PC strategy games like civilization and total war and hearts of iron any of that

any of that kind of stuff yeah yeah sometimes um hearts of iron i'm you know i get stuck when you're over 50 you find your favorite games and sometimes you don't ever want to change and then then those games no longer work i kept one computer in my office forever just to play uh one of the hearts of iron early games with a mod attached to it and finally my wife said what is that computer doing in your office I go, I need that computer to play this one game. I have to defeat Ursulini. We can't get it again. So the answer is I do.

And to be honest with you, I don't really see football to tie this together as all that different. I mean, to me, the reason I like football is actually in many ways very similar to why I'm interested in tactics and strategy and warfare or boxing. I mean, whatever part of the brain that a person utilizes for those other, I think it's, it's transferable or there's similar elements. I mean, I love, you know, like a quarterback on the sandlot with the rock and the piece of glass and those kind of things drawing up plays. I love doing that. And to me, it's very similar than being someone who's trying to figure out in 1914,

how to draw up a plan to invade France and do it in a way that cuts through Belgium. And all of a sudden, you know, you win and it's a touchdown. That was a particular empire that you would categorize is how? having thought too much with their heart and not have, I bet too much with their heart and not with their heads. I know we're kind of spoiled for choice here, but. Well, I would argue that very rarely do, do large groups of people operate with their head. And the funny thing is the occasions where you can find that very often you're dealing with somebody who's an absolute dictator. You know, Hitler and a lot of other dictators used to talk about one will with an entire,

country behind it. In other words, the autocrat gets to decide the direction and they choose it, and then you have a whole country backing them up where free countries are conglomerations of millions of individuals, right, who disagree upon the strategy and the tactics. And so you are, I think, by default, not following your head. I mean, a country like ours is a perfect example. We generally follow our heart. Most countries do. And countries that have dictators who can, who can take that strategy and say we're going to, you know, follow the will of Victor Orban or whatever it's going to be, that only goes so far because people can put the brakes on, right, and decide, you know, I know you said we're going to go here, but we'd rather

get rid of you than do that. So I think ultimately all nation states operate with their heart or their emotions. I think some of them have to get to a more higher level of dissatisfaction before they can operate that way. But I don't think anybody's really ruled by their head when you come to collections of large groups of people. So it's either you're ruled by one heart or millions of hearts. Well, and I think bottom line at the end of the day, you're still ruled by millions of hearts because if you don't like, if the Russians decide they don't like where Vladimir Putin is going at a certain point, they do have the ability to change that.

It requires revolutions and marches in the streets and violence and all. But bottom line is, you know, Mao said that all power emanates from the barrel of a gun, but that gun is not always in the hands of the dictator. So now that we've just did, like we dove straight into this vein of questioning, I get to ask the one I wanted to ask. I'm giving you three slots in terms of managing this historical football franchise. Okay, you can take them from anywhere in history, anywhere in leadership. I need a defensive coordinator, an offensive coordinator, and a head coach.

Okay, I don't know if you're going to put Cyrus. We're doing historical figures coaching football. Yes, historical figures coaching football, all right, because I figure that's probably of the position of strength here, right? So I need a head coach, an offensive coordinator, and a defensive coordinator. I don't know if you're going to put like Cyrus the second as offensive coordinator. Put the organization into a good spot by picking those big three. Well, I find the head coach to be the easier gig.

I think that's Julius Caesar. And I realize he's going to be a popular choice. But when you read about Caesar is one of these guys that had one of these brains. Supposedly, he could be in a litter, which is their version of transport when you're going somewhere right so they're carrying like a little a little platform that you're operating and he could be dictating three letters at the same time to three different people i mean he had one of those brains where you just get the feeling that he would find out the weakness in the other side he would build his own i mean he just seems like to me he seems like a head coach already

if you actually look at the guy offensive so offensive coordinator i'm going to take a mongol even though i like a nice solid solid running game and these moms Mongols are going to be throwing all over the field. They're just, they're so aggressive. And I, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and innovative. So I, I think, I think that, that I would take a one, maybe Subadai, the great Mongol general is the offensive coordinator, a defensive coordinator. This is a good one.

Who would you want for a defensive coordinator? I'm trying to, okay, I want, you know what I'm going to take? I'm going to take an Apache. I'm going to take an Apache for a defensive coordinator. I'm going to take somebody like a Mangus, Colorado, who's going to be. somebody that every time you think you've got him beat, he's got some way of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. And this is probably something that a guy from a school that needs to pull rabbits out of a hat would look at. Maybe if I was an Ohio State alumni, I'd pick a different kind

of defense, like a Charlemagne. But I'm going for some guy who's going to figure out a way to confuse you, to figure out I'm not going to have the biggest lineman maybe. So I've got to come in things a little bit differently, a little guerrilla tactics, a little subject. Fuge. So that's it. I'm going Mangus Colorados for the defensive coordinator. I'm going Subadai for the offensive coordinator, and I'm going Julius Caesar as the head coach.

Dude, I love this staff. I love this staff more than I love most action staff. They're killer, aren't they? Legitimate. Oh, yeah. That's pretty unbeatable. I love this. So, Dan, just to get you out of here on this one, when people like

recognize you in public, I'm sure this happens. Millions and millions of people have listened to your stuff. Millions and millions of people. what do they come up to you and do what do they say what are like what are the things that have the things from your work that have sort of like connected with just the average person who comes up and says hello oh it's a little weird because uh you know obviously i don't get recognized most places so what it happens it's always a little strange and i never assume that's what it is i used to do these um i used to do these top of the hour news things when i was a television

news reporter and you know so it'd be the top of the hour and you'd say you know coming up at 11 and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And then I'd go eat lunch somewhere and people be staring at you. And as I told my wife, you never knew if they were staring at you because they thought they'd seen you somewhere or because you had spaghetti hanging out of your mouth. You just had no way of knowing. So I was on this flight. And again, don't get recognized very often. I'm on this flight and I come out of the restroom and I'm walking down the aisle and way down at the end of the aisle, 15, 20 rows ahead of me. I see some guy that looks like Yosemite Sam from the old bugs bunny cartoons or gabby hayes big old 49er prospector beard you know and he's pointing at me but

with an angry look on his face like an inquisitive finger pointing at and and i thought okay what did i do to this guy i mean i've done something you know his girlfriend was just in the restroom ahead of me and what is he and i'm going what is this so finally i get to him and he looks mad as hell and he just hangs out his hands as i really like your show and i i breathe the sire relief but the entire plane was looking at this guy wondering what was wrong and And then when he shakes my hand, they're still as confused as I was. And then you don't know what to do, right? Do I have to say hi to this guy on my way out of the plane?

Do I mean, you know, so generally it happens at times. Another guy, to finish the story, when I got off the plane, somebody you'd seen all that, just walked up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and says, I like your work and kept on going. But so the answer to the question is I don't get recognized very often. And when I do, it's usually somewhat strange. And I'm never sure what happened. And then afterwards, I'm kind of analyzing it going, did I know that person? in high school or did they or did they have spaghetti hanging out of my mouth or or was it something

to do with the podcast? Do you ever get recognized by your voice? Like has there ever been a dude next to you at the deli being like, hey, that guy who's ordering roast beef taught me about the galls? It only happened once and it happened at like a department like a target type store or whatever. I was looking for something and the employee was on a step stool, uh, putting stuff on the upper shelf and I said something like, do you know where this is? Because I was, I knew I was close, but I hadn't found it. And he picked it up and he handed to me. and said, there you go, Dan. And I looked up to him and I said,

do we know each other? He goes, oh, no, no, I just listen to your show. And again, I was walking out of the place going, how did he know? But it was the voice. That's the only time it's ever happened. So has anybody just walked up and done a Dan Carlin impression? No.

Can Jason start now? I think people are afraid. I think they're afraid that I might take it personally. No, they've never done that. So at our Michigan live show, where we had kids in the crowd, we're calling out the names of, World War II ships and their exact locations. It was a target-rich environment, historically speaking.

I attempted a Dan Garland impression because we had like war-gamed out the entire Big Ten, the entire Midwest was going to war. And like I focus on a few elements of it. One is like you start like, you start low and you start low with a metaphor. You hit them with a creative metaphor, right? Like you start this segment with like, what's your favorite sandwich? And then you build on that and maybe maybe you'd like a sandwich. a little bit of pastrami on it, right?

Like, you do this, like, this subtle staccato thing that builds drama and builds drama. And you're doing it with, like, this incredible voice that goes from, like, super deep to, like, to, like, adopting other voices. You did it a few minutes ago, and it made me smile. I forget exactly what it was, but you were, like, quoting a character that you were using in an argument, and you, like, adopted this deeper voice for them. But, yeah, it was fun preparing for that by, like, just, like, listening to a couple hours of Dan Carlin and, like, okay, what are the key things?

you have to do if you want to attempt a tan cartland impression and like you know so you have i don't think i don't think people know how much artistry goes into like that kind of vocal work and i was just wondering if that's conscious or well let me clarify let me clear up something on your show right you just yeah you just yeah you just yeah you just did a whole imitation of him so like he gets free reign now no no it's this podcast people will say sometimes that i sound different when i do a show like yours than i do on mine. But it's not because I'm deliberately adopting some different

tone. Well, maybe that is what I'm doing, but it's not like this deliberate, okay, I have to slip into this character. There's a difference between a monologue and a dialogue. So I had a teacher in high school, theater teacher, and so much of what he taught us

was about how you need to sound on stage. He used to talk about slow Joe in the back row, you know, not being able to hear the consonants in your voice if you don't talk a certain way. You know, so there's a certain approach when you're when you're storytelling or whatnot that's part of once upon a time, you know, you tell a story.

But it sounds, so to get back to the theater teacher, but he somehow got the voice the same way he wanted you to do it in a monologue, but talked like that all the time, right? So it sounded weird. When you're listening to because in a dialogue to talk like you're on stage giving a monologue, you know, it sounds affected. is right what you're hearing when we do a show where there's no other voices is you're hearing me tell you a story and you speak differently than when you're reacting to something somebody else said

or interspersing your conversation if i talked like this in the conversation with you it might seem a little weird but but that's how i that's how i would tell a story to my kid that's how i if you're with dinner with me and I'm going to go into some long uninterrupted sort of it's going to sound like that also so it's it's really a facet of the circumstances that we're having the conversation in but when you say is it a deliberate thing if you go listen to my old shows and I hear from people about that too they think I've consciously changed my voice from the old shows where we talked a lot faster and a lot louder and it's not that at all I've just gotten older I'm slower The voice, you know, they asked Keith Jackson once, the great college football announcer, among other things, how he got such a great voice.

And they expected to hear some treaties or some class or this. And he said, without missing a beat, he said, Alabama whiskey and cigarettes. And I think that's, you know, I used to talk so fast because that's how fast my brain worked. It doesn't work that fast anymore. But the funny thing is, I used to talk so fast that it was harder to listen. to than it is to listen. So people think I've just improved my voice when in fact I've just gotten slower and they think that the voice is now artificially deep. Alabama whiskey and cigarettes. I don't smoke cigarettes, but you get my point. It's just, it's the effect upon your vocal cords of just getting older and life. And you don't meet a bunch of guys who are 56 years old who talk like this. But when I was 28 and on the radio, I would burst your ear drums and and you, and you, you, you, you, you, you wouldn't be able. I mean, it was almost, like I said, I'm a better performer now in terms of a voice talent than I was then, but through almost no conscious effort of my own. I think you and,

you and Keith Jackson are probably my two favorite guys to say the name of a place. Like, he'll hit you with Tallahassee. And you'll break out like Knie. Yeah. Yeah, it would be a, it would be a fun little thing to have us call a football game, but it'd be a little Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football maybe too. So sometimes, sometimes those combos don't. don't work the way you think they'll work in theory. I only want you to know. I do no consistent Dan Carr limitation, but when my children complain about their spoiled lives

being interrupted by even a modicum of inconvenience, I will go to them and I will say, we're not stopping at the quick trip for a snack for the second time today. Can you imagine the hardship of not stopping for a second snack? They're like, oh, fine, dad. done. You know what though? It only works if you put the headphones on them because that's the other thing that I didn't get into and you guys know this because this is what you do for a living

as well. But when you talk in this sort of a format, you are in that person's head, right? You are right there. So there's almost this. Yeah. Yeah. And there's this quality of if I'm in your head, if I'm whispering in your ear, it's going to have a sort of a conspiratorial kind of tone because it's just you and me right and so once but that that also is is um it dovetails into this idea of of a dialogue versus a monologue when you and i are having this this private conversation it's going to sound different than if i'm speaking to an entire room right so so all these things are just different versions of your own voice just like you have different versions of your own voice when you talk quietly to a small child then when you when you're talking to your pet maybe or your spouse or your

professor. Those may all be different variations of your voice, depending on who you're marketing it towards at the moment. This is all my way of putting in my favorite bit of playbook verbiage ever. I just want to have a package called Starfish Prime, which is after the atmospheric nuclear tests where they shot them into space, only because one of them went off like 50 miles too low and it knocked out the radio for a day and a half and they thought they had blown themselves up. Like Honolulu couldn't call them. And you could see it. I think from hondolulu there was like a visible light of like oh no what did they do and like a day and a half later they called and they were like yeah we're all right a little traumatic is there a fullback

in the starfish prime oh yeah yeah no we do an hback hback see i'm i'm more like an evolved hback spread formation we take the hback we use them as the fullback they pick up the uh whoever the lt is on that you know i've thought a lot about this dan i've thought a lot about what this package would look like you guys thank you it's been a wonderful conversation i i i i could talk football all day long with you guys well come back come back sometime and we'll see how the new we'll see how the new pack 12 is treating everybody yeah we'll see what happens i have a feeling we're not going to have my life i may not live long enough to see stability in college football again college football stop killing dan carlin yeah thank you there's a t-shirt in there somewhere

you guys thank you so much let me know if there's anything i can do to spread the word about this and then keep keep up the great work and thanks for having me on thank you dad likewise this was fun thank you dan a lot of fun stay safe y'all that was awesome that was fun I'm going to tell people I'm a film enthusiast Fuck, I love Mongols That's what it stands for Dude, when he said Mongols All of his fistpunch

Yeah, yes