The Josh Innes Show - Random Thoughts: It's Portal Day!

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

It's Portal Day! College players can leave their current situations for greener pastures. When I started recording this segment I thought it was going to go one direction. Once I started talking, I changed my mind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today is portal day! Yay! The transfer portal is open! All the kids who couldn't hack it at their current school have decided to go to another with no consequences. Alright, I'm being kind of a dick. But I kind of have like this weird relationship with the portal, right? Because on one hand, I look at the portal and I go, hey, guys should be allowed to move. I like movement. I like, you know, if you're not happy in a current place, you should be able to venture off to somewhere else. I'm totally in favor of that. But I'm also torn because there is a level of responsibility or a level of, Basically, there should be some level of accountability if you're going to sign on a dotted line to go play for somewhere.

And I get that there are extenuating circumstances. I get that you didn't necessarily go to Tennessee to play for Tennessee. You went to Tennessee to play for the coach. Use LSU as an example. You didn't go to LSU to play for LSU. You wentSU as an example. You didn't go to LSU to play for LSU. You went because Coach O convinced you to go there. Then Coach O got fired. Why the hell would you still want to go? So you shouldn't be forced to play for a coach that didn't recruit you.

And I totally get that, and I respect it, and I understand it. So I'm torn on it from that regard because I've worked in radio for a long time. I've worked in business like this. So I understand that if you get the wrong boss, you go to one place and it's totally different than you thought it would be, you'd like to get out of it. In fact, I'm convincing myself that mobility is actually good and fuck being punished for being someone that goes to the portal.

You know what? Now that I really think about it and hear about my own situation, I would love an opportunity to sign a contract somewhere and then just say, nah, fuck it. I don't want to be here anymore. Let somebody else have me. That would be good. You know what? I'm all in favor of the portal now. I was trying to find an angle on this where I say to myself, well, if I basically, you know what it was? It was my own personal issues with contracts. That's how I felt about the portal thing. If I have to sign on the dotted line and I have to say, all right, I am committed to this radio station for three years. And if I want to leave, there are punishments.

There are issues. If I were to say right now I wanted to leave, let's say I signed a contract tomorrow to stay in Nashville for five years. And then the next day, a radio station from New York or something calls and says, we want you and we'll pay you double that and you've got to come. If I were to attempt to leave, it would be almost impossible to do so because you've got bullshit contracts and you've got bullshit non-competes and all that. Part of it's, I think, jealousy. You know what? Let's be honest. I think I have a jealousy issue with these guys because they live the life I'd like to live, right?

Because we've talked about many times before that I have a hard time with committing to things, in particular jobs or cities or whatever. Like the second I get to a job, I'm like, hmm, what else is out there? Why doesn't everybody else want me? I look at job openings all the time. Not that I'm going to leave, but I want to see what jobs are open and see if people reach out to me from those jobs because I just want to be wanted. But I have commitment problems when it comes to jobs.

I'm like, what else is out there? If I pick a house to live in, I'm always worried that the next day there's going to be a better house that comes up on the market. That's how I am. And I think I have a jealousy problem with these kids that go to a place, sign on the dotted line to play, then they don't get to play for a year and they say, fuck this, I only have so many years to play college football, peace out, I'm out. And there's a part of me that says, hey, why don't you ride this out and see if you can make it and try to earn your spot? Because there is that part of it. There's that part where you look at a guy that goes to a place, and there are so many

different circumstances too. Like somebody on my Twitter brought up Joe Burrow. Like Joe Burrow had people in front of him. They felt the people in front of him were great, and they were. They didn't know what they had in Joe Burrow. Joe Burrow knew what he had in Joe Burrow, so he had to get out and he went to LSU and became the legend Joe Burrow that's crushing the world. If he would have sat there and said, hey, I can't wait for my turn, there maybe have never been a Joe Burrow.

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an issue. But you realize there's like five dudes on every campus at every position that are really fucking good, really good. And you might be great. And that guy might be a tick better than you. And he starts and you are wasting your time at that place. So I get it. But the question was more so should there be some sort of punishment? And punishment sounds bad. Some sort of deterrent to transfer. Like it used to be, hey, you have to sit out a year.

And now that's obviously not the case. And I don't think you're going to put that genie back in the bottle. There's no way they'd allow that to be the case because the argument you'll get is a coach can leave tomorrow. He can sign a 10-year deal like Hugh Freeze signed like a 10-year deal at Liberty. And then five minutes later, he's the coach at Auburn. So if coaches can do that, and of course, it also kind of grows that racial component of it as well because a lot of the coaches are white. So these rich white guys get to go wherever they want, leave the kids in the lurch. The kids are largely black kids that are stuck and they don't make money and all this.

That's kind of the argument you'll get from people on that. And to a degree, I get it. When I started this five minutes ago, I had every plan to come in and say, you know what, we've got to have some sort of accountability for these kids that jump in the portal. But now I've kind of talked myself into the idea that, hey, fucking rock on, portal. Let's fucking go. Let's get out there and do whatever you want. Movement's great.

Now, granted, in the real world, it doesn't work that way. Now, you could leave Burger King and go work at McDonald's. You're not a contract player there. You say, well, I work at Home Depot, but I want to go to Lowe's. There's a better job there. No one's going to give a fuck. This is all about jobs that are centered around a skill or a talent or media or sports or whatever. I think it was just jealousy. Yeah, that's what it was. I'm envious of this. I'm envious of the

opportunity because sometimes I'll talk with my agent and I'm very happy with my job. I don't want this to sound negative. This is more about old stuff, you know, but I would talk to my agent and I'd be, you know, in the middle of like a three-year deal somewhere and be really pissed off or whatever, and I'd go, we've got to find somewhere else. The agent will go, well, you know, you're under contract. You can't go anywhere. And I was being held hostage, you see. I was being held back.

But that's not necessarily the case for these guys. These guys kind of live the dream. Make a couple of bucks, go play football, tons of ass, tons of cash, and can literally leave anytime they want with zero repercussions at all. No consequences. And to me, the most important factor, let's imagine you're at Jackson State, and Deion was able to recruit some talent to do to Jackson State. Dudes that would have never played an HBCU if it weren't for Deion. Like, Deion elevated that.

Let's not act like Deion Sanders elevated HBCUs. He elevated his particular HBCU in that moment, and now that there's no Deion, my guess is a lot of these guys aren't going to be going to Jackson State or Southern or All-Corner or any of those. They're going to go to the bigger schools, like Deion did, by the way. So that's not going to be the case. But a lot of those guys went to play there. They said, hey, I'm going to go play.

Now that Deion rolls out and goes to Colorado, some of these guys are like, I might be good enough to play at an actual school where people will see me. Why am I fucking around at Jackson State? So I can't blame them. Like, you signed up to play for a guy. Now, maybe there are some guys who signed up to play at a school, and it's been their dream to play at that school, and it doesn't matter who the coach is. Their goal in life was to play for a guy. Now, maybe there are some guys who signed up to play at a school, and it's been their dream to play at that school, and it doesn't matter who the coach is, their goal in life was to play at that university. And maybe that's the case. Maybe that's real.

I'm sure there are plenty of people like that. You've heard about a lot of guys like that. I grew up in Louisiana. There are a lot of people, and their dream, doesn't matter the coach, was to play at LSU. To get offered a scholarship to go to Louisiana State University was a big fucking deal. It mattered. But as someone who's worked with many different bosses, and some get you and some don't, like when my boss, when Andy got whacked at WIP, that's not what I signed up for. Now, there's also an element of real world that these kids don't have to deal with that the real world does. Like, think if you're someone like Angelo in Philadelphia or Rich in Houston who worked for 10 different program directors.

Every time a program director gets whacked, you can't just go, well, fuck this shit. I don't want to be here anymore. There's bigger responsibilities in life. You have wife, kids. They might be in school. There's money. Like, truly, these guys have no obligations at all. That's the difference.

You know, a real-world situation like Angelo, maybe Angelo could have taken a job at any other city in the country and made a million dollars a year, but he can't just look at a new boss and say, I don't like this guy. I quit because WIP is the job paying a million dollars. And I don't know that there's another one out there doing that. Whereas a player, if you're some young dude, who's third on the depth chart, fourth on the depth chart quarterback, and you're playing at Ohio state, if someone calls you from Colorado or Boise State or wherever, and they call you and say, hey, do you want to get in the portal and come to our school? We want you. Well, there's no sacrifice you have to make. Oh, what? You don't get to stay at a free dorm room and eat free food in the mess hall? A mess hall, they're not army people. But you don't get to hang out in the food hall there? Oh, great. You just go to the next

place and fuck those chicks and eat their food and stay in their fucking dorm rooms. There isn't a huge risk for you. You've been there a year. It is what it is. You're probably not from there anyway. Great. On to the next one so I can play. So if you want to compare it to real life, it's not quite apples to apples, right? But it's somewhat similar. If I were here today, and I view things differently than I did 10 years ago or five years ago or seven years ago, but if I were here and program director Jonathan said, peace out, I don't want to be here anymore. And they hired some schmuck that I didn't want to work for. I feel like then I should have the opportunity to rip up this contract and

say, nope. Now, the other argument is you should put that in your contract, I guess, Josh. If program director Jonathan is whacked, I have the right to terminate this bitch and rip it up, wipe my ass with it. Let's go. And maybe that would be the case. But I got to tell my agent about that. That's solid. I should have the right. Like, listen, we can terminate this deal if there's a new manager.

Anyway, point being in all of this is 10 minutes ago I set out to tell you why I think the portal sucks and there should be some level of punishment for deciding to go to 10 different places. But I get it. You just want to go play. You want to go do your job. You want to be happy. We only get one trip around the sun.

How many trips around the sun? Well, we only get one ride on this fucking merry-go-round, right? So you might as well enjoy it. It's kind of like being married. If your marriage sucks, get the fuck out of it. Don't stay in it. It's a waste of your time. So peace out, Girl Scout. Let's go. And you might as well enjoy yourself and be happy and live your life.

So why would you want to stay in a situation? And no, I'm not telling you there aren't situations where some kid's just a whiner that doesn't get a chance to play. Like this guy DJ Ongolongole over in Clemson that's transferring. Well, this guy had every opportunity to be great, and it just kind of turns out he might stink. So he's going to go somewhere and try to stink less there.

Maybe he lost his job. Like there are examples where you can go, oh, this guy kind of pussed out. This guy was given every opportunity to puss out. But there are some, like Joe Burrow, who it's like, that guy's not going to get over the top in this place, and he's got to go. These big schools will get like five great players in every position.

It's not easy. And you might be a notch below someone. Why waste your entire life there and then five years later go, I feel like I could have played at a high level. I felt like I could have been great. But I just decided to sit there and wait my turn and that turn never came. And you could miss out on a Joe Burrow Joe Burrow could miss out on Joe Burrow what if Joe Burrow doesn't enter the portal

if Joe Burrow doesn't enter the portal does Joe Burrow ever become Joe Burrow does anybody draft Joe Burrow he certainly doesn't go number one he's not a top five draft pick does he ever have that opportunity to show what he's got it's interesting, it's fascinating to me alright, love you