The Josh Innes Show - Stop Feeling Sorry For College Athletes

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Dan Wolken, who sucks, wrote syrupy little story about the difficult lives of college players who lose a coach. It was really just a story about how it's hypocritical that coaches can leave and not get judged while players getting paid is so controversial. It's a bullshit, strawman article... Let's break it down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And look, I'm not going to be super sanctimonious and holier than now about the kiffin thing. It's transactional. It's business. It's like, I'm not going to sit there and tell you, oh, he's a scumbag for making the kids come in on a Sunday so he can tell them that he's leaving them. Like, I've seen some real sanctimonious bullshit about this, all right? This is not 1975. This is 2025. These aren't dudes that are staying at schools for four and five years.

These are dudes who are there because they think they can win now. And if they can't win there, they're going to go somewhere else. I'd like to know the number of players that are on the Ole Miss roster right now who have played at multiple schools already. Maybe I can Google that. Let's Google that really quick. How many Ole Miss football players have played at other schools? I probably won't give me that data, but it's absurd. So the idea that people want to sit there.

and make it seem like, oh, the coach leaving, it's terrible, and he left those poor kids. Real talk? Fuck them kids. Those kids are millionaires in some cases. Those kids, if not, they're 100,000aires. If not, those kids have held other schools hostage. Those kids have put up, have been involved in recruiting

where they've probably misled some people to. And yes, adults are supposed to be better than kids and blah, blah, blah. But at some point when you're 22, 23, 20 years old, and you're going from place to place chasing a bag, You're no better, and I'm not going to treat you like some kid that was jilted by a daddy figure. It's bullshit. So we'll get into that. I like this headline.

Lane Kiffin's disastrous exit from Ole Miss spells a much deeper problem in college football. All right, well, let's see what Dan Wolken thinks is a bigger problem in college football. I am curious. Let's play a couple commercials and we'll continue. All right. Let's read this story. Five years and five months ago, SEC Commissioner Greg Sanky went in front of Congress to push for federal protections that, to date, still haven't materialized. It was a fraught moment in college sports, COVID-threatening to disrupt the football season, legislative pressure, building on colleges to allow athletes to earn money through name, image, and likeness, and lawsuits meant to strike directly at the NCAA ability to regulate itself on a variety of issues like eligibility and transfers, blah, blah, blah.

All right, give me the story. I don't need a backstory here. The college football playoff, the Crown Jewel event Sanky and his fellow conference commissioners created to fill their pockets with billions of dollars will begin in fewer than three weeks. One of the teams that is unofficially qualified for the playoffs is every traditional metric is the University of Mississippi. Lang Kiffin, the coach who led Ole Miss to that 11-1 record in the best regular season in post-integration history, resigned Sunday to become the head coach at LSU. Okay, so great. What is the point here? We can have the discussion about the morality of what Kiffin's doing to a program that helped rehabilitate his obnoxious reputation over the last six years

the inconvenience of the coaching calendar and whether Ole Miss is making a mistake by prioritizing the long-term interest of its program over what's most likely to help the rebels win a championship over the next month. It's all fair game. But the larger problem with what Transpirets Sunday shouldn't be up for debate. Kiffin leaving the number seven team in the country to take a job with another SEC program before the, the sports marquee event is bad for the product, and no other well-run sports league would tolerate it. Yet, in all the years of listening to administrators like Sanky, fret about the unsustainability of the current model and wring their hands about how fans will react if college athletes got paid like professionals or the harm done to bowl games when players opt out,

have you ever heard a whisper of concern about what the adults are doing to wreck the legitimacy of their sport? Bro, you have such a misguided, dumb view on these things. have a tired, misguided, lousy view on all this. That's all you got, dude. Like, dude, stop, like, you cannot operate in a universe where, like, oh, poor kids are dealing with this while the adults in the room get to leave. Bro, when you start making $2, $4 million a year to play football, you are an adult. Save it.

Spare me the idea that these are just poor kids out there being left in the lurch and no one cares when the coach leaves, whatever. Because I know what your angle is. Everybody in the media uses this angle. The idea is that there's a bunch, largely a bunch of very rich, wealthy white guys who can do whatever the hell they want and leave whenever they want. But the players, who most of whom come from poor backgrounds, many of whom are African American or minority,

are the ones who are treated unfairly. And we as angry white people bitch when they make money. Most people are not bitching that athletes are making money. None of them are. People are fine with it. I think people have a problem when you judge. from place to place to place to place over the course of four years. But that is what it is.

People are going to bitch about that. I mean, look, Lane Kiffin stayed at one place for six years. How many of those players on his team are staying in one place for six years? Probably none of them. So the guy stayed somewhere for six years and he's leaving. But this holier than now, world's smallest violin, oh, these poor kids and the coaches get to leave. But all we want to do is dump on the players for ruining the sports.

for transferring. Most of those dudes who were dumped by Lane Kiffin yesterday, dumped, if you will, how many of them were at other schools? How many of them played for other coaches? How many of them left looking for a better opportunity? And by the way, those dudes have no rules in place. Like, Lane Kiffin, if he's going to leave, like, there's no buyout involved in this one because he wasn't fired.

But like when guys get fired from their jobs or they leave, a lot of times there's a buyout. And I know we talk about this all the time on here, and I know that it gets me all enraged over this. But it's real. I have a major issue and we sit around and we talk about it as if like, hey, these coaches can go from place to place and there's nothing that they are giving up

or there's nothing that's cost. There's no cost in this. There are schools that have to pay millions of dollars to buy out these coaches a lot of the time if they want the coach. Like a coach can't just leave. I mean, he can, but there's consequence to leaving. There's a dollar figure.

to leaving. There's a reputation hit that comes with leaving. What happens when, let me give you an example. So, Bryce Underwood, who's turned out to be not a dud, but he's been kind of blonde his first year with Michigan. Maybe it's because he's the quarterback at Michigan, and Michigan doesn't make good quarterbacks because Michigan's a shitty offensive football school, yet they were willing to pay three-something million dollars to Bryce Underwood. How long did LSU have Bryce Underwood locked in? He's on paper saying, I'm your guy. I'm committed. I'm verbally committed to you. I'm your guy. Then at the last minute, another school comes in with more money to pay, and he leaves and goes

there and chases the money. Somehow that's not an issue with college football. That's not a big picture issue. Oh, but when a coach feels he can go somewhere else and be more successful and would be happier somewhere else or whatever, we shit on that guy and say, what about the kids? Well, what about the kids that are jumping from place to place to place making money playing football, and we still treat them like their high schoolers or middle schoolers. Why does anyone in college football accept this is a normal cost of doing business when it crushes a fan base, sabotages a team, and devalues your playoff? Okay, let's go to the point.

Crushes your fan base. You know whose fan base has been crushed before? I don't know. Notre Dame when LSU hired Brian Kelly. How about, I don't know, Ole Miss, when Ole Miss hired Lane Kiffin away from FAU? Oh, but Josh, that's an obvious movie. He goes from a small school to a big school. Doesn't matter.

You're still going from place to place. So why do we only care about this now? Oh, it crushes your fan base. Yeah, it fucking sucks. You know what's going to happen? You'll hire another coach. You'll spend more money in the portal and see where it goes. This is transactional.

This isn't good for the brand, nor is it great content. It's poison spreading within Sanky's league right under his nose, while the league's leadership thinks fans are so addicted to the product that they'll forever accept any gut punches thrown their way, except, of course, the scourge of paying players what they're worth. Dan Wolkin is such a fucking jamoke. It's just a gemo. So you're writing this whole story to shit on Lane Kiffin,

and your main angle here is that, well, there are college kids there that we all want to judge. There are not, like, find these people, Dan. Like, find the masses who really give a shit that guys are getting paid. Like, what are you doing? You dig it around on the deepest reaches of social. media finding old angry white guy on Facebook? Like, you're basically fighting with a straw man here.

Fuck your straw man, Dan. No one cares that these guys are getting paid. The reality is that they're getting paid. They've never accomplished anything by and large. You're getting paid a shitload of money. Many of them are going to bounce from place to place. And none of you people in the media care when these guys do this. None of you

care when a guy says he's going to a school for 10 months and then at the last minute somebody pays him more money and he leaves. That it's free market. That's while these guys are getting paid what they're worth. College coach wants to go somewhere else because he wants to go fucking coach there and he's a piece of shit. Like that's the part that, like, these media people are such putses. They're such clowns. They are such stooges. And like, shut up. Like, this is not Pauliana world here. This is 2025 college football. And you guys open the Pandora's

box. You wanted guys to get paid. Good. Get them paid. It started with let them make money off their name, image, and likeness. Now it's collectives. guys getting basically contracts to come here. Contracts that they do not have to honor, by the way. Oh, you signed a deal to come to LSU? Cool, a year later, you can leave. And no one cares. Oh, well, that just, that kid's looking to make a better situation for himself.

Laine Kiven's not making a better situation for himself? Lane Kiffin can't do that. Or Eli Drinkwitz can't do that? Fun fact. Like, I saw Eli Drinkwitz the other day talking about how, and this after he signed an extension with Missouri. And I saw Eli Drinkwitz, and he says, I see that I was like the favorite for all these other jobs that I've never even been interested in.

I guarantee you he was interested in some other jobs. And if those jobs would have paid him, he would have gone. If they would have wanted him. If Florida would have said, hey, Eli Drinkwitz, come get some of this Florida talent instead of pulling your putt in Columbia, Missouri. He'd be like, sign me up. They didn't want him. But everybody loves the holier than thou angle. Everybody loves to play this holier than thou bullshit, man.

I don't know if there's anything I dislike less than media guy who uses straw. argument about all the people that don't want players to get paid. I don't talk to a human, and I talk to a lot of people that enjoy college football. I don't talk to a human that cares that these guys get paid. But you can't pay them like their adults and then not

treat them like adults. It doesn't work that way. That's not how the world works. Bryce Underwood's getting paid $3 million to play quarterback at Michigan. Sorry that you're 18, 19 years old. Kobe, when he was getting millions of dollars as an 18 year old, or Kevin Garnett was getting paid 18, or 18 years old getting paid millions to play in the NBA.

No one treated them like kids. They were adults. Why? Because they were playing professional basketball. Well, once you start getting paid to do something, what does that make you? Anyone? Bueller? A pro. You know what an amateur does? An amateur doesn't do that. An amateur just plays for the love

of the game. Do you know what a pro does? They get paid to play the game. So how do we keep viewing these guys as young people and amateurs? Yet they're getting paid in the same way that Kobe or Kevin Garnett or anybody else who went into the league, you know, 25 years ago and you still could make that jump, we would treat them like they're adults.

We don't treat these guys like they're adults. We don't criticize them like their adults. Why? Because we've got to be better because we're adults? Tough shit. They are paid athletes. They are mercenaries. They are employees.

Yet they get the financial benefits of being an employee and have none of the fallback. They can just leave tomorrow and it doesn't matter. They can tell you they're committed and then tell you to fuck off. It doesn't matter. so cut the shit Dan Wolkin and people like Dan Wolkin whose whole angle here is why is it that a coach can leave like this but then we all want to judge the players for getting paid find me the people saying that and not just a couple of slap dicks on the internet that are angry at the world find me legitimate viable people but what about what Nick Sabin and these guys say I don't think Nick Sabin gives a shit that these guys are getting paid I mean I think that's why he got out of it but like there's no consequence for these guys. There is no repercussions for being there and then leaving or whatever. All you do is sit there and blow them and say, they're just looking for a better

opportunity. Well, so is Lane Kiffin. So is how about Homeboy leaving Tulane? You know, John Summerall's going to Florida, just leaving for a better opportunity. Guess what? Tulane could be in the college football playoff. So no one's going to shit on this guy? Well, Florida is obviously, well, look, Tulane, they're in the college football playoff. Shit on him too. And I'm not just saying that because Lane Kiven's coaching LSU.

You heard in the previous pod how I feel about the guy. I think he's a fucking sociopath. I'm rooting for him because I want LSU to win and I think it's kind of fun and there's some drama and it's something. I don't particularly like the guy, but it's a different kind of, you know, not particularly like the guy. Like, Brian Kelly, I just didn't like. Like, I just thought he was just a pud. I don't like the way Lane Kiffin handled some of this, which again is a tough situation. I respect that it's a tough situation.

But like the shit with the dog tweets and shit, like fuck off, dude. Like I, like we can make a joke about how dumb everything is. But like, come on, bro. Stop fucking with people. Anyway, more to come.