The Josh Innes Show - What Is A Professional?

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

As we continue discussing Lane's return to Ole Miss, I still have a big issue with these idiots who say LSU was trying to sign pro players. What makes someone a pro? Money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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There is not one game on the schedule this week. What is this? Week three, week four. Let's see, college football schedule this week. Let's see. Let's take a look at this week's college football schedule. College football schedule. let's go week three is what this technically is.

Week three. We don't care about the Friday matchups. Boy, Oregon gets to play on Friday after getting worked by Oklahoma State. Portland State, I feel bad for you. Oregon's going to score 100. They are 57.5 point favorites are Oregon, by the way. So I feel bad for Portland State. You're going to get a good old-fashioned butt-fucking Portland.

Enjoy it. Texas Tech and Houston could be good. I think Texas Tech will probably work on pretty good. So let's see. Georgia and Arkansas, 11 a.m. No one gives a shit. Let's see. Penn State Buffalo. I'm just looking at top 25 teams at this point, too. Let's see. Tulane and Kansas State. I mean, no. Kansas, Arizona State. That might be a decent game, but no. I'm just like just scrolling through the schedule.

SMU and Louisville. Neat. No one gives a shit. Florida State and Alabama. Alabama's going to win that by four fucking touchdowns. South Carolina and Mississippi State, nobody cares, Duke and Stanford, nobody cares, Missouri and Troy. Missouri is my favorite, because Missouri is one of the teams that loves to like dick swing about being in the SEC and about schedules and about schedules anybody. And then Missouri's first four weeks of the year

are against just bums and it's hysterical. Murray State is a 56.5 point underdog against Oklahoma State. Do we take the racers after the biggest win ever for Oklahoma State. Probably. Might as well. I mean, there's not another game on the schedule this week at all that comes close to LSU and Ole Miss. Oklahoma, New Mexico. I'm just looking at the teams, the top 25 teams are playing. Notre Dame and Michigan State. Of course, you get that on NBC because you get all the Notre Dame games. You get a 30-point Notre Dame favorite. That's hot. Number seven versus number eight is LSU and Ole Miss. BYU and Colorado State. No one cares.

Indiana and Western Kentucky, nobody cares. Utah and Utah State, nobody cares. Oh, God. This is one of these things that really just annoys me. So USC is on the road this week taking on Rutgers. That is a conference game. The fact that USC and Rutgers are in the same conference will always bother me. Now, when we talk about all the problems with college sports,

and people are like, college sports is broken because did you see that LSU try to go out and get professional players? No, they really didn't. It was just some guy that practiced for five minutes with a team. He had eligibility left. He didn't know he had eligibility left until they changed a rule. So he tried to come back. You know why?

Because the guy could have made a shit ton of cash playing at LSU. You would have done the same fucking thing. And LSU did their due diligence and tried to make it happen. Fine. They're trying to win games. That's the point. But people love to get worked up over this kind of shit, you know, and talk about how the social.

Sports being ruined by things like this. You know what's ruined college football and college athletics? Is USC is in the same fucking conference as Rutgers. And that game's being played at 3.30 East. So that's being played at noon body clock time for USC. Like, tell me where that makes sense. Tell me where it makes sense for Piscataway, New Jersey to be a home city in the same conference as L.A.

or the same conference as Eugene Oregon or the same conference as whatever insert whatever Big Ten City is on the West Coast now stupid is what it is and that's a bigger problem with college athletics it's a far bigger problem in college athletics than oh did you know that LSU tried to hire pro players the dumbest fucking argument that anybody can make

is that argument about trying to hire pro players guess what they all get paid now who gives a shit. They're all pros. You know what makes you a pro? You get paid to do something. Arch Manning's 22 years old. Arch Manning, while he's not laughing at videos of Homegirl getting slapped by Steve Sarkesian, the dude's making solid cash. What is the NIL?

Arch Manning. Let's see. How much does Arch Manning get paid? What is this is? Like $8 million? $6.8. He's the highest paid college football player, which is pretty remarkable because he fucking sucks. But Arch Manning makes 6.8 million in NIL money during the, well, that was during the 2025 season.

Endorsements and other things. It surpasses the earnings of most NCAA coaches and only a few top tier coaches make more. His verified deals alone totaled over $3.5 million with the remainder coming from revenue sharing other NIL valuations. But Josh,

that's not truly a contra. That's a really pro. That's NIL. They're getting fucking paid. And Arch is going to Texas because Texas, LSU, among some others are places where the NIL money is the best because the value is the best if you play at these fucking places. These dudes are pros. So please spare me the idea that you're, you're appalled by the idea that some guy, like the thing that annoyed me, I know I'm all over the place here. The thing that annoyed me about the LSU getting professional players thing,

A, it was a Lane thing. People just wanted to shit on it because it's Lane and people hate Lane, and I get that. That comes with it because Lane's a hateable guy. So I get that. So it It was an LSU thing. It was a lane thing. But nobody listened to the reality of the story. And the reality of the story was that this guy and some others, it wasn't just these dudes at LSU, it was players at a bunch of places.

But these dudes left, and they left because they were told they didn't have eligibility left. Then after the fact, after they had left and declared for the draft and got drafted or went pro quote unquote, then it was revealed that, They got another year of eligibility. So why wouldn't the guy try to come back? Like, I guess my question would be, what made this guy a pro player? He was getting paid at Ole Miss. Like, let me see what Dayquan Wright was getting paid at LSU.

Dayquan Wright, Ole Miss NIL. Let's see how much he was making. How much did Dayquan Wright, Ole Miss, I'm going to put salary, but I mean, whatever. Dequan Wright doesn't have an NFL salary. At Ole Miss, Wright was a tight end. second team all SEC player instead. They're going to, okay, well, how much did he make? Let's see, how much did he actually make there?

Let's see, how much money, how much money did Dayquan right make at Ole Miss? Let's see. There's no publicly available record, but the guy made some money. He was like a second team all SEC tied in at Ole Miss. The guy made money, right? And he had an opportunity to make money at LSU coming back this year. You know, so, like, the idea that, like, these guys were pros, they weren't trying to bring back, I don't know, insert, you know, Brock Bowers. They weren't trying to sign Brock fucking Bowers.

They were trying to sign a guy that this time last year was playing college football, never played in an NFL game, practiced with a team for five fucking minutes. So, like, if you have a problem with that, whatever, but the idea that you're just going to tell me that LSU is out trying to get NFL players, you're just lazy bums is all you are. If you don't like it, that's fine. I think you're misguided because they're all getting paid. See, you'll feel better if you start to accept college athletics for what college athletics is. And what college athletics is or college athletics are or whatever you want to put, when you accept the fact that college athletics is a universe where there is no amateurism. Like, I think people still try to live in this world where there's, well, these are amateurs.

They're not. even the lowest of the low guy can make a couple of bucks. You know, not everybody's making the stupid money that, you know, Sam Levitt is making at LSU or that Archmanning is making. Like, not everybody's making like Buku dollars, but a lot of these guys are making something. I mean, there are guys at the end of benches that have been signed to some of these schools that are making sick money, like huge money, hundreds of thousands of dollars to do nothing.

So, like, you got to get out of this mindset, get out of this world where, well, you know, it's college versus the pros. They're all fucking pros. This is the minor leagues right now, except the minor league players, in some cases they're making more money than the pro players. So unlike in, you know, Major League Baseball or some, you know, Crash Davis has been toiling around

fucking the minors, you know, breaking the minor league home run record for 15 years, you know, not making anything, sleeping on someone's couch, you know, getting a $10 meal stipend every day. You know, that's not this. These are guys living a life of fucking, luxury, they got the best locker rooms, they got the best travel, they got the best medical

people, they got the best health and wellness staff. These people are loaded. So it's the miners if the miners made more money than the actual big leagues. But they're all fucking pros. Every one of them. These are professional players. There are guys going to teams, three, four different teams over three or four years getting paid at each one of them. So please spare me the bullshit. Just tell the truth. The truth is you don't like Lane, you don't like LSU, so you lie or you mislead people and say, oh, that you's trying to sign professional players. Explain to me what made Dayquan ride a professional player.

I never played in a pro game, had a couple of offseason practices. So explain to me why Dayquan Wright is a professional football player. Arch Manning's, it's not his age, right? Because Arch Manning's 22. So Arch Manning's 22 years old, makes $9 million or whatever it is. He's not a pro. Because any argument you can make to me about the age of a guy, Well, I mean, like, some of these guys are, I've seen this argument made on some of my social media.

Well, Arch Manning is, you know, some of these guys are, you know, the differences, you got grown men who are 23, 24 playing on the pros versus 18-year-olds. Not really. There are dudes in college that are like 25. So spare me. Like, there's no argument you can make about it that I would agree with. I'll listen to it. And if you want to have that belief, you can have that belief. That's fine.

If you want to go out there and tell me that, oh, my God, there shouldn't be pro players in college. sport, fine. I can get down with that. If it was legit. I was listening to my buddy Matt and I don't follow all this shit, but there was a guy that played basketball at Alabama. This guy played in the G League, played G League games, went back to Alabama and played like seven games at Alabama. It's kind of fucked up that I've never heard of that because you think that'd be a big deal compared to what's going on at LSU trying to quote unquote sign pro players. You would think that'd be a pretty big fucking deal, something that we'd heard about, right? Like, you'd think that that, wouldn't you? You'd think that a huge story would be that some guy that was balling in the G-League

and came back to Alabama would have been a huge story that stopped all the press and was talked about by people on first take and the national news like Dayquan Wright was, right? I had never heard of this guy. Now, part of that could be because it's college basketball, and that's not as big of a deal, but the story was amateurism and we can't have pros in college sports and the integrity of college sports and blah blah blah blah blah blah so a dude played in the g league and then came back and played six seven games at alabama and i've never heard of the guy yet dayquin right practiced a few times and got cut by the browns had eligibility left that he didn't know he had tried to come back ls u went to the courts over and shit the court said the guy can play lsu decided

we're going to back down from the cc and just say fuck it this is not worth our time but that was the biggest story on the planet and LSU's terrible and Laine Kiffin's a cheater and LSU's a piece of shit. Yet a legitimate pro player, a guy who played in the G league, that is the professionals. That is the minor leagues of the professionals.

So that dude played and nobody gave a shit. To the point that I don't even know, I could not tell you this guy's name because it was such an inconsequential story that to people, no one covered it. Then I'm like, I don't even know who that fucking guy is.

I couldn't care less. I don't know who he is. But Dayquan writes a household name. Why? Because it's LSU. It's college football, which is bigger than college basketball. But it's still the same principle, right? The same principle is we can't have pro players playing professional sports, right?

We can't do it. We can't have pro players coming to college. Nobody gave a shit when it happened at Alabama. And nobody gave a shit that Texas is trying to have some guy play that was in an NFL mini camp. Nobody cares. It was just L.A. LSU. And that's the lane power. That's the power of what he does, like the mind fuck that is Laine Kiffin.

Like this guy just like people's brains rot over Lane Kiffin. Like he has this incredible ability to like, and that's what I love. I love that he's the LSU coach. And in five years he won't be the LSU coach anymore. He'll go somewhere else and then we'll all be pissed like what the fuck lane. But in this moment, I enjoy it. So there's that.