The Press Box - Covering College Football, the Playoffs, and the Transfer Portal Era With Kevin Clark

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Bryan is joined by Kevin Clark to break down college football news and updates ahead of upcoming playoff and bowl games. They begin by discussing the state of the Alabama football program, weigh in on the impact of the transfer portal on the players, programs, and college football fan base, and touch on playoff scheduling. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Kevin Clark Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Peace! We're out of here. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox Final Edition. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Cervantes. College football bowl and playoff season is about to begin. Trophies named after people like Doke Walker are being handed out. And something called the Transfer Portal is just open. Times like these, we save our Scali for one man.

He is Ringer Senior Staff Writer and the host of Slow Newsday, Kevin Clark. Kevin, welcome to the press box. Hey, buddy, what's going on? It's so good to see you this time of year. No looking at the screen because I know you're going to be looking at Croatia, Brazil. We're talking college football here. I have one eye. I have one eye on my Fox stream here, checking out Croatia.

But I'm locked in. It's portal season. No portal in the World Cup. Let's start with the story you wrote this week for the ringer.com. Alabama Crimson Tide, coached by Nick Sabin, finished 10 and 2 this year, which is good for other teams, but not so good for Bama. What state does Alabama football find? itself in. There was a stat in that piece from Chris Felica, now at Fox, who said that Alabama had taken the field for, I believe, 168 straight regular season games in which they could have won

the national championship. That streak was ended in October of this year when they lost to LSU, and they actually play out the strength. That doesn't normally happen. So what state are they in? Everything is changing around them. And I don't think the point of the piece, was not that Alabama's going to fade. I mean, like I think a lot of people have gotten, it's a little bit like the Brady, Brady's falling off a cliff takes where like,

there's like 15 media members out there who have the headline, Alabama's done. Alabama's dynasty is over. Like that's, I saw a Woken thing the other day that I guess that in huge letters in USA Today, like seven years ago was like, well, Alabama's done. It's DaBos time.

Whatever. We're not saying that. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that there are shortcuts to becoming Alabama that didn't exist in the past. And you can go out. and get six, seven starters in what amounts to the open market every single year. So I think your high school recruiting establishes your floor and your transfer recruiting

establishes your ceiling. I think there's two sort of levels to it. There's USC went out and got immediately better by getting Caleb Williams, who's going to win the Heisman. And Jordan Addison, a receiver from Pitt who won the Bolitnikoff Award, they literally just went out and were like, hey, man, want to come to USC and, you know, some local businesses chipped in and all of a sudden he's he's on he's on the west coast um that's going to keep happening uh but then there's also guys like jared verse who's a florida state who's going to be a high

draft pick who played at albany a year a year ago this time last year and it's basically like oh i want to be a top 10 pick why don't i go play in the acc and have joe tess call my games for one year and so that level of talent floating out there i don't know how alabama's rain isn't threatened by that because you can just go out and get those guys and if you're an cc coach you just text a couple of your local Dodge dealerships, and you've got two or three really quality starters. So, you know, I think, and I said this on fine by the other day, but, you know, Nick Saban's whole line is everybody wants to be number one, but nobody has a discipline to do it, right? He always talks about the process and the grind and all that stuff and embracing it.

And that's always been his edge. But what happens, Brian, when there's no process? There's no process. Like, you can go out and be USC and add five, six, seven wins to your, total just through the open market. It doesn't, everything is different. This is the reckoning that happened in college basketball

15 years ago where Coach K went from, we got four year guys to we're going to go one and done. I wrote that in the piece that basically he told John Feinstein there's no such thing. By 2013 he had the Grayson Allen teams and he was saying there's no such thing as a young team anymore. Your team is your team. John Calipari was the first

person to say, cool, okay, one and done's great. I'll win national titles with those guys. I'll get to the final four with those guys. who's going to be the John Cal party of the transfer portal because that guy is going to immediately compete with Nick Saban. I was fascinated by the parallel you drew between Coach K, aka Mike Shoshowski and Nick Saban, because every time they would go to Final Four in Coach K's case or win another national title in Sabin's case, we would get into the media zone of the old guy still got it, college journalism being very, very coach-centric.

Yeah. And now they've both moved into it. as you say, no declarative statements here. But Sabin has moved into what Coach K was a few years ago, which is, does the old guy still have it? Is he going to be able to navigate the new world as expertly as he navigated the old world? It's interesting because he will, first of all, he's old. Like, he's not 50.

So it's like what the sample size and this is going to be. If he retires two years from now and doesn't get back to the playoff, we can't make any grand statements about whether or not he was equipped for the NILA or the Transfer Portal era, whatever. What I will say is, I think it's going to be a little more NFL-ish in the sense that there's going to be five, six, seven, eight teams maybe that always have the backbone of high school recruiting. We know what those teams are.

There were only five teams over from 2016 to 2021. There were five teams that got 60 percent of five stars. Okay. And you know who those teams are. Okay. The teams to play the playoff more times than not, right? And so for me, I think it's going to be, I think Alabama will. probably win the national championship in the next two years.

But I don't think that really, like I think this is the last normal year. Like Georgia is the last normal team in the sense that almost all of their guys are from high school recruiting. None of them left. I think that sort of the other barbarian at the gate here is what happens to Alabama's roster when LSU starts to say, oh, we can just get these guys for a million dollars. Like there's no consequences to that. So that's the other sort of facet to it.

And so Alabama has the top recruiting class in the country coming in for 2023. But how long does that last? How long does that keep together? When Ryan Day said last summer that it's going to cost $13 million to keep a roster together, people kind of misunderstood that. And they were like, oh, well, it's going to take $13 million to get a class. And there was that rumor that Texas A&M had spent tens of millions of dollars in their class. No, no, no, that's not what Ryan Day was saying.

He was saying to keep it together, to keep Marvin Harrison Jr. from going to LSU or to Clemson or Miami, it's going to cost probably seven figures, okay? And that's, let alone the entire offensive line, let alone the entire defensive backfield. Like, that's what that is. And so that, to me, is the biggest thing. How can you keep this talent, retain this talent?

It's not about development anymore. It's about understanding the realities of how this player movement goes. And so Sabin still can coach better than anybody. There's an amazing line in John Talti's, new book where I guess Sabin told Mal Moore at the very beginning of his tenure. He said, you just got a horseshit coach, but you got a great recruiter. And he was talking about himself, obviously. And but like that's always been the name of the game is talent management. And then the tiebreaker is how well do you coach? Right. That's what we see every year. Like Jimbo is not up

to it. Kirby Smart, Nick Sabin are up to it. And so I don't think that I, it's hard for me to sit here and say this is what's going to happen in the Nick Saban era, except to say that he's, sorry, Nick Sabin in the NIL era, except to say a lot of things are going to change and he still has, I don't know, a hundred advantages other teams don't have, including the fact he's probably the smartest coach in football. I hate to throw out, I'm old enough to remember us on this podcast, but I am old enough to remember something that is at least semi-analogous to this, which is when free agency came to the NFL in the 1990s, because it hits right when my Dallas Cowboys are the

best team in the league when they have been, at least again, somewhat like college football teams, drafting and developing players like no other team in the league under Jimmy Johnson. And all of a sudden, this new system comes in and goes, oh, wait a second, you're going to do that. And then other people can come and just pay for players. You know, this is, there's new capitalism in the NFL. And thank goodness, by the way, for that. But it was a totally new world. And a drafting and developing players was not unimportant. It's still obviously really important, but it just changed the chessboard completely. And you're seeing similar levels of cope and the cycles of grief playing out the same way.

I was a little young. I remember football always having for agency. I don't remember Reggie White, any of that stuff, the early player movement. I don't remember that stuff. Okay. I remember Reggie White playing for the Packers, but didn't know how he got there, right? You just sort of, you know, when you're a kid, guys just appear on teams. It's like, oh, he's always been on a team.

Whatever, oh, wait, he was somewhere else. He was an eagle? Anyway, you see the same levels, and we're going to have the same cycle in college, we have with the NFL, which was, I saw it this year with Texas A&M, which, well, when you buy players, they're just not committed and they're not going to, you know, and they're going to want to leave as soon as they can. And then it's, and then it's going to be, oh, well, you know, when you go out and you buy a player for one year, he might not fit the system, might not be scheme fit. He might not fit the culture. Culture. Remember that for like 10 years in the early 2000s? It was like,

free agency is paying for somebody else's mistakes. Actually, having players who were good is actually the advantage, okay? Like, let's not talk about culture. Like, culture is winning. Winning Begatts culture, right? So we're going to go through those similar levels. And what I want to emphasize on this is that everything in the history of college football especially has trended towards one thing, which is that talented players beat on talented

players. As Nick Saban says, in another book I just read, heavyweights beat up lightweights. That's what happens in college football. There will be no parity. That's why I say there's only going to be at most 10 teams who sort of can compete and and the transfer portal is going to rise one or two above in a given year. And I think that will change, by the way, because I don't think there's any such thing as a super scout as far as evaluating these guys.

And I also don't think over a decade that one team will spend dramatically more than the other nine, I guess you could say, right? And so I think that just generally we're going to see sort of the life cycle of NFL free agency in college. And we're going to see, you know, I guarantee you. Even you saw with Billy Napier last summer where he was like, you know, where it's not going to get into bidding wars with players? Is that just not who we are? Yes, you are.

I promise you you're going to get into bidding wars with players. I promise you're currently in bidding wars. And so you're going to see the same sort of quotes you saw from NFL coaches 15 years ago where it's like, well, we want to make sure they're a system fit. The system fit is a good player, okay? And it's like the Lionel Hutz line. The right house for someone is the house that's for sale, okay? And so you and I found out that out recently ourselves.

Yeah. Yeah. And so that's that's sort of the way I look at it. There's a thing called blue chip ratio in college football, which is basically that you have to have more five and four stars on your roster than three and two stars. And if you don't have that statistically, you literally cannot compete for the national championship. And anyone who doesn't have that as a literal fraud and they always get exposed, always. There is no exception to that rule. And so it's all about talent acquisition.

So we're going to hear all of this cope. I promise you, I promise you. Next September, there's going to be some team that starts out like three and O with no portal stuff, with no like NIL. And the coach is going to be like, we're doing things the right way. And someone's going to write some glossy feature about it and they're going to lose by 40 points. Like there's always this sort of reaction to whatever's happening. Let me tell something. I don't think college reporters like what's happening right now.

In the same way, I don't think. that college basketball reporters like what was happening in the one and done era because it's just new when it's unstable and you have to look at things differently

and the coaches hate it and listen, by the way, I've benefited from this so much for the past decade and it's been very good to me. You get coaches to complain about anything and just write it and get a lot of clicks,

okay? So yes, you're going to be able to get for the next five years coaches to say, oh, it's free agency. Lane Kiffin, yet this time last year

said we've, I don't know, we've destroyed. college football. We've brought free agency to college football. And recruiting doesn't matter. It's all about money. Guess who had the second ranked transfer portal class this year? Lane Kiffin. So I just think that the sort of the take cycle is going to be very similar to what we saw in the NFL. I'm intrigued to see how it develops, what the backlash is, the backlash of the backlash. I just think that everything that I can see is better for me than even though there is some

competitive problems or whatever, it's better for me than the player's not getting paid, which I always felt very icky about. You mentioned how reporters are reacting to the new reality. People don't know this. Kevin and I have spent way too much time on college football message boards. Every school has two or three college football message boards. They are essentially the local newspapers. I think I'm about five subscriptions.

Okay, five subs deep. Each message board has its own Woge or Schefter-like character, who for years and years was reporting on high school recruiting. Yes. Now they are reporting on the transfer portal. What has struck you about transfer portal coverage in its infancy?

All right. So first of all, there's a guy named Chris Hummer, who has become the Wojj. He was on the cover three party today. I believe he works for 24-7. He's become the guy who's owned the transfer portal just as far as just scouring the earth.

And he made the point the other day, I think it was him that said that, you know, This is the day that the portal day, which was this week, became more important than signing day, which I think is probably correct. The day the portal became president was Monday of this week. How has it been different? What I would say, what I will say is that I think that it's really hard. And I put this out on Twitter the other day.

It's really hard. And you see it all the time where it's like, oh, I just saw it 10 seconds ago. like Vanderbilt's leading tackler has entered the portal whatever and it's like well is he good because I don't know because I look at when a Miami guy enters he's coming into the portal he was a four star coming into high school and in his mentions it's like LSU fans being like come to LSU and it's like well I just watch this guy for two years and if he can make LSU I'd be very surprised right and so I think it's really there's actually not a lot of real time scouting there's just too many players and 24 seven does a nice job maybe three or four days after the faxing this guy's four star as a transfer. This guy's a three stars of transfer. You kind of have to go off the offers. Like, this is a kid from Kent State, Dante Cephas. I said that the day Georgia offered him. Okay, good. That's a good starting point. He's from Kent State, and Georgia has offered him, so he's good.

And so I think that's the hardest part where it's like you're going off of high school recruiting at this point. And nine times out of 10, this is not Jordan Addison. This is not Caleb Williams. This is not Jared verse. Just some guy who wants playing time. And so that's a little different. And the message board stuff, It's confusing. I mean, I love, I love sort of the calming. Someone compared 24-7s moderators last year for Miami to QAnon, where it was like, everything will be happening. It would be chaos.

And then the moderate, David Lake and Gabby Uruidia would come on and just be like, okay, everybody calm down. Patriots are in control. It's going to be fine. We're going to get Mario Cristobal. And so I just love that culture, but it's total chaos right now. because no one knows, no one's equipped to handle this necessarily. And that's what I think is so fascinating about it.

And the guys, I really do think Max Olson was on Riscilla yesterday. I really do think the portal evaluations and coverage. I think that guys like Cooper Patagna, who is a personnel guy under Mario Cristobald Oregon actually works for 24-7. Like those are the guys who are going to be stars in this new era because you need real-time evaluations and need to figure out who's going to help and who's not. Because, again, I don't know. Like I feel a little bit like Jaden Daniels transferred last year from Arizona State to LSU.

Miles Frazier transferred from FIU to LSU. And I feel under-equipped. Like I didn't know they were good. I know that he was a starter at Arizona State and he was pretty good. I didn't know who's going to play this. Jaden Daniels was going to be the quarterback Nasty title game when he went to LSU. Like, help me. Help me evaluators.

It's really interesting because it makes the challenge of covering college football even more difficult. You watch college football on television. Let's say you were just a normal college football fan. I always try to point this out to people. Michigan, TCU in a couple of weeks. How many players total were your normal college football fan know in the whole game between Michigan and TCU? Five, maybe 10, if you're really into it, you don't know the people on the field, which is why people like Chris Fowler and Kirk Kerrb Street are just doing storytelling for the entire broadcast,

being like, this is who this is. This is where this person came from. This is much more handholding than in an NFL broadcast. Now you've got transfer portal. So you are taking a batch of players that turns over rapidly and you're turning it over even more rapidly. So I can imagine, especially from a national level, that being a huge headache. Agree. There's a couple of things to break out within that.

Number one is, and you and I talk for this all the time, like how often, like Colt McCoy was so much more famous than anybody currently in college football. Like, and I feel like, there was a bigness to it in previous eras. Johnny Mansell became an absolute household name. I don't know. My mom watches college football every Saturday. And outside of her beloved Terps and probably a couple people on Florida,

Florida State in Miami, I don't think she could name me a college football star. You know, I'm not totally sure she could give you a Bryce Young right now. And I wonder, part of that I think is the media stuff, is that players are just not. So first of all, and this is a take

I privately revealed to you a couple of weeks ago, I'm of the opinion that the, the lack of hype around Sports Illustrated covers and even ESPN the magazine covers really hurt the college football ecosystem because you would get like Arizona on the cover and it's Teddy Bruskey

and he's wearing a crop top. And it's like, oh, hell yeah, we got to know these guys, right? And I don't think there's necessarily like, yeah, you know, somebody was saying the other day was listening to like a fashion magazine person talking about it's like, oh, it's all about Instagram now. It's not about the cover on the newsstand. It's all about getting the likes on Instagram. Well, that doesn't really cut to mainstream America. That really doesn't. Like they're not sitting on there looking at like

Cosmo or Vogue or whatever, Vanity Fair and going, oh, I'm going to smash that like like. We got, you know, George Clooney's in the cover. Hellie, I'm like Como. That doesn't really get into the kind of that kind of pool there. And so, I'm hoping NIL, which has actually opened up, a lot of these, I mean, Bryce Young was the debut guest on Slow News Day, the podcast this year, right? Those guys were not giving interviews five, six years ago because coaches just said you couldn't. And so I think the lack of media access in college football has become a real detriment to the players. And I think the NIL is loosening that up because they're doing paid interviews. You know, an SID was just telling me a couple of weeks ago when I was BSing with them, that, you know, they'll just.

turn on the radio sometimes and their starting quarterback is on like the zoo crew morning show. And it's like, oh, I didn't know about that. Huh. And five years ago, the coach would have suspended the guy for that, you know, just like, wait, you're giving an authorized interview to the, you know, to scooter and the turtle on, you know, at 3.30 and drive time. Like, what the hell? And so what was the name of the drive time guys in King of the Hill?

Chad and the sports, sports jock, something like that. Yeah. Just like, just calling in, calling into those guys. And so I think that that can help these guys putting themselves out there. I just think from a year to year, college football actually has a bit of a superstar problem. And I'm hoping that all of this changes. And also it doesn't hurt like Caleb Williams transferring. I know he's a big star at Oklahoma, but like that storyline doesn't hurt from an attention standpoint.

There was a take out there that said, okay, you're going to open up the NIL, college football players are going to be able to be paid in some way or another. And people are going to like college football less because it is not a quote unquote amateur sport anymore. That was bullshit. That was a bad take. Now we're kind of in stage two of this take where we're getting to a point that if you're at central Michigan or if you're at Wyoming and you have a really good season, you're like,

and very understandably so, I want to go to a big school because I can improve my draft position or I want to go to a big school because I can get money right now that I deserve to play college football. So there is very little impetus for me to stay at a mid-level or smaller school. Is that, do you think, going to change the way people like college football? Yes. And I think that's part of a broader shift, and this is a conference realignment too, from a regional sport to a national sport, which I think has the chance to backfire, quite frankly.

I don't think people consume it. I don't think people consume college football nationally. I really don't. You really care about Texas, probably Texas A&M, even though they don't play them. I mean, we text about Jimboe quite a bit, so I think I might read on it. Those will remain off the record. Texas Tech. I mean, like, you probably, when Texas Tech gets a four-star, you click on it and you read about it, right?

You don't do that when Ohio State gets a five-star. You don't do that when Michael, when Washington, Washington's quarterback Michael Penix comes back for for an extra year. You're just kind of like, oh, that's interesting, not that into it. For me, I will read anything about Florida, Florida State, Clemson, those types of schools. And if Cal is going through something, that's on the back burner for me. I don't think you're going to end up with a situation where there's 140 teams and everybody processes it like the NFL. I really don't.

So I think you're going to see some markets that are hurt. Like, I think that you think about something like the Mac, which is its own ecosystem. And it's such a, you know, Matt LaFleur, his dad was a position coach at Central Michigan. And he was like, you know, Mac, the Mac just felt like the biggest thing in the world to me growing up in Michigan. And when I interviewed Mike LaFleur, who's the Jets offensive coordinator, he was like, you know, we played with our favorite teams, which at that point were Notre Dame and Central Michigan. It's like that, that's how you process it. And I don't think people really get it if they grow up in a major city and they have a sports or whatever. like you're in some places. If you grew up in Montana, people are all in on the Grizzlies there,

right? And you just don't understand it. And, you know, in Florida, you go to publics on a Saturday and all anybody's doing is getting ready for a game for their team. And it's just such a, you know, kind of all politics is local thing. All sports is local. And so I think that that college football is going to flop if they try to make it too national. And I think part of that, and I don't know what the sort of solution to this is. is that, yeah, if you are, I mean, I just saw Miami just offered a kid from Dartmouth.

What's going on here? I don't know if Brian Winhorse here, but like, what has changed about college football in a year that like some kids, some seniors showed out at Dartmouth and all of a sudden he's moving up? I don't know what the solution is. I do think on the back end it's going to hurt if you're really into Dartmouth football and he really wanted to see

Shane Cox's senior year. You're not going to get that. But I just, I think there's a small price to pay for letting these kids be actual college students. By the way, you know who transferred to better as professional stock? Me. So who the hell am I to get angry if, uh, if Daryl Jackson goes from, from Maryland to Miami to Florida State? Yeah. And of course, I always, you know, I want players to go get money, go be happy, have as much freedom of movement and freedom of everything else as

they possibly could, freedom of talk to reporters, all that kind of stuff. But there are interesting ways this is going to affect college football. And I think the, the transfer portal stuff's interesting too because you and I both know when reporters see transactions and especially a transaction window, a trade deadline, a free agency opening, a transfer portal opening, we get excited because that is a sugar rush. That is something that just makes people pay attention even if you're not totally sure what you're paying attention to. And I know this because I'm a Texas message board. They list like 50 guys are in the transfer portal. I'm like, Wait, did Texas call the guy from Kent State?

Or are we just studying this guy for the hell of it? Like, is this? We, is there something I need to know about this? Or is he just, he just in? So I, and I do wonder about that because what you do, we've seen this in basketball and other sports, you rewire people's brains to tell them what's important. Yes. And if the transfer portal is cool, it is, as you say, important because it's a shortcut to

to becoming, to competing, let's say, with Nick Sabin. but I also think it becomes sometimes transactions for their own sake and they distract everybody from the thing. Yeah. So the college football ecosystem and the media ecosystem needs to do a better job of commodifying this. And that's part of what I was saying earlier about sort of the real-time evaluations and just being like, okay, these guys, this guy is actually good. George is going to offer this kid. Alabama is going to offer this kid. We don't have to just rely on the fact that he was a four-star three years ago and he played nine snaps.

last year. So it reminds me a little bit of, so they actually have a window now. The window has been shortened. It reminds me a little bit of the European soccer transfer window, like literally one to one when you talk about transfer window. And they're so good. I don't think it's ever going to become a situation like Europe where Scott, where, you know, Marty Smith's going to be outside, you know, Tuscaloosa's facility and just saying, we got one hour to go until the transfer portal. We don't know if Bres Young is going to Florida State or not. Like, I don't think that's going to happen. Like I remember talking to one of my colleagues, Tom Clegg, at the day the European transfer portal, transfer window was going to shut. And I was like, hey man, when does,

when is the, when is the shut? Is it like midnight? And he's like, no, no, no, you don't understand the European media. It doesn't close. It's slam shut at 11 o'clock. And then, like, everybody's got the graphic, like on Sky Sports. It's like, there's the countdown clock. Like, we got, I think we, it's impossible to do, but you have to make it, first of all, part of the problem, is in a week 14 of the NFL, the World Cup's going on, NBA's in full swing. It's really hard for them to kind of own the news cycle. But if somebody was in charge, they would make this, they would have it after the Super Bowl, the week after the Super Bowl, it would start, the clock would start, and you would just have,

I mean, first of all, you're ruining the Bulls by having everybody transfer out. And allegedly they care about the Bulls. But I think that early February is the time. You have it for a week after the Super Bowl. It opens. There's absolute chaos. for one week and then you get a couple more weeks where guys can make their decision. Like that, that to me would be the most important thing.

It's just finding a way to have this owned the new cycle because it's not actually, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, so you might as well make money off it. Last question for you. And this is kind of a normie gripe. But let's rehearse it anyway here. The college football playoff, always intriguing, got Georgia, Ohio State this year, Michigan and TCU. they are once again playing these games on New Year's Eve, including a game that begins at 8 p.m. Eastern on New Year's Eve.

When are they going to stop playing important college football games late on New Year's Eve? Kevin, can you fix this? So Andy Staples is on Slow News Day, available on Spotify and Apple, wherever you get your pods, a couple weeks ago. And I had a gripe about how subservient the playoff has been to the Bulls. and he gave me a not so fast, my friend, because his theory on this,

and my gripe on this was that the quarterfinals are going to be at bowl sites, which I think shouldn't happen. I don't think the semifinals should be at bull sites. I mean, like, how many times... Listen, the college ball playoff does not have a lot of buzz in most years. I was at the Natty last year. A lot of media were to sit some coaches convention instead.

I remember I almost went when Clemson and Alabama played in San Francisco, and on stubbub, like the morning of the game, tickets were like 30 bucks. And the national championship. And I was just kind of like, oh, maybe I should just drive like six hours

because he's the national title game. And I just, you know, I think that got vetoed by my life. But, but, you know, you end up, there needs to be some buzz.

And I don't think that Alabama fans, comes in fans, LSU fans are going to travel for three, three games, right? Like, this is not going to happen. And I think that they, unless you make it,

I don't think that they, they're going to go to Atlanta, but I do think, well, I mean, Atlanta's geographically, you know, Dallas, but I do think they would visit Penn State. I think that's interesting. That's interesting to me is you go to visit Penn State. Anyway. Same. So I give my whole gripe to Staples and Staples is not so fast, my friend. The bowl contracts go through 2026, I think. And once that happens, there's no commitment beyond. And so what I think you might end up seeing is at the end of this decade, or the middle of this decade, the president said, you know what, we're actually kind of done with the Bulls.

We don't like the fact that the Rose Bowl tried to hold up, almost held up the playoff for two years. Like, this is ridiculous. And so I think once that happens, once we start realizing the Bulls shouldn't have any power, I mean, it's a parade. The Rose Bowl was a parade and then the Utah plays. How dare you, sir? That's not all that interesting.

And so once the playoff kind of, it's the only thing to me, that I, the playoff that I feel like actually should be treated more like a business, right? So many things in California are now treated like a business, except weirdly the playoff, which is trying to go through these weird half measures. And they need to say, no,

no, no, this is what's going to happen. We're going to stop playing on New Year's Eve. We're going to stop playing in the Cotton Bowl. We're going to be a business. We're going to be a playoff. And that I think you'll see by 2027. Such an old school idea.

Going down to San Diego for the holiday bowl, going to check out SeaWorld, see the sights while you're down there. It's just really, it's just really in 1995. I think it's like, oh. I think it tells us what time. In the 90s,

this is before TCU was even close to good. I mean, we weren't even sniffing good yet down there in Fort Worth. TCU's playing Texas. And they beat Texas for the first time in decades. I can't remember. It was like 30 years or something. And they were playing for a birth

in the Independence Bowl. It had been TCU. The bowls were not coming coming very quickly, which is in Shreveport. And they had to beat Texas and they beat Texas. I was there with high school friends. The whole stadiums rocking everybody's going nuts. And these two old Texas guys in front of me turned to each other. One of them goes, well, I guess we're going to Sleesport.

Like that was the. I just want to know what those guys ended up doing in Shreveport, Louisiana. I love Shreveport Smack Talk from Fort Worth, Texas. I've always remembered that. The one thing about me, you know, my uncle was briefly a walk on Notre Dame. He loves Notre Dame. You want to talk about just media lessons of 2022. It's that I had to explain not only how to sign up for Peacock to my uncle,

but I had to explain what streaming was. I had to give him the, I had to like start from square one. And at the end of the conversation, he had signed up for Peacock, because he needed to watch Notre Dame, I think, against UNLV. Or Stanford maybe. I'm not sure which game it was. But anyway, that's my streaming lesson of 2022.

Media executives take note that my uncle had to do it, sign up for peacock. We got him going, okay? It's a new world. It is a new world. But like he would always go to like Notre Dame bowl games or whatever. And my parents generation would always like be really into the bowls. And like Notre Dame and Florida State played a couple years ago in the what's now the cheese that's bowl was the Champs Sports Bowl.

And it was like, well, they're playing in a bowl. And I was like these are two kind of middling teams. I don't care. I have never cared about the Bulls ever. And I think it's a generation. thing because I think that the older generation doesn't realize the bowl creep that happened when we were younger, which is like everybody starts going to a bowl. Six to six win teams go to a bowl. I had a, um, I came down when I lived in LA. My wife and I came down for Christmas and Miami was playing in the champ sports bowl like the day after we were leaving and my dad was like, you're not going to change your flight. And it's like, no. I would actively, I'm not going to watch us play whoever it was West Virginia or whatever in the in the champ sports bowl. Like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm,

I'm all set there. And my parents are like, whoa, wow, skipping the bowl game. Wow. I'm going to sign up for an airline that doesn't allow me to stream live television so I can miss this game. All right, Kevin Clark, read him in the ringer.com, listen to him on Slow Newsday. We've just learned he has been offered by Georgia. So he is a legitimate member of the transfer portal.

I'm in the portal, baby. It's time for the second weekly edition. David Shoemaker guesses the strange. pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about the presidential aspirations of one Mike Pompeo was Pompeo and circumstance. Today's headline I found on the Twitter account of Sports Illustrated's Adam Doersson.

It's about NFL long snappers. NFL long snappers. Okay. We're talking about magazine voice on Monday, the lost magazine voice. This is kind of lost Sports Illustrated bonus piece voice. I'm going to take something that you don't think you're going to read about, but then you read about.

The long snapper, David, is football specialist specialist, according to Adam Doerson's tweet. I want you to think football cliches, football cliches along with a very specialized football role. What was S.I. Strainpun headline? Football cliches. Mm-hmm. And the trenches.

Okay. Keep going. Need some more. Plug and play. A little older than that one. You know, it's like, David, it's third down and you get close to that first down marker. You realize it's a game of inch. Well, let's say fourth and inches.

How about that? Okay, fourth and inches. Fourth and inches plus a very, very specialized role. It's fourth and... Fourth and... This is very strange. It's my specialized role. It's a little thing I do on the football field.

Nishes? That's not even... It's not even... It's a visual pun more than it is an audible pun. Fourth and niches. or niches if you feel comfortable saying it that way. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes back Monday. And more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.