The Press Box - The August Issue: How Do We Talk About College Football Now?

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Today on The Press Box, it's the August Issue. With college football season kicking off soon, Bryan and Joel discuss how we talk about college football and how it's changed over the years. They talk about how NIL has changed things, what's considered a scandal today, the most influential media members in the college football space, and much more. Then Bryan talks to John Henion, the director of 'Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young,' about the process of making this doc and some of the major characters in it (01:07:37). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and Joel Anderson Guest: John Henion Producers: Isaiah Blakely and Jon Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced deli-meat products for always $375. And get Life Brand Pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready, with a whole world and more. Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs? What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With ancestry, you can search select historical occupational records.

for free for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors. Search free until August 31st. Visit ancestry. ca for details. Terms apply. Hello,

media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox Thursday. It's Brian Curtis. It's Joel Anderson. Hello, Mr. Anderson. Hutt! Huck! Huck! It's week zero, isn't it? I can feel the fairly mediocre games of college football right around the corner.

Hey, TCU versus North Carolina kicks off the season, Brian. That's a big game. That's a former national finalist versus the greatest NFL head coach of all time in the season open. And what else could you ask for? I was talking about the other ones, but okay. Okay.

We'll throw that one in there. NC State, Virginia, not bad, but okay. Not bad. Producers, Isaiah Blakely, and John Not Bones-Jones. Before we get to the business of college football, I want to ask you a question I've been waiting 48 hours to ask. Oh, wow. Okay. Joel, what's your favorite Dolly Parton song?

Nine to five. Because that song was ubiquitous to me as a kid. That's how I came to know who Dolly Parton was. Now, I didn't know this year. I will always love you. I think that's a beautiful song. You thought you were going to get me, Brian, but it didn't work because I'm a low-key. Dolly Parton fan. I've never been to Dollywood. Never listened to her. Jolene is dope too, though.

You know what I'm saying? Anyway, what's your favorite dolly? Jolene is really dope. I listen to Two Doors Down a lot, which is probably in the second tier of Dolly, but it's a very fun song about her sitting in her apartment and hearing a party going on and then she goes to the party and she finds a man and she comes back to her house. And it's just one of those just happy Dolly songs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, man. I mean, it's You know, I was listening to a college football podcast with Andy and Ari, and they were talking about, I'm trying to remember who it was that had died. But they were saying, like, when, I think Andy was saying when Hulk Hogan died, it was like, wow. Like, I can't believe Hulk Hogan can die, right?

It was just sort of a shocking thing. There's always a celebrity for a person like that. I'm not saying that Dali Pardon is that person for me, but she is in, she's at the 11th. level of somebody like that for me though you know 100% I had a friend uh when the news came of her death text me and say she might be the first celebrity that we were aware of and I think that she was certainly in the conversation I mean like I don't remember a time where I didn't know who Dolly Parton was that's what I'm the nine to five thing was really ubiquitous because we're the same we're the basically the same image we're it was it was you

I don't think people who were alive, who weren't alive in the early 80s or weren't there, can't remember some of it, for how you would hear that song, how many times you would hear that song. That song was so popular that even today, like, at least a few times a week, I'll just sing a few lines from it just because it's always in my head. Got a funny story for you. On Tuesday, I was sitting in the same seat. Okay. And I am ready to be the kickoff guest on the Paul Feinbaum show on ESPN. All right.

Kickoff, that's the lead. Lead cast. Lead off. And I've been thinking about, okay, you know, what am I going to say about the SEC versus the Big Ten? And what am I going to say about this new transfer portal stuff where you can play in the pros and then go back to college football? You know, trying to get a good line or two to impress Paul. And the control room hits me like five minutes before we're going to go on the air and says, hey, are you prepared to talk about Dolly Parton's death?

Wait, is that the way you found out? I had just found out. Okay. I'm sitting here texting with friends, including that Fred I mentioned. Yeah. And they're like, are you good to talk about Dolly Parton? And I was just thinking, like, Joe would love this because how many musical acts could I do? And you always get me on hip hop.

But like if all the members of Weezer had died, I wouldn't have anything easier. Yeah, they were great, man. What a run. Weezer had. Like, I wouldn't have anything about anybody. But Dolly Parton is somebody I had something about because she was so big. My son and I saw her perform the halftime show at the Cowboys game three years ago. Oh, yeah, that's right.

I didn't realize that you, yeah. Did you go as a fan or was that for work? I was there as a fan. Okay. And my son, you know, he was 10. Yeah. And he didn't really know who Dolly Parton was. But I was like, I was.

I know you don't know who this person is. You might find it interesting that a 77-year-old woman came out in a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader outfit and sang not only her hits, but we will rock you. And it was just like the whole, as a musical performance, I'm not sure that will rank in the top, you know,

1,000 of Dolly's career. But I was like, someday you are going to say that you have seen Dolly Parton perform live and it is going to be incredibly cool. Who would the equivalent have been for us at that age? The oldest person I can think of is like Cab Calloway. I was like, oh, I saw Cab. That would have been amazing.

That would have been amazing. But yeah, I'm just trying to think of who the Dolly Parton of our youth was. I guess Dolly Parton was a Dolly Parton of our youth. But there was somebody else that, like, was it Elvis? Elvis would have been up there. Yeah. I mean, that might have been bigger. Again, I don't want to get to Elvis versus Dolly Coos who cares.

But, yes, if we had seen like late career, Elvis waddling around the stage in Vegas with our parents and they turned to us like, hey, this is going to be really cool one day. This guy's kind of done. This guy's toasted. This is the end, but yeah. One day you're going to say you saw Elvis Presley. It's crazy, man.

I mean, it's just because you don't, again, there was a time of my life when Elvis was fairly ubiquitous. In fact, the Houston Oilers head coach, then the real prime years about, you know, when I was like 10, 11, 12 was Jerry Glanville. And the thing about people that don't remember by Jerry Glanville is that he would leave tickets for Elvis at every game. He would leave two games. That was like his little deal. So you talk, you know, I don't think kids know as much about him.

I think, you know, eventually, you know, the people that cared about Elvis, they're not here with this as much anymore. And it's just, it's almost kind of sad to me to think that that might ever happen to Dolly Parton. Just like Dolly was ubiquitous, so was the conspiracy theory that Elvis was still alive. Oh, man. very, very 80s thing. That's right. That's right. I saw it. I mean, he was white Tupac. You know?

I'm just going to leave that right there. All right. And proceed, Joel, to the August issue. Yeah. We are going to have the director of the new Vince Young documentary. Oh, man. On Netflix. John Hennon, it's going to come on a little bit later.

Well, documentary, you got a little affiliation with a little bit. Well, they needed a talking head. I mean, there's a lot of it. lot of people, I probably, guys, listeners, viewers, I was looking, I guess, I wanted to try to watch the documentary before we got started, but I ended up listening to his very, Brian's very good interview with Herbie from the other day instead. But I was, I had the documentary on in the background and all of a sudden I just, the Zoom had just come on. I'm looking at Brian and then on my TV there's Brian. I was like, oh, wow. Brian is, you know, I was big time, man. I mean,

For you to be the representative of the UT voice, that's a huge deal, man. The longhorn-coded narrator of the Vince Young documentary is quite an honor. For the August issue, with Week Zero coming up, I thought we should talk about an interesting subject. How do we talk about college football now? Oh, man. College football has changed dramatically in this era when players are getting paid and when the sport has its own version of free agency. And at the same time, the way we cover college football and talk about college football has changed dramatically as well. So let's start here.

How has the way we talk about college football change post NIL? I think, first of all, we talk about it all the time because now there is an acquisition. There's a transactions part of the season, right? Because it used to be, you know, the season would end. that'd be the coach hiring cycle. There's recruiting, you know, signing day in February. And then, you know, spring practice. And then you probably not hear much about it until, you know, late July, early August,

before two a day is what start. But I don't, this offseason was weird. It's not typical of every offseason. But I think it's a glimpse into the future in which we're just going to be talking about. The deals that kids signed, you know, all the. all the roster movement. We're not going to, presumably there won't be as much court stuff and legal of finagling.

But I think that it says we just talk about it all the time now and that just didn't used to happen. Does that seem true to you? It seems totally true. I mean, I saw like the Mavericks buying out Clay Thompson the other day, which is now the kind of NBA transaction that we're just kind of gone. You know, we don't even, we don't think about it anymore. I didn't even know that.

Sure. Yeah. And then he went to. play from Miami. The college football has become a lot like the NBA. Yeah. And one way you can tell is because college football doesn't just have one woge, one shams. It has multiple woges now. I was writing these down. Pete Thammel of ESPN. Yeah. Is coaching hiring, coach hiring wodge. Right. Also big news about the sport. He's also day of player injury wodge. So and so is good to go today. Mm-hmm.

Then we've got Pete Nacos. I knew you were going to say Pete Nacos next year. That's your guy. He's Portal Woge. Yep. Portal Woge. Yep. We've still got some recruiting Wojges.

Mm-hmm. We've existed for a long time, I think, of Steve Wilfong over it on three. Yeah. And then we've got political machinations wodge, which is Ross Delinger of Yahoo and his competitors in that space. His, he's really blown up this year. Like this is, you know, Ross Delinger. has been a very good reporter for a very long time.

I think he was also an LSU beat reporter at one point in his career. But yeah, because of the Protect College Sports Act and everything else that's been going on at Capitol Hill with the NCAA trying to get, you know, that antitrust exemption, he's really come to the forefront of a lot of that reporting this summer. And he has the story to write every day. He's like the Jake Sherman of college football. It's right. I mean, he really does. I mean, I, the number. I would love to know the number of violence he had this summer because I felt like he did basically right almost every day.

And I named four people there, but all four of those people have competitors in each of those zones of wogness. Like there are lots and lots of people competing for those scoops. And you just think of like how much news college football shakes off. Now a lot of it's just, you know, the special teams coach at ruggers is going to quit. I'm like, this does not affect my life at all. But I'll look at that on Twitter and it's like, you know, I don't know, 50 retweeweeers. And I'm like, really? Yeah, yeah.

Like we've now turned this sport into such an NBA-like object that anything gets attention? Do you remember? I think, let me see if your recollection of this is roughly the same. And it may be revisionist history. I feel like when Chip Brown, shout out Chip Brown, used to be a very good Cowboys Beat reporter at the Dallas Morning News. And he was when I lived in that area. And now he's the orange bloods, right?

He was at Orange Bloods, now he's at a different site. Different site, okay. The University of Texas site. University of Texas site, there you go. And he reported on the Longhorn Network and UT looking to leave the Big 12. And it was such a big deal. And I felt like it was one of the first times that there was just all this news, not like crime news because, you know, players get arrested or whatever.

Of course people report on that. but something that was like ostensibly related to the game but involved a lot of business tv networks you know um and i felt like ever since then since the especially since the sport has totally transformed there's been all this different realignment um that that was kind of the start of the era we're in now that's a good place to start it he chips at 24-7 by the way 24-7 but i think at the time and this is when texas was trying to go to the pack 12 if you remember the oh yes what a weird moment in sports history that was. Larry Scott.

It seemed like that would be a one-off. But that's college football kind of all the time now. It may not be that the conferences are going to change all that much going forward, though. They probably will at the bottom end or in the middle somewhere.

Yeah. The SEC is going to be adding more teams. The Big Ten is going to be adding more teams. But it's just like this avalanche of news and change. And, you know, I think I told you this one time, but when the whole transfer portal open, which essentially allowed college football players

to be free agents at the end of every season, I remember my local message board being like, here are the top 200 players in the transfer portal. And I'm like, sorry, are we getting all those guys? Are we getting like two of those guys? It kind of became like the NBA, and I think this was happening to college football anyway. It was going from a regional sport,

which it largely was in our youth, to a nationalized sport anyway. Same as the NBA. It's like you root for your team. You root for the Rockets. You root for the Mavericks. Oh, wait. Actually, you just root for the whole league

and you're just interested in players. College football has changed the same way, right? Like, I know that that tight end at Purdue is way better than, you know, a Purdue tight end ought to be and he's going to get a big payout. And you just have this crazy amount of knowledge about the whole sport. Yeah, it's weird because college football coverage is either really, really local. Like, you, the kind of people. that follow message boards and like the 247 team sites or old rival sites and they want to know

the details from spring practices and who's ahead, who got the most snaps with the second team today and all that kind of stuff. And there's an audience for that. But then there's like this hollowing out of all the local and regional newspapers. Like again, when I worked at the St. Pete Times in the early 2010s, they had a beat reporter for every school, every, you know, floor Florida State, Florida, Miami, in the state. And now I think they have one who covers all those teams, which is just so now, so when you go to look for college news now, you go to the national sites. And then that's where you just, now you, I know a lot more about University of Washington's

football program now than I ever would have known, you know, 20 years ago. Let's come back to the hollowing out of newspapers because I think that's an important issue that I want to get deeper into. Okay. with you. Let me ask you this. College football used to be run by head coaches and institutions. Where has the power gone in the last couple of years?

I think it's got to be the TV networks. I think they have all the power. The conferences do what they tell them to do, which is, hey, man, big, big 10. It'd be dope. We could renegotiate your team. TV package if you happen to have the LA schools and a couple other ones, right? And so they'll do it. And then the coaches have to respond or, you know, the athletic department has to respond. Then the coaches have to respond. So I would say that most of the power is with the TV networks because that's

what we've got right now. That's why the sport looks the way that it does. What do you think? The power of the coach has been eroded by the fact that they can't hold on to their players in the same way that they could a couple years ago? Yeah. I mean, they're like, I mean, this is professional sports now. And in professional sports, the coaches are never more important than the players. They don't have the same, because they're partners, right? The players are, the players are partners with the league and coaches are part of, you know, I guess, you know, the organization, so to speak. So, yeah, so they work together. And it's not really like that now. in college sports because coaches still have an awful lot of power.

No players probably getting paid more than their coach right now at least. And, you know, how close? By the way, stop there. How close has it gotten? Like, we have players that are probably around or over the $2 million a year mark now. Oh, we definitely. I mean, so there are players that are probably making more than some coaches in the country. Like, I bet Jeremiah Smith makes more than whatever, you know, the University of Nevada

Reno coach is making right now. So, if coaches, some, but let's say the big time coaches are making. 10 to 11, 12, but lower somewhere south of $15 million a year. Yeah. And your best player on your team is making $2 million a year. Yeah. That's if you're a bad team, though. That's not a team that might be competing for the national championship.

Yeah, I mean, your best player, if you're competing for a national championship, should be somewhere around $6 million. Speaking of paying players, if you spent any time thinking about college football in the old days, you thought about scandals. Oh, man. Particularly about scandals that involved teams that were your biggest rivals. I know they're paying the players under the table. I know they're cutting players and, you know, releasing them and treating them like their NFL players instead of college football players instead of honoring a four-year scholarship, et cetera, et cetera.

What constitutes a college football scandal now? Well, so everything and nothing, which is kind of similar to the rest of the world, which is, that there are so many little contra attempts that are happening. The Brendan Sorsby thing, the, you know, this senator says he's not going to support the College Protect Sports Act. You know, this coach is making this. So there's just so many different things that are, you know, oh, yeah, this coach is going to take this former NFL player.

And all these are big scandals, but I guarantee you by the time the game start and by Monday, Well, I mean, maybe the player's thing would still be kind of up for grabs because it's the court wrangling, whatever. But it'll be gone because so much is happening now. But, I mean, back in the day, the scandal was, hey, man, this star player of the University of Wyoming got his meal comped downtown Laramie. It's an NCAA violation and Wyoming is about to go on two-year probation. You know, that was the big scandal back then. you just think of how many the most important college football players of our lifetime had something like that attached to them.

Reggie Bush, Cam Newton, Joyce Smith. I could go on and on and on. Anthony Carter, even going back to Michigan. Yeah. What I think is funny about fans, and this includes just about every Texas fan that I've ever met, is in the before times, they'd be like, hey, those other schools, especially those Sese schools, they're paying the players. We don't pay here.

are paying the players. And now when I find those same fans online, they're like, why aren't we paying recruits as much as fill in the blank? Oh yeah. Like it wasn't, they weren't worried about paying players. They weren't really worried about amateurism.

They just wanted their team to win. Right. It doesn't really matter. It's like, oh, actually just pay them as much as they want because we want the best players to play for us. I always thought that once we just started paying them, that it would be roughly the same as it is with professional sports. We're like, there is some resentment about a certain kind of person making that much money,

right? Very much so. So there is that part of it, but for the most part, if you're a college football fan, you set aside a lot when you want good players, man. I mean, we will excuse a lot of good things, all of your institutions, for a good player. And so if it means giving that guy $3.5 million in a membership at a country club, then they're just going to go ahead and do it now and roll with it. And this is a little grain, though, but I know that when I'm on message boards, I have started to see an interesting dynamic, which is recruits, especially big recruits, cost a lot of money now.

Oh, yeah. And as you know from first-hand experience, when you're 18, you do not always walk onto a college football team and start producing at a high level, especially at certain positions. Like, you want to get, there's a wide receivers that cost a lot of money. Mm-hmm. And then sit on the roster as 18, maybe 19 year olds and don't do much. You start to see this thing in the fan base that you see with fans of professional sports. And you're like, wait a second. We're paying that guy $1 million, $1.5 million.

And he had six catches this year. I think it's changing, man. I mean, for people that, so Larry Ellison's wife for a gift helped to pay for the services of the top quarterback recruit in the country a year ago, a young man named Bryce Underwood. He was supposed to go to LSU. He was committed to go to LSU. And then all of a sudden that money came in from the Ellison's,

and he was going to University of Michigan, which is the home state school. I don't want to guess out loud, but he's making a couple million dollars a year. And he had a, you know, okay freshman year. Like they had the plan. He had an okay freshman year, and people are already like,

Is that worth it? Is this worth it? And so like I said, it's kind of becoming pro sports in some ways. It's a very, very different way of thinking about college athletes. Yeah. A very different way. And, you know, a salary cap in college football is still pretty notional,

no matter what anybody says. But money is not infinite. Like, you know, they can't just get even the biggest programs. It's not just like, okay, we're just like $100 million dollars ready to throw around here. Like they have to make decisions. So they're making decisions. about who are we going to pay? How much are we going to invest in 18-year-olds

versus investing in a 21-year-old that comes more or less fully formed from another program through the transit portal? And it just, again, it just completely changes the way people think. Start thinking in general manager terms like you think about putting together an NBA team or an NFL team.

And I don't remember that people thinking about that. They talked about roster building a lot in college football history, but they did not think like that. I mean, the recruiting class, I mean, recruiting was its own animal. So, like, the acquisition of talent has always been the thing. And there was a lot of, you know, talking about how, you know, how people did it.

But whereas they've all, the players have always been commodities. But there was at least sort of like this nod to, you know, the concept of amateurism, that there was some sort of higher ideal, that they're there getting educations. They're part of the campus experience. They just happen to be really fast or really tall, right? And that's just not, I mean, what quarterback was it the other day that said he did? Oh, Lenora Sellers, the quarterback at the University of South Carolina. He's really good, really talented, probably would be a high draft pick if everything works out.

And he talked about, I don't have a class, I don't even have class this semester. You know, he can just go and grind tape all semester, but semester is barely even a concept of him. And so we've accepted that. Like now we just like, all right, like, it used to be a big deal if, you know, your school had basket weaving as a major or something like that. But nobody even pretends to care about that anymore. What was the one for the Ohio State linebacker AIDS Awareness? Oh, man. Was that Andy Katzen-Moyer?

I think so. That was Andy Katzen-Moria. Yeah. We'll double check, but I'm pretty sure that was a class. But by the way, isn't that a happy outcome of this new era? We don't have to do that. Well, you're not taking challenging class. we don't have to go through the whole silliness of, you know, trying to be like, well,

this is, you know, this is the, you know, amateurism has been besmirch because you're only taking 12 hours and these are not, you know, classes on your route to a degree. Like, come on. Yeah, I mean, it was crazy. That was stupid. None of those people ever cared about it. And there is a reason to care about it. I mean, they, they, they only cared about it in as much as, like, they could use it as a cudgel against other schools. Like, 100%. For, so for years when Dexter Manly, former great Washington commanders great graduated from Oklahoma State and he said that he was functionally illiterate. It meant something about Oklahoma State, Oklahoma State's program. But that doesn't, we don't really do that anymore. And because before, it really sort of mattered.

Like people didn't talk about it like that, but they didn't get paid in college back then. You know, not what they're certainly, it wouldn't life-changing money. So actually having an education really, really mattered. Like, it didn't have to be lip service, but now it's totally like, all right, they make $2 million a year, that's fine.

Like, we don't care. You know, which is, I think that's probably the superior ideal here. So if we fans are okay with players making millions of dollars a year, we're okay with transfer portal free agency. Are you fascinated like I am

that we seem to have drawn the line at a player who goes to an NFL training camp, doesn't make the team, is not going to be a professional football player, and then tries to come back to college to play one last year of football. I mean, there's so much been overheated rhetoric

about this stuff, but I think some of it is the LSU of it right now, you know, because they're just out of control. So for people who have not followed this story, there's a tight end name, Dayquan Wright, played at Ole Miss last year. He was really good. He was not drafted.

He went to two training camps or was signed by two train camps, yeah, two different teams. He wasn't going to make the team. He got his release. He cleared waivers in the NFL. And now he is going to follow his old coach, Lane Kiffin from Ole Miss to LSU. Right. The only reason that's happening, by the way, is because the NCAA has clarified their eligibility rules by saying five for five. So basically, you have five years to do your career.

You used to be a concept called red shirts where you could sit out a year, whether it was because or you got hurt or because of inexperience and you weren't ready. And you could, you, it was, you had five years to play four, but now it's five for five. Well, the NCAA changed that rule just a couple months ago and kids that who would have probably not gone into the draft and had another year of eligibility are suing, they're like, hey, you should have told us that because I wanted to play college again. So that's how it's coming. And I just, so to make that a scandal, this is never going to happen again.

This is not precedent setting. It doesn't care. But, you know, people, I'm sure we're going to talk about this. People like to catastrophize college sports all the time. Like, it's just the easiest thing to do. Things are going to hell, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so, like, this is just a piece of that. I just find it so funny.

We've allowed so much. We're okay with so much, but that's the place. And I was trying to think about this. I agree with you. The LSU of it all is certainly part of it. Lane Kiffin has become the number one villain in college football. We can talk about villains and why the meat. he needs villains here in just a second.

But I also think those of us who love college football and you and I are both in that category really want it to be different than the NFL. Yeah, that's right. We may not care about salaries. We may not care about free agents, but we just want it to be different somehow. And I don't know if that just triggered something, the fact that he was wearing a Cleveland Browns jersey at one point. Right.

We don't want college football to be like the Browns. Yeah, right. We don't get that out there. But just something about that made us think, wait a second, is it now just the same product? Are you literally taking off your NFL jersey and putting on a college jersey? I don't care. By the way, I don't care about Dick Juan Wright can play as much football as he wants in LSU. It just doesn't bother me.

But to me, it was interesting that that was triggering in a way. Yeah. Lots and lots of other things have not been. I think everybody is just primed in college football this year because even Donald Trump is interested in the future of the game. And so I don't know how much of this is just K-Fabe and how much of this is just, you know, like people sincerely, you know, going out of their damn minds because they're just used to when it comes to college football. Speaking of which, in the age of the super conference, has conference versus conference smack talk

replaced some of these school versus school smack talk of the before times? Oh, absolutely. Don't you think? I mean, I just nobody, I mean, we grew up. in the Southwest Conference era. But Southwest Conference didn't mean... Pause for laughter. Yeah, I know, probably no, man.

It was Arkansas and the other eight Division I was Division I schools in Texas at the time. I love the Southwest Conference. Oh, I miss it, man. I really do. The old RACOM network. But I never used it as a measuring stick for other ones, right?

Because, again... Did we just not feel conference pride? Was that the problem? Yeah, yeah. If we'd been in the Big Ten, where we have felt differently? The teams maybe... weren't so great then, but like, and I'm sure I would have loved it at the University of Houston

and won a national championship. But it was really cool if they won the Cotton Bowl. Like if they, if they, you know, were Southwest Conference regular season champs and got to play in the Cotton Bowl, that was a big deal, man. And so I thought about it more that way. But now, you know, because the conferences are larger, the rivalries are less familiar. You, and because the postseason is so heavily weighted on who you played and how you beat, and what happened when you played them. This conference stuff actually sort of matters. And so, like, that's what you need, even if you hate Oklahoma, Brian, you need Oklahoma to be

at least nine and three this year as a Texas fan. It actually doesn't matter. And TV is a huge part of this. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it is one of the most consequential things that has happened is ESPN bought the entire SEC after sharing the SEC with CBS for so many years. That's right. So ESPN became the network of the SEC. And then the Big Ten, which is the other big conference, got split between three networks.

So all the kind of smack talk that would have happened naturally between ESPN and Fox, and that does happen. Yeah. In terms of who influences the sport more, who controls a play. By the way, that's also ESPN gets absorbed into this conference rivalry stuff. Yeah. Because if you work for Fox, you're not just going to be like, actually the SEC is a lot better and the stuff we're showing on our air at noon Eastern is crap. Right.

You're of course going to claim that the Big Ten, winner the last three national championships, is a superior conference as a superior product. That's just what you're going to do, right? So something that happened on a message board now happens in a C-suite. in an interesting way. That's right. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. And it just, again, it matters. Like the amount, how often people want to watch your teams is matters, which is why the Big Ten had to do something. This SEC was such a dominant conference. They dominated on the field and they dominated in TV ratings. So the Big Ten had to respond in some sort of way, which is why they expanded, particularly in the L.A.

And so now, you know, it's like they, it's like, you know, they have a lot more case and they have a lot more teams that could potentially make the playoffs, which adds up to more money, better games, all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, like it actually has consequence the conference versus conference stuff where the school versus school stuff is just kind of cute. I'll say this. I'm not an SEC partisan because I can still barely believe that Texas is in the SEC. So weird. But the SEC television product week to week is so much. much better than the Big Ten television product week to week. I mean, just think of how many good games are happening in the SEC every week versus the, you know, sometimes you know, three Big Ten networks, they can't get one good game among the three of them.

I mean, it's just like, it's not close. So much has changed. And I just remember the big joke used to be, especially when I was younger, you'd wake up on a Saturday at like 11 o'clock. And then within an hour, they were kicking off. was Purdue versus Minnesota. And you'd just be so mad. Michigan also always had that slot. Michigan versus some tomato can from the big tank.

Yeah, I don't want to, this looks so horrible. And the Big Ten doesn't look like that anymore. But also, they had to change it because it's the SEC on Saturday at that 3.30 Eastern time slot. The old CBS slot. The probably, is that the most, this is a weird thing to say. That's the most iconic. block of TV time and college football, right?

Maybe a Notre Dame on NBC? In our lifetime. In our lifetime. Now a lot of that shifted to prime time. Right. Right. Yeah, that's not changing. Yeah.

Yes, that SEC game. I mean, I was just looking at the Texas schedule this year. I promise it's not a Texas podcast. This is solely for an example. I would never lie that to happen, by the way. No, thank God. Can I interest you in the following games? Texas versus Ohio State.

Texas at LSU at night. Oh, man. Oh, you know what? Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. We've got to go to that. In Baton Rouge Night, we might have to go to that. Texas at Tennessee. I mean, crazy. Ole Miss coming to Austin in another version of the Manning Bowl. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I have not mentioned the Red River rivalry with Texas in Oklahoma. I haven't mentioned Texas playing its historic rival, Arkansas. I haven't mentioned Texas going to A&M also at night or Texas playing Florida and Missouri. That is one team's SEC's schedule.

this year. That's crazy. All those games will be on ESPN or ABC. Now think about that versus, let's say the entire CBS sports college football schedule from this year. It's not close. It's not close. There's nothing can beat that. Help, the helmet, the helmet on helmet stuff there. I mean, the SEC, I mean, I'm sure, I don't know, you know, it could just be a quirk of football and history or whatever that the Big Ten is the dominant on product, on field product that's better right now. but the SEC, man, it's just even if we say that those teams aren't quite as good as the big tenor as roughly equivalent,

it looks different at Knoxville at night. It looks different on TV. It looks different in Norman at night, you know? Purely is television programming. Yeah. If you went up to somebody who was like, I'm not really a college football fan. I know just in a little bit, they're like,

oh, I want to watch that game. Yeah, yeah. Auburn, Alabama, yeah. I understand that. Auburn, you know, Alabama, Georgia, yes. I understand that that's like a good football game. Oregon, Ohio State. Oh, that's interesting.

Is that a big rivalry? Like, you'd have to just explain it a little bit more. Yeah. Well, it's like we have why these teams playing each other, but the SEC is actually a southern footprint. Even when Texas and A&M didn't play in that league, there still was sort of a rivalry. It's just like, oh, yeah, you know, Texas and Arkansas,

they didn't play each other regularly for a while, but they knew them. LSU's right next door. So it always made sense that they would be playing them in some way. And so, yeah, when you see it on TV, it's like, I can't believe Texas versus Florida is a conference game now. Just imagine telling somebody that in 2005. And it's every year. Every year.

Every couple years at least. What do you make of the Trump era merger between college football and politics? I mean, the long-awaited homecoming. It's homecoming week. Is homecoming week? Well, you know, so I've always, I mean, I'm, people might say that I obsess over those sort of dynamics, but I was always aware of it.

Like, you know, starting around high school going into college, I was aware of how right-coded that stuff is. But especially as you get older, and you see it from different ways, like, okay, they send them, you know, the evangelical stuff has become a much bigger deal. And of course, the rise of the South and the politics down there. And so when my wife, who was from California, went to school on the East Coast, a totally a coastal elite, she didn't care about college football. And through me, she got to saw, she got to see it.

And this is right around the time that the MAGA movement is coming up. And she's just like, yo, these look like, I mean, she says those look like MAGA rallies. And I was like, shit, I guess you're right. Kind of does. but that's I mean that's kind of college there's that version of college football the kind that most people get to see on TV

it's just yeah I don't know is that sort of your experience of it? Does that make sense to you or do you even think about that? Homecoming is such a great word because it has always it has always carried that now it's just a little more

forthright right in fact that Donald Trump is like I want to save college football like Teddy Roosevelt theoretically did. I want to be that guy. These are my people. These coaches are my people.

Absolutely. They have no problem, you know, being chummy with Trump. Like, yeah, of course. And I don't know, does it affect your enjoyment of the sport at all? You know, this is weird because not really. It doesn't me either. As soon as kickoff happens, it's a little bit of, analogous to the way people felt about the World Cup.

Remember how awful all those World Cup stores were about infrastructure and FIFA? And they also, by the way, after the World Cup, they just started up again. Yeah. When they had tried to sell the whole thing. Yeah, you're right. But everybody was like, oh, my God, this is just going to be hovering over this thing, like a rain cloud. And then as soon as the soccer started, everybody's like, I don't care about that anymore. I feel exactly the same way about college football.

College football is so nasty when you explained it. And it was so much worse when the players didn't get paid because it was like, oh, wait, so you tell. me these people are suffering the sort of injuries that will be with them forever. They don't get compensated for their labor in terms of the revenue that they helped degenerate. And it's at these large flagship schools that didn't, you know, when my parents were old enough, they couldn't have gotten into those schools. So there's not even really a history of us caring about, you know, the University of Texas, LSU, and that kind of stuff. And it's like, you still like that? That's kind of my way my wife is like, I know you. And you still like that?

And I was like, yeah, this is, I mean, this is shameful. I get it. I love college football like this, but it is what it is, man. I don't have many vices, and this must be one of them. Totally shameful. I just remember as a media person, too, all of the high dudgeon and angst that was poured into opposing the BCS. Oh, man.

A book written article. Oh, yeah. Stu Mandel's book. Article after article. And you'd be like, you'd be like, you. You know, the players aren't getting paid. Yeah. They are being cut and then they have to sit out a year before they can play for another team.

Like, the players have something close to zero rights. Yeah. And we are considering this other thing to be the great moral travesty over time. What? I think that's people in the public and the times pressuring people. But, you know, again, this is another thing that I think was a real inflection point. When Taylor Branch did that article in the Atlantic, about, you know, the shame of college sports, basically,

and that the players didn't get paid, and you compared it to the neop, a neop plantation system, all that sort of stuff. Now, it was a very good article, a very influential article, but a lot of people had been saying that sort of stuff before, right, including me. I mean, you know, nobody cared who I was or what I had to say about it, but if you asked me, I would tell you that sort of stuff.

And I just think that that changed a lot. And also, you know, I don't, yeah, it's weird that it really changed kind of in the Trump era to because you would think that the players would not have gotten paid in that era. But labor getting, it's just a amount of revenue. But yeah, it just really, I really think that this is a 12, a 12 year last dozen years sort of thing. Because otherwise, you're right. It was people, you know, fretting about, you know, athletes getting impermissible benefits. and oh my God, we need to figure out

how to pick a national champion. That Taylor Branch article came out in 2011, so 15 years ago. Oh, wow. And I still remember, like you did, reading that piece, and here was a civil rights historian saying what he was saying, comparing it not only, I think he said the college sports had the whiff of the plantation,

but also compared it to colonialism in that article. And as you said, people had been making those arguments for as long as college football has existed. as long as quote unquote amateurism has existed. But it took almost putting it in that space, you know, in long form with his byline on it. And all of a sudden it was like, okay, that was just that, I just remember that going off like a rocket at the time. And of course, you know, court cases were going to start. Like that was not the only, that was not why we got here.

But it just certainly took a lot of arguments and a lot of angst and put it all in the same place. And another inflection point, I think, is Real Sports did a segment on Ed O'Bannon. Ed O'Bannon was a great former UCLA player who led them to the national championship in the mid-90s. I can't remember if it was 94 or 95. And one day, I think it was this kid, one of his children or something is playing a video game is him. And he's like, wait a minute. They can take my image and use it like that and sell it to people and I don't get any money for that. and HBO and Brian Gumble,

they covered the absurdity of that. And I thought that was also sort of influential too because that case is like really responsible or at least partially responsible for the lot of changes that we see in sports today. Let me ask you a provocative question.

Okay. Has Pat McAfee become the voice of college football? No way. Do you think that? Are you sure? Man, there's so many voices in college football. on Twitter this week, they've put out a, it was rage bait,

but it was a list of 100 top college sports personalities. And it were just messing around, like Josh Pate's number two and all that. But really, I think that, like, you could watch college football, enjoy college football, and not engage with Pat McAfee at all. Don't you think? Even though he's on game day. I see, I don't know if game, and this, I mean, this is part of TV, the media talk we're having here, but I don't know if Game Day is influential as it used to be.

I don't know if it has a hold on the fandom as they used to. There was a point when it was sort of like inside the NBA and college game day is the standard for the studio show, right, in sports. Like, if you were creating a show, you wanted to do like one of those two things. And I just don't know that people think about Game Day like that anymore. I mean, they do have moments. When Corso retired, you know, sometimes they'll have a great celebrity to do picks or something like that or something crazy will happen.

But I just, I don't think it has the hold that it did 10, 20 years ago. Do you? Here's my case for McAfee being that guy or being on his way to becoming that guy. Okay. He's right wing coded. Of course. Trump's boy. He's on game day.

His daily show is increasingly becoming the place where someone like Lane Kiffin shows up to explain himself regarding the Dayquan right transfer. Kiffin was on the other day, and I just want you to listen to how McAfee asked him to explain his decision to recruit a player that had already been in an NFL training game.

I think this is a beautiful time for you to give your side of this whole story, because obviously we've heard everybody else's side on what you're doing and how this is all going. So I think this is a great moment for you to kind of explain why and how you think we got here as a whole. I will tell you, to represent the people who are pissed off, though, one of the boys, every answer you give,

will be saying something negative immediately afterwards, like, boo! Or you suck or something like that, because they are representing somebody who hates you. You just need to, in the essence of fairness. Now, I will like to let you know, thank you for coming in the middle of this time. I know you're in a middle of training camp,

trying to get a football team together. And obviously, the block is very hot with everything happening at LSU Tiger and college football as a whole. Can you tell me how you think we got here with the five for five injunction in Baton Rouge, and now guys that are in NFL training camps

are now playing back in college? Can you explain why and how you think we got here, Coach, from literally the epicenter of the entire conversation? Okay, that's a lot. Kids, if you want to be a professional interviewer, you can either be like Brian and try to reduce every question

to its small. smallest possible essence. He's very good at it. Or you can barf out questions like that and make $60 million a year. I was going to say, your choice. I was like, really, I was like, I guess I need to learn to be more like that, you know. But yeah, I'm look, I'm not going to pretend that I'm David Frost here or anything.

But, you know, I don't like, I'm not an, I'm, people may not believe this. I'm not really an adversarial person. I like to have an enjoyable conversation, not a tense one. But I mean, yeah. I mean, but that's sort of the McAfee thing. And yeah, so you're right. He's going to get, I mean, Aaron Rogers makes all his news of Pat McAfee, too, right? And so, yeah, people are going to be going to Pat in college football.

The coaches will feel a lot more comfortable there because also keep in mind, that's Nick Sabin's boy. Nick is vowing for Pat McAfee, you know. That was a key moment. Yeah. Because coaches, as you know, a little jittery about the media. Yeah. Nick Sabin, when he's still coaching a Bama, starts going on there every week. And I bet a lot of coaches looked at that and said, that's the safe space now.

That's where I'm going to go. He may ask me a question, but he'll give me a chance to explain myself. Right. At length, this is not going to be an adversarial confrontational interview. Right. I can do it there. And I don't believe Pat has a lot of worked out hot take opinions about how college football should change. Right.

but I believe he is happy for his show to be used as a vessel where such things are talked about, especially by coaches. I also think he knows his audience. It's not the Democratic Socialist of America. Of course so. It's going to come out a particular way on that television show. And that's my case for him becoming that guy in college football.

I would say, to your point then, I would say he's most representative of college football. and where it's heading. I just don't think it's possible to be the voice, but I could be biased here because, one, I just really don't engage with this content. And that's nothing. So that's what I'm saying.

No offense to him, but that's just not what I want to do. Also, I'm in a college football media space. So maybe it's my prior. Are you on that top hundred list? No, I wasn't. By the way, Tailgate wasn't on either as an entity.

And I'm like, dude, I'm sorry. No offense to some of the people on there, but I haven't heard of you. No, we're not. And tailgate's not on the list. We're not famous. We don't have any influence whatsoever. Excuse me.

Excuse me, sir. Yeah, no, next week, we're going to have a guest. I mean, things are happening over there. But yeah, so, yeah. We're going to have a guest. No, but look, the kind of guest that Brian would be excited about. Oh. Oh, I just go ahead and say it.

Cam Newton. Cam Newton's going to come on with this next week. Yeah. And so, you know, things are changing. But, yeah, so, I mean, again. Dude, but let's, I'm sorry. and I'm just going to stand up for the tailgate crew and you and everybody else.

If Van got on a microphone and talked about, it talks shit about the SEC for five minutes, that would be more influential than a lot of people on that list entire work product for a year. That's a, that's a very good point. I mean, yeah, Van is, I mean, he's all media. He's all media.

So yeah, so you're right. You're right. We probably, but I don't, I mean, there's a lot of famous, again, the list, I could kind of make an argument for almost everybody. on the list. I was like, yeah, man, Nicole Arbock is more famous than a lot of people. We're not here insulting Nicole. We're just, you know, this is just, we're just putting everything in perspective here. Oh, yeah, I think Nicole was, the reason I put Nicole and Nicole does is a fan of

this show. She was, I think she was number two on this list. She's number three. It's Tom Fornelli, Josh Pate, Nicole Arbac. Sean McDonough is number 99. Big Sean McDonough looked at this list. Oh, man. Does Desmond Howard get on there at all? Nobody, Nobody remembers that Desmond Howard is on college band. Des is in at number 41 spot behind Brett McMurphy. I just love this list. That's so funny. It's intended to piss people off.

Brett McMurphy, Desmond Howard, Dennis Dodd, and Joe Tesletor. That's four names in order. Joe Test is behind, oh, wow. Behind Dennis Dodd? Come on now. I mean, Dennis is a great dude, very influential writer. I mean, that's Test, dog. Come on.

Let's end here. And on that same note, talk about where power, lies in college football media now. Yeah. Let me give you a few prompts and you just go on and tell me where you think these things rate. Okay. I'll put them in categories.

First, the ESPN category. Yeah. ESPN as a company led by Jimmy Petaro. I mean, there's not, if you look at it as the institution, there's not going to be anything more influential than them because they have some. many of the game rights. They own the whole playoff. They own the whole playoff.

Yeah, you just can't fuck with ESPN. Like, they are the Titan in this industry. And yeah, I mean, they have the bulk of the personalities. They have the bulk of the studio shows. They drop. And if you are a college football fan, you know that they are accused of putting their thumb on the scale, even down to what teams get picked into the playoff. So, yeah, you just can't.

ESPN is a whole different thing. the number of conspiracy theories about you is often a good indicator of your power. Absolutely. Remember when the playoff was going to be like the NFL where you had all these networks and then the Super Bowl would change hands, you know, every year? Yeah.

Actually, we'll just take the entire playoff. We'll take that. But, you know, again, for ESPN, it's more existential than it is for anybody else. They needed it a lot more than everybody else, but also they had the money to do it, you know, because they all those dudes. So, yeah.

They had the money to do it. They were creating the app. You need programming for that thing. You need lots and lots of programming. You need Monday night football, all that stuff. And college football is just about as important as anything there, I think, except the NFL. And they've got a lot more inventory in college. Number two on my list, Kirk Herb Street.

Yeah, man. It was out. So people should listen to the interview with Herbie. He's, I don't know. There's something about you that really, you know, humanizes him in a way that even I've sometimes failed to do one. I see him on TV. When you listen to him, when you talk to him, he just seems to be a really delightful, thoughtful, gentle person, especially when he talks about Lee Corso. But I was thinking about he was talking about who inspired him.

And it was Chris Collinsworth. And I was just like, man, those are two. I mean, Chris Collinsworth, one of the biggest voices in the NFL. Herbie, one of the biggest voices in college. Just that little corner of Southwest Ohio. It's just weird how they've done that. But yeah, Herbie, I mean, he's one of the most influential people in sports, period, but certainly in college football.

Both sports radio dudes in Ohio before they got the big TV call up. Herbie, to me, it's always interesting because it's like, I think of him on the air when he, I don't, quiet power might not exactly be the right word. He's not up there really weighing in on that many things. He's probably got opinions on who should be in the playoff. he's probably got opinions on on those kinds of things and like but you know the game day thing is very the whole affect of game day is very restrained except for pet macafee like you know directing the audience in chans oh hey try oh like the idea is not to be a hot takey kind of thing yeah so they will address things he will give his opinion on things but it's not exactly like i am trying to shape the future of college football with every time I speak on the air. It's too bad because that's what he gets accused of.

And I don't remember if this was a part of it, you tell me this was wrong. Once in one time he used to live in Columbus. He did. And he moved to Nashville and maybe the quality of life, Nashville has exploded over the last decade or so. But I thought in part it was also because fans were giving him hell there over something related to his opinion about the college football playoff.

And it was one of those things where just sort of spiraled and made his life more difficult. there. I mean, Herstreet's a legend in Columbus. He was a former Ohio State quarterback, but it was like that heated. The people thought he had that much influence that they needed to go. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Nick Saban. I mean, Nick Saban, if they ever come up with a college football commission, he's going to be in it. So, yeah, I mean, what he says, he kind of is already, right? At least he attended all those meetings. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, for all the coaches in college football genuflect of this dude,

right he is that guy when he walks in the room he's jordan of college football and also like he's got all these political connections like you could argue that nick sabin like had his hand and joe mansion senate win a few years ago like that's how influential he is and so he has a direct line to trump and people on both sides of the aisle actually which is sort of interesting which is why people have talked about him running for public office before but yeah he's yeah he's right up there i mean he and herbie probably, you know, they're on the Mount Rushmore or the head of the table or something. And again, a guy who really picks his spots. Mm-hmm.

Who is, you know, not, you know, he is not up there being like, here's what college football should look like. And again, I don't know if that's, I think that's partly Sabin, just like it is with Herbie and partly it's game day. It's just not set up to be that kind of show and doesn't want to be that kind of show because people would probably turn it off. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, his mission in life is to make the job easier for coaches.

So that is, he is so mission-minded. minded about it. And so that is his, that is his most, his strongest opinion that he makes publicly, at least. You mentioned it briefly. What about game day as an institution? Yeah, I mean, I still think it has a lot of influence. That's not a show in college football that's more influential than it, right? Like, if you get on game, yeah. Big Noon has made a lot of ground, but it's not in a, to me, it's still not game day. Yeah, nothing comes to that. And so if they talk about your story, your athlete, your school on there, it's still a big deal. So is that, I mean, is it, I'm trying to think, is that a podcast?

Yeah, so I have an opinionator's category. Are you ready? Oh, okay, yeah. Let's do it. Paul Feinbaum? Yeah, man. I mean, he's, he's been king for a while. He's kind of like Nick Saban, you know?

Like, it's just like he's, he's still strong, still people care about what he says, but you can see the sort of day that, you know, he's closer to the end than he is to the beginning or the apex of his powers. When I was on with him the other day, he was kind of making fun of the statement the SEC put out about players going NFL training camps and then coming back to college because it was so wishy-wash.

I was like, that's Paul at his best. That's just the thing you put out there was just throw up that didn't mean anything. Right. Let's just say that. Josh Pate? He's the guy that they're grooming. I mean, to take over for Paul Fearmbaum, it seems like.

He has also interviewed Donald Trump. Like multiple people that we've seen. spoken about today. Oh, man. Yeah, buddy. Yeah, Paul, yeah, yeah, yeah, man, it's just, um, the Pate thing is, is interesting. Like, I, I don't remember where he came from. I don't, I don't think anybody does. I think he just appeared in our Twitter feeds a couple of years ago, and everybody was like, Josh Pate's the guy now? What happened here? I swear to you, last year, when we were coming up with Ringer Tailgate, it was, we, the idea for the show really didn't get locked in until, like, a week before the games.

Okay. But I was sitting there talking with Van, and Van was like, yeah, you know, which shows, do you listen to whatever? And he said, I listen to Josh Pate. And I was like, who? I had not heard of Josh Pate as of July 2025, right? So, I mean, his rise has been incredible. You mentioned Ari Wasserman and Andy Staples from on three, but Elliott on CBS, the Yahoo College Football Enquirer podcast. Yep, because it has Ross Dellinger on it, by the way.

So, yeah. It's like college football is a hard sport, I think, to do in podcast form, but just because there are so many teams and so many things to get to every week. But it's also just a great talking sport, as everybody says. It's a great place to have big, strong, you know, 23-inch python opinions about. I mean, college sports is so cool because you get to talk about some guys, some guys and you get to talk about some games. You know, if I say Cory Dillon,

or if I say Troy Davis, Iowa State, like something is coming in your head and you have a narrative about that if you've been following college football long enough. And so, yeah, it's just, you just want to, we just want to talk ball, man. There's a newsbreaker category, which I mentioned earlier, Thammel, Naco, Dillinger, et cetera.

Yep, yep, yep. The athletic should probably be its own institution here because I think in a lot of ways college football is the thing they've done the best since they started that whole enterprise. Right. Like that as a national category, like if they done anything better

than cover college football? As a mainstream national outlet, I don't think anybody's doing it better than now. I mean, CBS still has a lot of good reporters and they do a lot of work, but just to be honest, when I'm going to get my information on college football, right,

up with the sport, I probably start there more often than not. Don't you, where do you, like, how do you do it? I think, I think that, that's the stuff I read. I mean, it's weird because I probably start with my message board. Okay, there you go. So I can see everything through orange colored glasses, but. Actually, I'm going to move college football to number two on the athletic. I'm due number one, anything Katie Strang has written.

Okay. Okay. So in category. No offense to all our friends covered college football. So speaking of which, I have a category for mess. boards. Okay. And this to me is one of the most interesting things because I think that's almost sounds

a little antique now. I'm going to go subscribe to my rivals recruiting site or my On3 recruiting site and pay my $9.99 a month. They've been around for about 25 years. Yeah. But so many things happen in message boards that I think showed me how media was going to change without me even realizing it at the time. Yeah.

A couple of things. the hollowing out of newspapers. Okay. And their replacement by new media. Newspapers could have built those things. Newspapers could have said, hey, let's have three reporters just talking about recruiting all the time. Yep. And let's build a place for our crazy fans in Austin and Tuscaloosa and everywhere else to talk about it.

They didn't. The business got taken away from them. Mm-hmm. And they got further hollowed out, especially in college towns. That's number one. Number two was that media would essentially be partisan in a lot of ways. Yep. Especially if you remember the old message board's like, oh, you're an Oklahoma fan.

You're banned. You never get to talk here. This is for us. This is our clubhouse. Tex-Ags. I mean, again, I'm not in that world. I'm not fluent in it, certainly like you. So, yeah, you hear, you would hear about things that were said on Tex-Ags, though, or Tiger Bate or whatever.

So, yeah. Also, that just intimate connection with a school. You know, that's what we'd come to know. And in a slightly different way, I think, with podcasting. Yeah. The idea that the people there were fans that we felt like we could trust them and we knew them in a different way than somebody that wrote for a newspaper or mainstream outlet. Absolutely. That was so big.

By the way, the way that mainstream reporters were vilified in those places. Oh, man. Even the most, like, you know, normie down the middle. It's like, you are terrible because you hate our team. Oh, yeah. That was a vision of how social media would treat mainstream reporters. Well, I was just going to say, I thought almost think of. this as a precursor to social media, right?

Like, it's Reddit-esque, right? Very much so. Yeah. Very much so. And I know I go back still today to get news about my favorite college team, but also just to get what you might call cultural news, like, oh, the spicy ketchup is back at Waterburger. I need a place that's going to tell me that in an efficient way. It's, it is my Twitter, my Reddit in a lot of ways.

That's funny. And final point here, too, is just the way that, like, I think those places showed how media would become media on demand in the future. Okay. Where it's like, here's my paying audience, just like I'm a substacker today or a podcaster today. Here are the people that are coming to me, week after week after week.

What can I do, sir, to make your experience here happy? That's right. That's not the way media used to work. Oh. He's to be like, I'm going to post my article, please read it, goodbye. This became like, can I answer your questions? Can I connect with you? Do you want to send me a DM?

Yeah. Want to talk to me in the comment? What can I do better for you? How can I earn your money? I'm going to do a live stream. Come on, ask me questions. I'm going to be on Reddit and do a live chat. Please join in.

Just imagine Randy Galloway having to do that question. Randy would be great in the comments section. He would have been fantastic at it, but I don't think he would have done it. He would have been offended. He's like, well, I'm going to get paid for that, you know? Should we say a few words about Vince Young before we start this documentary? So you have an experience with Vince Young, who's from Houston. who was a high school stud

times one million at a high school called Houston Madison Madison Marlins, do I have that? The Madison Marlins, man, southwest side of Houston, that's why I learned to drive. We see in this new Netflix doc, which by the way is called Untold,

the testimony of Vince Young, that his high school team got so popular when he was playing there that they started playing games in the Astrodome to accommodate the fans who were showing up to watch Vince Young run through opposing defenses. He was the number one recruit

in all of high school football. Yeah. Wines up going to the University of Texas. He went to National Championship 20 years ago this year, January 2006. Then he goes to the pros and his career goes very, very sideways. Yeah.

Especially in Tennessee where his old mentor, Steve McNair, played. Right. That is essentially the Vince Young story, at least as it's told in this documentary. Yeah, man. I mean, we don't have to get into it now.

Vince Young is one of my favorite football players, which is incredible because you know how I feel about the University of Texas. He had to be that cool and that good for you to like him. My Houston, Mount Rushmore might be like Beyonce, Vince Young, Akeem Elijah won. Shit, man, I don't know. Earl Campbell make the list? Oh, man, yeah.

Oh, my God. Yeah, Earl Campbell. Well, man, what do you think about Earl? Campbell versus Nolan Ryan. Do you think he makes... No, no, because Nolan played... Nolan was more your era, though. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. He was a big deal in Houston, and he's from Alvin, which is right outside of Houston. But you know what? He's more... He's more y'alls now.

He's more of the Rangers than Astros. So this director, John Henion, sent me a text. I was like, would you... Are any interest in appearing on this documentary? And I knew the assignment, because when you have these documentaries, you're going to have Vince young. Oh, yeah. You're going to have his college coach, Mac Brown. Mm-hmm.

You're going to have other people, which in this case included Matt Liner and other players he played with, all that stuff. But I know what you need because there also needs to be like guy to get you from point A to point B to point C. Do you tell me what the perception of Texas was after Mac Brown got there before Mac Brown won a national championship? Yeah, I got that. I can't wait to hear you talk about that.

I could do that part. I can't wait to hear you say. give that answer then. It's just like a, it's like a topic sentences. You know, you write in an article, the first sentence of every paragraph, I'm the topic sentence. Oh. And I was just like, I would love to embody this role because I'm like you. There's no college football player I've ever loved more than Vince Young. Okay. No, look, Vince is my note. It's him and Steve McNair for my favorite college football players. There we go. Here's John Henion. Let's bring in John Henion. He is the director of an awesome new documentary. It is called Untold the Testimony of Vince Young. You can watch it right now

on Netflix. John, welcome to the press box. Thank you for having me, Brian. And thank you for being the star of the documentary for your contributions. Oh my God. That text message you sent me, which I, you know, having printed out and framed right now is one of the best unexpected text messages I've ever gotten in my life. Shout out to Kurt Goldsbury for that. for the intro. I was telling this to my co-host Joel Henderson earlier. I love watching sports docs as somebody who covers the media because I love those moments when you have to hear the director's voice when they're asking a question and just for us to be sitting in that beach house in Redondo and for you to be on the other side of the camera asking me questions.

I was like, wow, I have really entered the Matrix. Welcome to the suck, Brian. You're on the inside now. Let's start at the very beginning. What interested you? you and Vince Young as a subject? Well, I started with the phone calls asking me if I would be interested in doing it. But I remember the 2006 Rose Bowl. I remember where I was and watching it and seeing Superman basically will UT to a win. Like, I really didn't watch a lot of college people back then either, but that game definitely had left an impression on me.

And then I did. I got the call because I had moved to Austin, Texas in 2022. And, you know, the real, the person that actually brought the project to life was Ross Dinerstein of Camp Fire Studios, who's a Houston native, but as a filmmaker, he went to USC, was out the game like you. And, but he's like a proud Eustonian native and loved the Vince Young story. and for years had wanted to make that. And he went to Kincaid High School the same as Vince Young's son.

And it's always funny because like the Genesis story, you think of like entourage. And it was probably like a bunch of agents wheeling and dealing to make these projects happen. And it really came down to like Ross had a nephew that also went to Kincaid and got an intrude through his nephew to Vince and Candace. And so, you know, they'd finally got to the point

where they'd had enough time for reflection and we're willing to tell his story. And so Ross really kind of pushed the boulder up the hill. And then I just got the call once they had greenlit it, and they were looking for a director. And since, you know, it's a small community of doc filmmakers and then doc filmmakers that do sport, people are like, well, who lives in Texas?

And I think I showed up in a bunch of people's lists. And so I got three calls on the same day, one of which was from Ross. Another one was from my agent, and I can't remember who the third was. asking me what's interested. And so I started going down the research rabbit hole and learning all of the things that you know well, not only about the UT years, but also as pro years. But I've done enough projects now with celebrity athletes where I insist that I need to meet them

first because I've been an arranged marriage before and it's not a good place to start. So I insisted on, you know, driving to Houston and sitting with Vince. And I sat with him for about three hours and he told me, you know, his story. And I think he had a real clarity of who he was then and who he is now and the emotional progress that he needed to make. And so he was available and ready. And I remember, like, the title of the film being the testimony of Vince Young, like, he mentioned that to me. Because I asked me, was like, is there anything you're, you know, you don't want to talk about? because if there is, we should talk about that now because I need to decide if I want to sign out for that.

And he just looked at me and he said, my testimony is my testimony. And like, I can't ask of anything else of someone. You know, like, some people say like two things can be true. You know, when it comes to him and Mac Brown or him and Fisher, sometimes two things can be true. But he had owned his narrative and his story and had processed a lot of stuff and was on the other side. So I was like, okay, I can work with us. So, and they gave you the job. There you go.

A documentary like this relies partly on your relationship with somebody like Young, but also your ability to pull those stories out of them on camera. So what do you do? What are the kinds of questions you ask so you make sure you're getting the good stuff into the film itself? Yeah. I mean, it is an important thing. I like to say that the most important filmmaking,

happens before you hit the red button and start recording. So you have to build relationship and sort of understand them on a human level. And so, you know, I spent a couple days like just cruising around Houston with Vince and his son. You know, I had a lot of conversations with him on the phone, had a lot of conversations with Candace on the phone, his wife. So I felt like that enabled me to understand not only what to ask, but also how to ask. how to ask and when. Like one of the most important moments for me that I had to build towards through the process of two eight hour interviews with him was like the question of like, what do you wish the Titans

would have done differently? Because like if I, if that was the first question, it would have been, you know, a very different answer and a very different mental process. So you have to sort of like strategize like how and when. to ask the questions, but you also have to be very open to like going where they want to go. Like you can't have this strict roadmap, which is one of the reasons why, you know, a lot of subjects will ask like to see the questions in advance and I always say no, because like, I don't know. Like I'm just going in with an outline and then I'm feeling it out from there.

So yeah, you get a pretty good foundation based on that process that happens before any filmmaking happens. And then you just be open to like receiving and then five. following the conversation from there, kind of like at a dinner party. You know, you don't stick to a script. In a dinner party, you let the conversation flow. Like, they share, you share, you share, they share. And so I think a lot of it comes from just sort of approaching it that way. So you've got Vince Young, got old Curtis.

What other characters did you want to build this story out? The ones that are in the film or the ones that I wish I got. Well, let's do both lists. Well, I wanted I wanted Candace I wanted his sisters I wanted his mom so I got all that because I really felt like there was a very personal narrative

that you know the why of his story really starts before even high school it's like where he grew up and how he grew up and then from there you know then it becomes sort of strategic like you know it's time and money right like you don't have the money

to interview everybody if I had I would have got Reggie Bush and Matt Liner. I would have gotten Pete Carroll. I felt like Lendale was important because he was his opponent in the Rose Bowl. Lendale White for the uninitiated. Lendale White, the infamous fourth and two. Is it fourth of two or fourth and one?

But then he was drafted at Titans the same year Vince was, and they became like best pals. And so he had perspective on Vince as an opponent, but also as a friend and as a teammate. So I thought that was critical. And then Bo Skafe, who's another guy who was on the, you know, he wasn't on the 06 Rose Bowl team, but he was on the team.

He was drafted in 2005 and was on the Titans a year before Vince showed up. So I feel like there was sort of like a double dip there. Like I was able to get a college perspective, but also a pro perspective. And then, of course, you know, Jeff Fisher. and Mac Brown. And, you know, there couldn't be two sort of like polar opposite coaching archetypes than those two. So I felt that those are very important. And then, you know, the list of people that I didn't get, first is his dad.

And, you know, I talked to Vincent and his wife and his sisters and everybody. And we tried to track him down. We even hired a private eye at one point to try to find him. But we just couldn't find him and connect with him because I really wanted to sort of lean into that father-son narrative as much as possible and kind of peel back the layers. But we never, and to this day, like, I've never been in contact with them. So we had to kind of like give that up and go a different direction. Beyond that, I think like Andy Reid would have been a really interesting perspective. And one of the games I like to play with myself while we were editing this was if Matt

Liner had gone in the draft in 2005, what would have been, first of all, Matt Liner's because he went to the Cardinals and went to Weisenhunt, and they didn't have a very good relationship with which is he's very transparent about. But then Vince goes to the Titans, like if one draft pick changes, even in the previous year, everything changes and it's a game of like what would have happened then. And I think, you know, if Vince had landed on an Andy Reid team or I know the timeline doesn't match up, but Pete Carroll, who has a very sports psychology approach to negotiating conflict and working with players, Vince Young, I think, would have had an incredibly different career. And I think Matt Leiner might have had a much different career too, because he would have been drafted by the Niners instead of Alex Smith. And, you know, who knows, maybe the Niners have three more Super Bowls now.

He's like the hero of the Bay Area. So you mentioned Jeff Fisher. He is Young's coach with the Titans team that drafts him. He, for a lot of people, will be the villain of this story because they didn't get along and he seems to have very, very few regrets about the fact that they didn't get along or at least the things he did to get there. What was your pitch to Jeff Fisher? I wish I could really remember.

We did have a conversation on the phone and, you know, say what you want to. want about Jeff Fisher, but he doesn't hold back in his, you know, resolute in his beliefs. And he had his questions and his reservations, but at the end of the day, he was willing to do it because, you know, he has a story to tell too. So, you know, sometimes you think, like, is someone doing it because they want to say this or that? I really feel like he just wanted to have his position on the narrative established in the film as well. And it's interesting you mentioned the villain because that's one of the things that I've a little bit more surprised about in the film and the reaction to it that I wasn't expecting

because I actually don't like to have binary villains and heroes. I think it's much more interesting when you live in the grays. and for me, like, I actually didn't make choices to establish him as a villain. Because I also, you know, he's an old school coach. And you watch old movies like, full metal jacket and stuff like that. And there's always like the hard ass drill sergeant. But, you know, at some point in the film, you learn he actually has a heart of gold or he's doing this to make you a better man. Like he was just operating from a different playbook that didn't work for the player of 2006,

for Vince Young. And so, you know, like I don't share the same political beliefs as my mom, but I don't really want her to be the villain or some narrative in a documentary about me either. So I think he's just sort of like a different philosophy and wasn't, didn't come from a coaching tree

that was used to meeting players where they're at and adapting, which is what Mack Brown did so well. So yeah, it's really, it's been very interesting and a little surprising to see the reaction to Jeff Fisher. But at the same time, like, you know, the story is the story. And his reflections are meaningful contributions. But it is based on, like, our assessments, what happened in those incidences and the role that he played. One moment that's so striking is that after Vince Young was out of the NFL, he writes a letter to Jeff Fisher just to kind of, you know, I don't know if apologize as a right word, but just kind of

explain what he was thinking and try to get right with him. And as you show in the doc, Jeff Fisher does not respond to this letter at all. Did Young tell you about writing that letter? Is that how you found out about that? Yeah. In our first meeting, he mentioned that letter, that he wrote him a letter. And I thought it was worth including because that was really a testament to Vince's reflections. You know, like the big question that I mentioned earlier of like, what do you wish the Titans had done differently? And Vince actually acknowledging like, I don't think they actually did anything wrong. I think I wish I had had the tools of that time to process and negotiate that conflict better. And so that was, you know, Vince,

his gesture of bearing the hatchet and saying, I'm sorry for his contribution. And it's just one of those things. You kind of wish you could get like a letter back, like no hard feelings. I wish I had done some different things differently too. Like that's how apologies work, right? You say you're sorry, then I say I'm sorry too. And so again, I just think that, you know, Fisher sought more as a business arrangement more than anything else. else and for whatever reason chose not to write him back. But he also does say I wish in hindsight maybe I should have some shit about it like getting my name wrong, which is not the way of like,

Vince Young misspelled his name. That's the, that was his initial reason for not responding to the letter. Yeah. There's this great collage of images in this film from Young's life at Texas to his life in the NFL. For the novices out there, how do you go about gathering those kinds of pictures? and images. You just Google it. Just kidding. It was like, wait a minute. We had in a great archival team, you know, led by a woman named Tiana Williams who just left no stone unturned.

And, you know, we reached out, of course, like UT had a lot of archive because they've done other projects around this. And so it's a lot of like, you know, gum shoe footwork too. I was over at certain people's house pulling photo albums from people from his high school years. I know other people on my team were doing the same thing. You know, we were getting people to mail photo albums

and then FedExing them back. Candace and Vince gave me some scrapbooks that we got to pull stuff from from both the NFL years and previously. I think the funnest story around the archive, though, is that we reached, out to USC because UT had locker room footage.

It was this era of sort of like, you know, smaller cameras like Sony VX 2000s and PD-150s. So teams had videographers more so than in years prior, you know, like 80s filming locker room and stuff like that. And we had the locker room from UT, but we didn't have USC's locker room. And so we reached out and we, it took some time because it's not usually the priority. to help the documentary to find footage. But I remember Tiana telling me that they were like, yeah, I think some of that footage is around. Let me talk to so-and-so who was actually there

and is still working here. And we got on the phone with this guy. I'm probably butchering the story, but it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I have that. I shot it. It's on these tapes in the storage unit in southern L.A. Or South L.A. or South L.A. or something. So we literally had to go down to a storage unit.

And in my mind, I'm picturing I'm looking for like a Nike shoebox with these tapes that say like 2006 Rose Bowl locker room footage. And me just being like, oh my God, like how is this not like archived and easily accessible? And if that guy hadn't still been at USC, we never would have found those tapes. But by the grace of God, we got them. And so, you know, there's a lot of stories like that about how we found different footage from different places. Do you show the documentary to Vince Young in person when you're done? No, because he lives in Houston, I'm in Austin, and we showed him a cut very late in the stages. And, you know, he, there were some things that he loved and some things that, you know, not so much.

But there was ultimately, like, they're very, very happy with the film. like it. I have watched stuff with subjects before. It's not the greatest experience usually, because you just don't know until films get made. And there's also, there's sort of like a relationship life cycle for a documentary filmmaker and a subject, especially with sort of biographical like this, and where like people are typically pretty excited about it in the beginning. And then in the middle where you start poking holes at the more sensitive things, there's a little bit more apprehension and they kind of like pull back a little bit. And I've just learned over 15 years that this is this is what you do. You start with that place of excitement and, you know, people thinking,

oh, it's going to be awesome, we're going to show the Rose Bowl, this and that. And then you start asking the questions about, you know, like the end of the Titan years and things like that. And then you start to worry because like you're not the filmmaker and you're, giving yourself to this person and this team to make choices about your narrative. And then once you finally get to see it, then usually it becomes a little bit easier, but it's really not until it comes out and you start to see the reactions and how it responds. And that's sort of like regalvanizes the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject.

Because we have this joint product and now outsiders are looking at it and, you know, brazing it or poking at it or whatever it is they do. Yeah. This big line in the movie, hell no, I am not at peace that he says. How would you describe how he processes all these events now from his football career, both in college and in the pros? I think he's able to compartmentalize them. And I ask him the same question at the end of the film.

Like, are you at peace now? Not in the same phrasing, but different. So at the beginning, it goes back to what I was saying is how two things can both be true. No, he's not at peace with how his NFL career ended up. He would have liked to have won Super Bowls and gone to multiple Pro Bowls and accomplish all these things that great athletes want to accomplish. And I don't think he'll ever be at peace with that.

I lost my last high school basketball game ever, and I'm still not completely at peace about that. But the second time I ask it, he's pulled out and looked at. at it from the perspective of like being a husband and a father. And that was one of the most revealing things like cruising around with him and his kid. Like he's really committed himself to family and his relationship with his daughter, daughters and son. And so the second time, and maybe a lot of athletes aren't able to really achieve this perspective until they retire, but you start to put things in order of priorities. And I think that, you know, through his own process of getting over the disappointment of his NFL career, going to rehab and embracing

therapy and resolving things with his dad and then deciding, all right, I'm going to become the best dad that I possibly can't do my kids. It allows him to find the piece that he didn't have with just his playing career. John Henion, the film is untold the testimony of Vince Young on Netflix right now. Thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for putting me in your movie. And I'll talk to you soon. My pleasure.

We'll do another movie together, Brian. You're a star. All right, that's the August issue, and that is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. He's Joel Anderson. Productions and Magic by Isaiah Blakely and John, not Bones, Jones. Scheduling change next week.

Oh, yeah. We can explain in detail, but Joel Anderson, you are moving to Mondays on the press box. Shocking. Shocking. Shocking. You're a Monday guy now. I'm a Monday guy.

I'm a Monday guy. I say that in a non-radio row kind of way. Shoemaker's going to be a Thursday guy. We'll explain our thinking about that, but I will see you Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. Look forward to it.