The Right Time with Bomani Jones - Pat Forde on Donald Trump's Absurd Plan to “Fix” College Football, Pimps in College Basketball | 03.06

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

Bomani Jones is joined by Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated.  First, they discuss Donald Trump's roundtable discussion on the future of college athletics and how difficult that problem is.  Later, they break down the priorities for fixing college sports and what they would like to see changed.  Finally, they react to a story of a Cal State Bakersfield College Basketball coach moonlighting as a pimp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the right time, a wave original. My name is Beaumani Jones. Thanks for listening wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for watching us on YouTube. Subscribe, like, rate us, review us, give us five stars. You only give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are a hater, and it is 40 Friday. Pat 40 of S.I.

What's going on, man? Well, much, hey, good, you know, March madness happening. State of college sports and constant flux. Never a dull moment, Bo. And, you know, some people get to go hang out into Dolomites for a couple weeks and call it work. That covered the Olympics, man. They don't let everybody do it anymore, but it still seems like the best thing going. It's phenomenal.

As has been said, it's the only thing worse than covering the Olympics is not covering the Olympics. Because the logistical hurdles are ridiculous, right? Of getting anywhere, you know, language barriers, et cetera, et cetera, are incredibly long, but you want to be there. And then the stuff you get to cover is ridiculous. You know, I got to cover both gold medal hockey games before they became political touchstones. The skiing, yeah, hanging out and the Dolomites walking around Cortina, Italy. Not terrible. Not terrible. I recommend it for anybody. Yeah, you know what else is a really long day of covering stuff? Do we've done conference tournaments?

You give me the option of the grueling day of the conference. tournament or the grueling day of traversing the dolomites. Traverse it shall be. I mean, I love a conference conference tournament. It's a lot of fun to cover it all. They are. But you're right. When it's game four and it's like 1130, you know, and you're sitting in some half empty arena, you know, watching the eighth place team play the ninth place team or whatever. It's always that game. It's always that eight, nine in the middle of the night. And you're just like, all right, man. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, you got it. You got it. But I don't know like what the timeline is or to schedule the Saturday Night Live uses in terms of writing their sketches.

But I feel like the cold open for Saturday Night Live is written. And it is this meeting that Donald Trump is supposed to have about that's like a state of college football situation. And for those of you who are unaware of this, the range of names that is going to be here, if I had told you in it had not told you in advance what all these people were going to be doing, I'm not sure you fully could have guessed. Like you would have had an idea, but you wouldn't have been sure. So we have many people who are going to be there. I was going to throw some names out there.

Nick Saven is going to be there. Mac Brown is going to be there. Urban Meyer, okay. He's going to be there. Notre Dame's athletic department director, Pete Bovacua, will be there. The ex-A.D. at Notre Dame will be there. Jack Swarbick, former AD at Oklahoma, Joe Castiglione, will be there. Tim Tebow will be there.

Charlie Ward will be there. Someone you may not have thought about in a very long time, but suddenly I have some idea of who Charlie Ward voted for, and it's disappointing. Cody Campbell, who has a gazillion dollars and has single-handedly made Texas Tech a relevant player, but to be fair to him, I have to say, he has, he's not a fool. He's just, you know, type it diabolical.

We got all these athletic directors, but also this, Adam Silver is going to be there. rich people like David Blitzer and Mark Gannis and Jerry Cardinal. I have no idea who those people are. He's know they're rich. Tiger Woods is going to be there. Bryson D. Shambo is going to be there. Condoleezza Rice is going to be there.

The president of ESPN, the president of Fox. It's like anybody that ever watched a college football game is going to be there. And as one of our colleagues who need not be named, learn the hard way. Jessica Trump says y'all going to talk about college football. Doesn't mean you're going to talk about college football. This is where we are. Yeah.

This is total, yeah, SNL cold open satire material, if we've ever seen it. Because what the hell? I've heard say by people in college sports, you know, the bigger the meeting, the less likely things are going to actually get done. This is a pretty big meeting, disparate people who aren't, I mean, can you imagine Tiger Woods, who famously does not like to waste time, sitting there trying to, like to, lock in on what the president of Tennessee is saying about what we need to do. Like, what is he going to be possibly interested in this about? Rice and Des Chambos, seriously?

Yeah, well, I went to an SMU game once. Okay. I appreciate that. This is a classic Trump. Let's just throw out a bunch of big names of people who like me or I like them and get together and they'll listen to me, bloviate for a while. probably nothing will get done. And also, to be fair to Trump, which I am loved to say, but is the case.

This is what the college sports infrastructure has begged for, is could somebody else come fix our problems for us at every turn? Like just, hey, what if this gets so bad, then somebody has to come in and fix it. Yeah, let's go ahead and give that a try. Like, this is in part what they ask for while also, what in the world are we doing here? I'm trying to imagine with all those people, there's going to be like some measure of introduction. I don't know what the,

what could the minutes possibly be or the agenda possibly be. All right. So like, who wants to go first? DJT is going first. The question is when he ends. Is anybody still like possibly following the bouncing balls? Is it still a college football discussion or college sports discussion? and then, yes, who picks it up from there?

I don't know, man. This is a high potential for complete chaos. Well, I also think the part of this that's interesting is, if they're like, so what do we do about college football? It's not like there's one thing, right? Like, like, we're going to fix college football. That's not the same thing as fixing your car, right? Like, there's fixing your car and then there's tuning up your car.

If you tune up your car, there are a million different things that you might do. But if you're fixing your car, this thing is broken. we're going to fix this thing. This isn't that kind of car, right? Like if a car had as many things broken as college football, you could never have that many things broken at one time. It's like the radiator hose is detached on this as is now. It needs a new timing belt.

And I think that's the biggest one. It feels like at any point, the piston, like the engine block could get cracked at this at any point because so many moving parts are there. And I was thinking to myself, if I were going into that meeting with good intentions, I don't even know where would I start? What would be thing number one that we supposedly need to deal with?

That's a great question because it is. It's like you have 99 problems and the ways to fix them are not. There's no consensus on how to do it. If you're going to start somewhere, I think you start with transfers and eligibility lawsuits. Right. I don't think there's a. great appetite for seeing 25-year-olds in their seventh year. And you know what, I'm not good enough to make the NFL or the NBA. I'm going to go sue in court for somebody that still needs a

quarterback, you know. So there's not a great appetite for that. And then secondly, the transfer, the constant transferring, to me, diminishes both the academic part of this whole thing, which does theoretically still exist. Secondly, the attachment, I think, of fans to schools, like every, if it's every single year, like, I don't know any of these players. I think that diminishes the, uh, the attachment there. So those would be the two places I would start. But look, those are the two areas that in certainly in the transfer area, college sports has gotten its butt kicked in court constantly. Uh, the, the eligibility things they've had a little better success, but it's a constant legal challenge there. So,

you know, can you sit there in a, in the new East Wing ballroom? the gilded and ornate ballroom and come up with a plan that you can then go to Congress and say, here, enact this and save us from having to go to court 73 times to make something happen. I don't know. I think this is, again, this is going to be a lot of theory and

a lot of discussion. What it tangibly leads to, remains to be seen. Yeah, like, I feel like, to me, it may be just a broad thing, but like the only thing that is worth taking the time to discuss as such a meeting to me is we have got to figure out what

steps need to be taken so that we can come to some sort of agreement with players so that we can then legislate and negotiate out some of these issues. Because their biggest issue you just pointed it out is everything they used to do, now they get sued for it and they lose. Right? Like everything, everything that kind of made this game work, now they all get sued. The other thing was for them, the fundamental part of what they did was this idea of amateurism. And it was like, hey, if you get some money, then that means that you can't come participate over here, except now they give people money. And so now, okay, so like what is the idea of being a professional,

trying to figure out how to deal with this idea and this on the player end. I don't know how they legislate this out, but, you know, I do not have kids that have been of college age, but I have taught quite a few of them, and I know enough to know this. At those ages, you may pay them like they're professionals, but they're not pros. Like, they're not of the age. Like, it's different if you got, like,

an 18 or a 19 year old on your team full of adults. But when it's all of them, right? Like a bunch of them, they make such horrific decisions. This isn't, this isn't, they're not capable of, you know, the idea that you give people money and then all of a sudden, they turn into what you think the money is supposed to represent, right? Like, it's just not how it goes. But we had my buddy Joel Anderson on here a couple of weeks ago,

and he was talking about the collective bargaining idea for players, which really gets to the biggest thing is that, Will the NCAA and its members ever come to terms with the reality that they're just going to have to declare these players as employees? It's the simplest way to, just don't talk about it that much because, like you agree, I don't think there's a great appetite for the idea that they are professional players. But if you just get that into paperwork and then go from there, it gets a lot easier to fix this stuff. Well, undoubtedly, that's the biggest stumbling block, right? is the fact that there is no, that we have a pretend system of non-employment,

when it's increasingly obvious that they are employees in an employee-employer relationship. I've had people, you know, who make their living in administering college sports who say, we can't do it or will all be bankrupt. The point there being, we can't do that and have all the other sports. So that's kind of become, I guess, the conflict point, the tension point is, you know, we, yes, the football and basketball players are employees. We need to collect a bargag with it. That would be the best way to do that. Everybody else doesn't necessarily fit that parameter.

And if we turn this solely into an employee-employee relationship with all the infrastructure that would go along with it, we can't afford the other sports. And that's where I think there would be a lot of pushback from people saying, no, no, no, we want college sports to be all this other stuff too. So how you get out of that? I'm not sure unless you take football especially and just break it away from the university. And you have Crimson Tide LLC and you pay rent to the University of Alabama to use Bryant-Denny Stadium. And you pay a licensing fee to use the logos and the colors and the school fight song. but your coach and your staff and your players are employed by Crimson Tide LLC,

and they don't even have to go to school then. Then we don't even have the charade of them, you know, getting a 3.4 when they never set foot on campus. So that, I think maybe the way you can get out of this, but I don't know whether anybody wants that either. Yo, so I think you raised a very interesting point that's important because you talked about the academic element of it being somewhat theoretical, right? But there are two things, right?

One of them being, these boys are still going to have to live a life after they play these games. And we're going to, look, you can write it down. These stories are going to start coming in five years, maybe 10 years, about how all these boys got all this money and all of them are broke, right? And it's not going to be because of anything necessarily terrible, but that's just how people of that age spin. And if you get yourself acclimated to a certain lifestyle, you're not going to be able to dial it back. The advice economy around it is terrible, da, da, da, da, so forth and so on. but professional athletes don't keep all their money. We're going to find out.

These guys are going to be broke, right? The idea, it used to be that the football or the basketball or whatever it was was the way to get the education. The education was the beginning of what was going on in life. Now, a college degree makes you less money, relatively speaking, than it ever did in the past. I totally get that. But you don't even have to go to school. You know what that sounds really cool, too?

An eight-year-old. An eight-year-old is like, ooh, we don't even have to be. go to school and I'm looking at that like well first of all the girls are there I know not everybody cares about that but the girls were there you're not really doing anything else you'll want to hop over there at least every now and then but I don't think people are honest about the fact that we're not just in this for the football like the football or the basketball is nowhere near the quality of professional right we're in it for the totality of the situation and I was thinking about this I don't know if you saw this stat that 22 players in America

this year will participate in senior night in basketball at the only school that they attended. I think the Big Ten has one player who will be a senior at the school that he started with. And I didn't care about these things until I started, you know, really covering sports when I was living in North Carolina. But I came to love senior night. Like, it is a, like, there's a lot that goes on with the idea that a kid is there for four years or the fact he's not a kid by the back in, but he comes in on the front end. You see the ups and downs. And when you cover a team, we know the things that we don't write down about what's been

hard, about what the thing has been and everything else. And the parents come and everything else. And I just thought about it, man, what is senior night now other than like the last day of school? Yeah, right? The last day at school at the last of your five schools. Yes. You know, it's, I did see that stat.

And it is profoundly shocking, right? for those of us who grew up watching exactly that, watching decades of senior nights, and at the places where, you know, a North Carolina, a Duke, a Kentucky, where it really means something, you know, to wear that jersey for the fans, right? For the 22,000 fans that come to those games.

And, you know, I shoot, I had three kids that were, they were college athletes. And we had seniors day for all of them. And they were all at the same school they started. and, you know, I don't mean to go old guy radio here, but there was incredible value in writing out some of the stuff they wrote out, where they wrote it out, and then graduating with peers, friends, colleagues,

that they're still with, you know, great friends with. You know, during the, a lot of this transfer stuff, I wrote a story in the summer about some of this and looked at AJ Store in particular basketball player who had, is it Mississippi now, I'd been at Kansas, been at Wisconsin, St. John's. So it was like different school every single year. Nice young man.

Hope the best for him. But the process of writing this and talking to other people like, where do you go for homecoming? What letter jacket do you have in the closet? Do you belong anywhere? And he talked to like Matt Painter at Purdue is really good on this subject too. You come to Purdue. You're good.

You're bad, but you're on the team for four years. Guess what? somebody in medical sales in Indianapolis has given you a job. You're going to have a support network of professional opportunities that exist because you were a Purdue basketball player for four years. If you're a Purdue basketball player for one year, you go somewhere else. It may not be that invested in you in the next place. So there's a lot of give and take that comes with the freedom to move around every year.

Yeah. And this is something that I don't think is going to come up in that room that Trump put together because one thing I noticed about the room they put together was nobody is there to speak on the interest of players, right? Like the only former players, Charlie Ward won the Hizman trophy 33 years ago, right? Like Tim Tebow, I think he's got to be 40 now. Yeah, Tim Tebow is pushing 40. Yeah, right.

Tim Tebow was a senior in 2009, I believe. Yes. Yeah, I mean, and let's face it, Tim Tebow was your grandfather's player in 2009. Like I said, oh, it's full why. He's not going to be sitting there relating to the 2026 realities of things. Yeah, and boy, it's funny too, because Tim Tebow would have made $150 million if he had played right now. Absolutely. He wouldn't have gone nowhere either.

That's the other part. Like, I feel like he's the one, like, it's been very interesting watching the way that Archie Manning is managing his grandson's career, where it is very clear he let him know early, you don't need this money. you don't need to go anywhere. You are going to be here for four years. Like people laughed at my guy, Nate Tice, when he said this, but I think it's true. Arch Manning would be the number one pick in the draft this year.

And this was never a consideration. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. We're going to ride this thing out here. No doubt. No, look, that's been a long game play the whole time. And it's not just Archie, but Cooper 2 is dead. And I think they looked at this and said, you go redshirt?

be a happy backup and then be what you can be. But there is no reason in that family to say, I need to go pro after three years. A, I need the money or I need to go prove myself. There will be plenty of chances for that. Right. That is a privileged situation, not necessarily not an unearned privilege,

but it's a privileged situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, man, you take the flexibility as you get it, right? And he's the one that has it. And I'm thinking about just the idea of what these guys are meeting about and what there is to possibly talk about. And I wonder, like the things that you and I just talked about. And we are, you know, we're saying this as not young people necessarily, but also as people who've been around this in various capacities for a very long time. I wonder who there is in the room or if there's anybody because everybody there really has a tie to money more so than anything else. Does anybody stop and take a moment to be like, hey, so why? isn't anybody likes this stuff in the first place. Like that's the thing that I noticed so often is no one ever asked the question of, so why are people here?

Like that's how you wind up with new Coke, right? Like you ignore, people were here because they like the way it tasted. Now you think you're going to change it and everything's okay because it's in the same can. No, bring us back the old shit. And they brought the old shit right back. On this one, I just, I wonder if they, if anybody stops and asks themselves. So why is anybody here in the first place? I think a guy like Saban is interesting, and even duplicitous, though he may be Urban Meyer,

I do think that those guys both believe in something fundamental about like what this experiment is. Like I do know, Nick Saban absolutely believes that football and everything else can change the trajectory of a lot of these guys' lives and not just about the money that they could make, but, you know, a lot of those things. Outside of money, I wonder if these people are capable of understanding like why people file in to come. to these games, you know? It's not because of the quality of play. It's about this whole thing that's been put together. Yeah. No, that's such a great point. Is the understanding and appreciating the fabric of college athletics, right? And is it simply a means to winning games and getting rich, or is it just getting rich and winning games? But the rest of it, all of it, and what brings 100,000 people to Tuscaloosa, Alabama on a Saturday night, or to 85,000 to Clemson, South Carolina, or 103,000 in Columbus, Ohio is a bit disconnected from where we are right now.

And so an appreciation for what has made college sports special, different, unique, and then how to keep it, well, also not violating the law, and not taking advantage of the players that do the work that makes them so popular. Right. And I think that's a key point that doing right by the players is job one, right? Like I think that is the most important thing. And a point I made, I remember I wrote a column about this. I guess this is now over 15 years ago when they kicked in the door in North Carolina over the football program.

I was like, hey, man, something everybody needs to understand is there are going to be changes and to be fair, we're not necessarily going to like what it means. But if that's what we have to do to be fair, then that is what we have to do. So I do think I, on one hand, fully appreciate and understand there's going to be, need to be a transition from some of what we knew and some of what we loved in order to get to a place that is equitable. At the same time, I'm trying to figure out on the player in, how do you battle, you have to give people the right to make terrible decisions, right?

It's the American way. That is how it works. But man, I just feel like this system is synivized. some really, really, really terrible decisions. Like, your point about Matt Painter is a great one. Stick with me, kid. You're going places. Like somebody will take care of you.

If nothing else, you can get into every game for free, right? If you stick around here and you do it right, then, you know, there's a future for you within this. And you lose that with the infinite transfer game. But I was also thinking about it when you were just talking about, you know, the kid being nice and you wish him the best. And you brought up something I hadn't thought that much about. who are your college friends, right?

Like who do you take with you from all of this? And these are questions that nobody in that room is going to think to ask. No, absolutely not. But that, you know, that is. It's one of those things that comes up when you talk to people. And again, that I saw with my kids that, you know, played, they swam. But they're their teammates that they were with for four years. Five years are still their friends.

Now, the oldest is 31 years old. He still talks to those people every day. they're part of his life. If you have moved from school to school to school, what's the support network? Not even just support network, but your peers and your people you talk to every day. So maybe it still exists. And we have been in such a, I guess, transactional mindset when it comes to sports, going back to youth sports now. I mean, kids changing high schools frequently. Because when daddy finds out, you got to get more playing time over there and we need more playing time for junior. And so you're just in this constant spin of kind of almost a nomad existence that you wonder what the tradeoff is.

Right. And then the coach is in there. I know what they're asking. They don't even coach anymore. But look, Nick Saban, and we saw this in basketball, Shashefsky, Roy Williams, Jay Wright, we could name a few more. Guys that looked around and was like, nah, man, I ain't doing this no more. Like, this is, this is, this is not the game that I signed up for. I will never forget in my life. Roy Williams sitting at that table talking about, opt out like I don't even know what that means. He defended his sensibility so much that he blew that pop stand and he never came back. But I say on the side of coaches, I can't imagine how chaotic it is where like every, no system can exist where every day is a negotiation. You know, and that and that's that's kind of what it feels like it is. Like I don't know, in the SMU case, the documentary, the 30 for 30 that ESPN did,

I think it was called Pony Excess. And they just made a point about how it was that the money was never good enough. And since it wasn't legal and since somebody could always tell on you, you were really always in so form of fashion at the mercy of this kid being like, yo, I need my money. Now you're kind of sort of in that same place, except they've got these one-sided contracts going against the players. But even if, if the players like, hey, it's Auburn Alabama this weekend.

I'm not playing. What are you going to say? We'll sue you later? No, you might have to capitulate to something now. Like, I can't imagine what life is. And you talk to these guys a lot more than I do, right? Like, they're not the most sympathetic figures, but I can't say they don't have a point.

Yeah, no. That's like obviously, yes, for years and years and years, the players were completely taken advantage of by the system. And now the pendulum has swung back enough so the players are taking advantage of the system sometimes to the dismay of the coaches, right? And it's kind of fun to see the pendulum go that far,

but it doesn't mean it's an ideal system. And I can't have some sympathies for. There have been players this year that I have, been told. I cannot prove it, but certainly basketball players that, hey, you know what, I started the season well, I need more money or I've got an injury that may keep me out. And we have seen guys not play. And then maybe they got more money or maybe somebody said, no, you can't really do this. But it's happening. It is absolutely happening. We saw it in football season. Getting late in the season. I feel like I've produced well enough. I need some more money.

I'm on the, put me on the injury list. You know, there's no doubt that those games are being played. And when the contracts aren't necessarily enforceable, when it's not employee employer, guess what? You're kind of stuck. And this was the old days, like you were saying, when they were getting paid under the table and nobody was supposed to know about it. Where's that a little bit of leverage then?

I can blow this whole thing up if I tell everybody what's actually happening here. Or you can give me some more money. No, they had it all. Like, this is part of why we love this world is that it is chaos, but there was a measure of order that kept it going. Again, I could see why people are saying we want to send everybody to do this, you know, make the president go fix this. It's just that that room is not going to be the one to do it.

Now, coming up next, something that I thought was very interesting about the fact that they put this room together to try to fix college football. Tell you what it is. Coming up next. Ever wanted to go to the NBA finals? Where now's your chance, courtesy of, Fandul. All you have to do is use your profit boost on an NBA future, and you'll be entered for a shot to win an NBA finals trip for two. NBA futures let you lock in your pick

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Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Beaumani. That's ZipRecruiter. com slash Beaumani. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. All right, we are back with Pat 40 of S.I. And we're talking about this meeting Donald Trump's having the college football meeting and everybody's in there. And you know it's about politics because it's just about college football, right? Like that is seen as a certain red state, red meat sort of situation when, as I discussed, I think the broader issues are about just the relationship with players and what needs to be codified. And then

from there, the transfer portal, which, look, it made sense in the past that you had to sit a year for transferring, right? I mean, I think there's an argument that it made sense to have freshmen in eligibility, but the problem is it has been struck down by the courts for fair and good reasons, right? I don't think it ultimately serves in most cases, but understandable that they're there. Everybody bounces around every year, everybody has the, everything's a one-year contract, basically. And this, I think, is actually a much bigger deal in college basketball than it is in college football. And the fact that basketball is not in that room points out, again, the political nature of that, but especially where a basketball player can swing so much,

where, look, the top level guys, right, the Cameron Boozers, the young man at BYU, Darren Peterson, they're not going to another school. We understand this. We get that. They're about to head out of here. But these guys that before would have been second round picks, but now I can stick around to make a couple million dollars. They're sticking around, but I'm not saying stick around at a school. They just sticking around in college. They're going somewhere else because the money is waiting on them right there. And you reached this point where I was thinking about when Lawrence Moten died a few weeks ago. And I was like, that sort of figure that I will remember forever but was not an NBA player. Like you remember the socks. He was just a guy, but he played

to Syracuse forever so you know who he was. That's the part that doesn't exist anymore. No, yeah, no, that's, that, that is the, the endangered species of college basketball, for sure, is that high level college player who's in one place for four years or whatever amount of time and becomes, you know, a fan favorite for life, Lawrence Milton and Syracuse. And you can find many examples.

examples them everywhere. But no, that's like, look, it is it is year to year contract to contract. And if you make yourself marketable, you know, you put yourself out there for the next team and you see what the market will bear. And usually it's going to bear more than where you were if you've established yourself. So the, yeah, the fact that this is a, a football only discussion is, again, part of the fundamental problem with trying to fix. college sports. People talk about fixing college sports. They're talking about football. There's so much more than football that actually matters to people. And you can't really get at a solution for everything as long as football dwarfs everything else. Right. And there's there's an ironic situation

going on now in college basketball, the Darren Peterson situation at Kansas. And I just want to say, it appears to me that he is hurt. I don't know exactly how all the decisions are being made necessarily, but what is so interesting is he didn't have situations like this when the guys weren't getting paid or, hold on, me put their finger quotes in there, weren't getting paid. But one would think that with the payment

that there would be a greater incentive to go out here and thug it out a little bit if you get hurt. But no, actually in this world, the economy around him is like, yeah, it's cool, but the real money is waiting over there. But the real money was always waiting over there. and I don't recall there ever being a scenario that feels like this one.

Again, because I think, I don't think he is well. I can only imagine what the conversations are that are going on back and forth around that. But you would have thought the money should have cleared up this problem. You would think, but it is fascinating because I think that was the hope by coaches and ADs is like, well, now they really have to play all the time and they got to play hard and maybe even play hurt. And we've, you know, we're paying them now. But, oh, no, that dynamic has not really kicked in.

And especially, again, what's the power of the contract? Is the contract really actually serving to protect the school, or is it just serving to enhance the players' compensation? And especially when you were one and done, like these guys, I mean, it is a phenomenal group of freshman basketball players. Yeah. A nominal. And they have established, all right, I am good enough to be picked in the top 10 of the NBA.

What else do I really need to do? here. You know, I think the best word, I agree with you on Peterson. When he plays, that dude wants to win, it looks like to me. I mean, that guy wants to win. But is there still something somewhere saying you're hurt

just enough that let's just not. Right. Yeah, and the problem, I mean, as it all goes and as the system like plays itself out, this is going to be an interesting NCAA tournament because college basketball is not the national topic of discussion that it used to be.

Like, I find myself following it less because it's less of a topic on a show like this because it's less of a topic for the audience. There is an audience, but it's like Kentucky fans listening to a Kentucky podcast about basketball, you know, so forth or so on. But you just mentioned, this is a class, like the last class that I remember being discussed in these terms was 2014. Now, that didn't exactly pan out with Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Joelle Embed, Julius Randall, Aaron Gordon, Marcus Smart.

Well, he wasn't a freshman, but we got a handful of other guys that were there. This one, though, when I have seen those guys who are at the top, we seem to have like superstar possibility here, but some of this mobility and the things that we're talking about is kind of why this isn't the thing that it was. Like if we drop Zion Williamson off in this year, does he become the phenomenon that he did in 2019?

Yeah, great question. Probably not, just because it's a crowded landscape. as you said. I mean, Peterson, A.J. DeBonsa, um, uh, Kingston Fleming's at Houston, Darius Acuff at Arkansas, so on and so forth. I mean, there are, uh, boozer, clearly. I mean, they're, they're like eight to ten guys that are just lined up there, uh, at the top of this thing.

And I, I will be very interested to see NCAA tournament because the one, the one dynamic here is, you know, the freshman, are incredibly good, but we still have old teams. Yeah. And who wins this battle? The really talented freshmen or the old teams? And for the most part, the old teams have won since Anthony Davis was run on the court at 2012. So we'll see whether these guys can change that dynamic at all.

I don't know. I mean, I give Duke a very good chance of it with Boozer and company. Old teams have always won. Kentucky won it in 2012. and Duke won in 2015. Something I always found interesting. Shashefsky made the whole paradigm shift starting in the year 2009

when they tried to recruit John Wall. That was the beginning. Kyrie Irving comes in the next year. But they did not get Walled. They won the national championship that year with an old team. And if you looked at the results from when the paradigm shifted

for that time period and take that same time period and put it before, the results were exactly the same. More or less, right? Cal, who is in a very interesting situation here where he usually would have like a bunch of Darius A-Cuff's, but he doesn't. He only has one.

It's very rare that a John Calipari team has the one star that carries it in the way that A-Cuff is doing with that team at Arkansas because it's a whole different world that he's in. And by the way, it sounds like Cal has finally made peace with the change that he made. You know, it's been an interesting year of change. It has been. And, you know, look, I think Cal would love to go back to the days when he had five of the top 10 freshmen in the country. Yeah. But that's not the way the market is working right now. And that's another interesting part of this whole thing of, and I kind of like about, you know, the players getting paid here, it's dispersed the talent.

Kansas has a megastar. Arkansas has a megastar. Duke has a megastar. BYU has a mega star. You know, it's not. just a cluster of freshmen in one place that's saying, we're in charge here now. Yeah, Cal has been an interesting part of this. You know, he's actually now speaking less as the, the renegade disruptor, I guess, that he kind of characterized himself. And now kind of like,

we need a little more stability around here. He's like Al Davis at those owners meetings at the end of his time, right? You look around and you realize you've been here longer than everybody. I mean, like, Cal's been coaching damn near 40 years. Like, he's not at the same place, so he's not like Ray Meyer was in DePaul. But, like, you look up at all these guys we remember when they first started. Like, remember when Judd Heathcote, who was there forever until Izzo there came and Isl's been there forever.

So what, they've had two coaches for the last 55 years, I want to say. Yeah, I mean, forever. That's like unheard of, frankly, out there. Yeah, no, like this is, it is quite the time. Um, Boozer and everything that goes on at Duke, Shire, I can't get a great handle on exactly it because Shire's teams have been consistently good. Um, I don't know how I, I don't know how good I know or think that he is at this point. I don't watch as close as I used to, so I can't like be as molecular,

but they sure lost that game at the Dean Dome this year that I didn't think they was going to lose. Yeah. No, that, to me, this is for Shire and Tommy Lloyd at Arizona, this is a season of you need to have a great run in March, and it needs to not end in flaming disaster. You got a great run in March last year, but it ended in flaming disaster. They blew, oh, what, a 12, 14 point lead in the second half to Houston.

The year before, it ended in flaming disaster against North Carolina State. The year before that, it had inflaming a disaster against Tennessee. They need at least, hey, die with your boots on, man. If you're going to lose, make it a great game, show up and play really well. Same with Tommy Lloyd at Arizona.

They've got two of the best teams. They need to win a national title at some point, but even if you don't, don't punk out at the end. So it's a high bar. Look, but you're the coach of Duke, man. You got handed Mike Cheshefsky's job in your 30s. That's where the bar is.

Meet it. Yeah, I just want to point out, by the way, that you were only listing the Shire Flaming Disasters, but if you had dialed back one more year, we could get to the two biggest flaming disasters in the history of Duke basketball, Coach Kay's last home game, lecturing his players before everyone because the party had already been planned. Oh, yeah.

And then losing the game in the Final Four. And that takes me to Hubert Davis because, hey, they'll never, I don't know if they'll ever be happy with Hubert. And honestly, I think Hubert has proven to be a good coach, but I don't know if he is a coach that can consistently perform at the level that Carolina fans want. However, hey, man, his tenure. has been a success. There's nothing that could possibly happen after 2022. That makes that,

that changes the fact he won the literally the two biggest games in the history of the program. This national championship part is not what this is about, man. Hey, without question, I was there for both those games. And the one of Cameron was truly shocking because North Carolina was all over the place before that. DeShalle just really didn't look like they could get it together. and you come in and you ruin the single biggest send-off game in the history of college basketball. Because John Wooden never did that at Pauley Pavilion, and Bob Knight never had a chance to do that at Assembly Hall. Dean Smith didn't go that way.

And it was all orchestrated for that, and you win that game. Like, I just, I will never forget, too, that, you know, they're going to do the, like, the little ceremony after the game. Yes. You told you they absolutely thought they were going to win, right? The players come filing back out of the locker room for this ceremony, and they all have this look on their face, like, we're the worst people.

I can't believe we did this. I mean, it was just unbelievable. And then to double down and do it again in the final four, you're right. Huber Davis will always have a warm spot in the hearts of North Carolina fans. It doesn't matter whether he wins a title. Now, they'd like to win titles, obviously. It was so funny leading into that. because I was talking to my guys in North Carolina,

and they would come across people who would be like, well, you know, Coach Kay, he doesn't really want all this attention. She must be crazy. Like this, this was this was a preventable set of circumstances. And what will shock me about that forever is when Carolina was terrible in 01 and 2002 and she just, I think they played them in the ACC tournament, where Carolina had to play in the game they used to call the Les Robinson

invitation or the eight, nine game for the privilege of playing against the one seed. And so they were so bad they were in the eight, nine game. And then they played Duke, and then Duke beat him. And they were getting a little too happy about it. Shosheski came and told them, hey, it's not going to be like that forever. Right. Like, like, you might want to, you might want to be easy in the way that you handled this. And it's so funny that his recognition that they're never really dead did, did not kick in about what to do in this moment. And as Paolo Bancero, just sitting there like, man. Yep. We let the whole school.

And Mike Cheschewski is not the kind of person to come and tell you, it'll be okay. It's not your fault. No, no, no, no. I guarantee the practice the next day after that. Oh, my God, it had to be a bloodbath. That is a documentary we need to find a way to make is the day after practice, right? Like, just people with their recollection of something happened this day, and the next day was the worst.

Or my favorite, the story of Dino Gaudio after they lost to Cleveland State in 2009 at Wake Forest, a team that was Final Four good and lost in the first round. Gaudio tried to have practice the next day. This will shock you, but James Johnson did not go. Yeah. Dino Gaudio didn't quite have the weight to pull that one off. Oh, and then, I forgot about Dino Gaudio.

Did he have to go to jail? Did he just simply get a felony? Yeah, he did not go to jail. Honestly, I can't remember the resolution for that. But, I mean, there's just another federal investigation at Louisville basketball. There's been like three of them. You know, it's hard to keep them all straight. An underrated college basketball story for those who don't know.

Garrio was an assistant at Louisville, and they were letting them go. And he extorted or attempted to extort Chris Mack and tell the world about, of illegal violations, and as was the case with somebody, and in that case, completely wrong. We tried to extort Josh Paster, they just called the cops. Which, look, there's been a long history, frankly, of extortion in college basketball, because nobody ever calls the cops.

Louisville did. It's incredible. It does remind me, I hate to divert here, but what we've been talking about, about the old underground economy. This is back when players could go straight to the NBA out of high school. One of them had signed with a college to play and had taken a large sum of money from that college. And then he went straight to the pros.

The college sent somebody out, basically not quite a bounty hunter, but somebody said, go get our money. And one of the guy's house is like, I need the money to give back to the college that you took. That's how things worked back then. What a time. Speaking of college ineditans, have you seen this story from Cal State Bakersfield? I have not. Okay.

I'm just going to read it for you. Is the lead going to be enough? Okay, so this is the lead from Schwethe Serendron. I'm not familiar with her work at ESPN, but Dateline in Bakersfield, California. The men's basketball program at Cal State University, Bakersfield, won't turn many heads with his last place ranking in the Big West

West Conference. But when it comes to scandal, the school could be a top contender. And you're saying to yourself, like, how big a scandal could it possibly be to merit that lead, huh? Cal State Bakersfield Athletic Department has been an upheaval since August 29th, when the then-Men's basketball coach Rod Barnes opened an anonymous email from a tipster who alleged that Barnes' temporary assistant, Kevin Mays, was also working as a pimp across four states. Other lawsuits, internal investigation. dismissals and finger pointing have only served to deepen the department's

sense of crisis. Oh my. Yeah, so we'll fast forward a little bit, and criminal charges have been filed. Mays, who is being held without bail, faces a hefty rap sheet of a lemmy criminal and misdemeanor charges, including felonies such as pimping. He was also charged with possession

of automatic firearms and high-capacity magazines and possession of methamphetamine and marijuana with intent to sell. Separate charges cited him for possession of more than 600 images of youth or child pornography and distribution of obscene matter involving someone under 18 years old. Oh, man. Yeah. So, Barnes, um, I'll say, as, as this case reverberated in Cal State Bakersville, the school announced in September that Barnes and athletic director Kyle Condor had left their roles. And Rob Barnes, who I believe it coached Ole Miss in the past.

Like, he was a, he was a somebody. And if I had to guess, he had no idea that this was going on. But the Rod Barnes that I knew from Ole Miss was so square he was divisible by four. Like that guy was your good Christian coach. Like for him to, like he must have been so removed from minding the store that, you know, who knows? Somebody said, hey, you need to hire this guy. Okay, sure.

I just can't imagine him having any idea. But for this to happen on his watch, Oh, dear. A pimp across four states. And by the way, he is, and this is where it probably has to really hurt for Barnes. He appears to be a, oh yeah,

he is a former player at Cal State Bakersfield from 2014 to 2016. Oh, boy. Right? So he got friends there that are like, hey, okay, we'll go ahead and, you know, and we'll get you on the job. And so, yeah, he played for Barnes.

Yeah. He played for Barnes. And yes, this is the, this, this is, wow. Man, see that, you never know. That's part of the diversity of college sports. You never know where the next, you've got to be kidding me, scandal is going to erupt. Yes.

And a part of it too also is, hey, man, I'm cutting them assistant coaches is always trying to find a way to get a little bread here and there. That's the, that's the Chuck person. You know, it's amazing Bruce Pearl went unscathed in that situation. and Will Wade just counting down his days to go back to LSU, you know, all these things that happened. But Chuck Persons needed some money.

Like the idea that a lot of these assistants were fronting the money themselves to get players? That's like truly, that's probably the room to get into it, the final four, the NABC back room at a bar or something and get those guys all. So like, how much did you lay on the line just to try to keep your job and eventually become a head coach. Yeah, like these are the guys so happy

that somebody else is actually providing the money now. Yeah, right. Like, I have to come up with, what was it? Todd Bozeman, didn't he come off like $30,000 of his own money to get Jalani McCoy? I believe so. I believe so. Yeah.

I mean, you got to do some hustling. And now, yes, at least you just go to the collective and say you do the hustling. Yeah. And you know what, though? There's always more money. Like, that's going to be the next level of this is we're going to find out somehow, that other game is still going on in some form. And see, this is the stuff we need to get them out there talking Donald Trump about.

Can you imagine how enraptured Donald Trump would be if we started talking about those stories? Honestly, if you got all of the assistant coaches who got pinched in that federal investigation like eight years ago, get them in a room with Trump. That's how you find out what's really going on. Those guys were a bunch of suckers. You never spend your own money. You never spend your own money. You just tell them you'll pay them later. And then one day they ask for the money,

you'll tell you you pay them next week, and then you just stop taking their calls. That was it. That something Donald Trump would have never gone for, paying $30,000 of my own money. Absolutely not. That's a dude who knows how to work the angles. You kidding me?

Pat 40, check them out at s.i.com covering college sports. Hey, man, I know you're about to head into the real March badness. covering all of this stuff. Yes, sir. That's Big 12 tournament next week and then the big dance after that. So it's time to go. Big 12 is going to be a fun one though.

Yeah, yeah, it should be good. My bad, I appreciate you. And ladies and gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us here on the right time. We do this four days a week. Ryan Brumley had a thing behind the scenes. Thank you, sir.

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